The most personal question you can ask someone is, “Are you happy?” To answer that question honestly means confessing every secret: the state of your psychology, the state of your sex life, the state of your moral character. Happiness is a verdict on how your life is going. It is, in Ayn Rand’s definition, “that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.”
Happiness is your highest spiritual state—and your most demanding. It’s not a string of transitory pleasures that comes from satisfying short-range desires. It takes precious little experience and reflection to see that a life made up of nothing but vacations, massages, and Netflix binging is not a life worth living. Pizza is delicious, but it won’t cure misery.
This has led some to declare that satisfying your desires is irrelevant to happiness. Under the influence of Eastern philosophy and Stoicism, much of today’s conversation about happiness equates it with absence of desire. On this view, desire leads to frustration, and happiness is really about avoiding frustration and other negatives. Stop wanting anything and you’ll have everything you want. As Ryan Holiday, a champion of Stoicism, puts it:
The key to happiness, to success, to power—any of these things—is not to want them really bad. It’s not putting what you’re after on a pedestal. The key to happiness and success is realizing at a granular level that the things most people desire actually suck.
That being rich isn’t that great. That getting lots of attention is a chore. That being in love is also a lot of work. That the prettiest view in the world still has mosquitos or a biting chill or it’s hot as hell.
There’s another word for people who think that life has little to offer: depressed. The view that life is suffering and desire is suffering and happiness is to be found in becoming someone who cares for nothing can’t lead to happiness. It means giving up on happiness.
Achieving desires, if they are rational, is vital to happiness. They aren’t empty, they don’t suck, they are that great. Your goal should be to value deeply, passionately, and rationally—not squelch your desires. Your aim should be to care so much for your values that you will live for them and, if necessary, die for them—not to turn yourself into an empty vessel who experiences meeting the love of your life and watching the love of your life murdered with the same equanimity.
Happiness is not “not giving a shit.” It’s an enduring form of joy that comes from achieving your values and being on the road to achieving even greater values. Externally, it means being engaged with life, tackling meaningful goals, and realizing them over time. Internally, it means being proud, confident, and serene. You feel good about who you are, sure of what you can do, worthy of what you achieve. Happiness is love of being alive.
You can see that state, or the precursor to it, in children, who typically face life with a sense of eagerness, wonder, playfulness, and delight. Their attitude amounts to: the world is here for my fun and enjoyment. At the adult level, I like to think of the attitude projected by famed scientist Richard Feynman, who conveyed a childlike zest for life, that same passionate playfulness, but encompassing a much wider and deeper sense of the fun and enjoyment that life offers. And I also think of people I know who are quiet and serious. Their happiness doesn’t leap out at you, but you can sense it if you pay attention—it’s a calm but unmistakable radiance that comes across as an ease in living, an unself-conscious pride, an air of dignity earned through virtue. Happiness comes in varieties, and it whispers as much as it yells, but its indelible mark is peace and passion.
A common mistake is to view happiness as a sense of finality, where the work of living is done. Social scientist Arthur Brooks commits this error when he equates happiness with satisfaction and observes that no matter what you achieve, you’re never truly satisfied. He recounts a conversation with his teenage daughter:
As we wind our way through life, I explained, satisfaction—the joy from fulfillment of our wishes or expectations—is evanescent. No matter what we achieve, see, acquire, or do, it seems to slip from our grasp. . . . Satisfaction, I told my daughter, is the greatest paradox of human life. We crave it, we believe we can get it, we glimpse it and maybe even experience it for a brief moment, and then it vanishes.
There is no great paradox here. The reason no single value can satisfy you for eternity is because the work of living is never done. Happiness is a perspective on the ongoing life process. It’s not about achieving one goal and then living happily ever after; it’s about being the kind of person who continually sets goals, achieves them, and sets still further goals. You can and must satisfy your desires—but you will never satisfy desire. What would be the point of living if you could?
This, then, is what it means to commit yourself to happiness: to draw a line in the sand and say, “I’m going to do everything in my power to make the external and internal conditions of my life as good as possible. I’m going to settle for nothing less than the best life I can create.”
Not everyone does that. Not everyone makes the commitment to be happy. Everyone may wish to be richer than they are or feel better about themselves than they do. But all too often people tolerate failure, frustration, and fear. Forget about what they wish and judge them by their actions: their lives don’t matter to them.
Happiness is a goal you have to embrace by choice.
To pursue happiness, you must conceive and achieve a life you want to live. You have to formulate a vision of the particular values that will constitute your life—and then take responsibility for everything that’s required to achieve those values. To quote a Spanish proverb Ayn Rand was fond of: “God said: Take what you want and pay for it.”
Happiness is about getting what you want. But reality and human nature impose limits on the kind of wants that can be achieved. You cannot achieve the impossible: success without effort, self-esteem without virtue, love without self-esteem. Attaining happiness requires choosing a life that is attainable. Nor can you achieve contradictory goals, since the fulfillment of one aim will frustrate your other aims. If you desire health and fitness, you cannot also eat and drink whatever you feel like. If you desire to save adequately for your future, you cannot also buy whatever you want whenever you want. If you desire a fulfilling romantic relationship, you cannot also jump into bed with any attractive person you meet. To achieve happiness, you need to conceive of a life where all your goals and the actions required to achieve them fit together into a harmonious whole. Only then can you realize “that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.” Rand elaborates:
Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.
What are rational goals, rational values, and rational actions? How do you know what sorts of aims and actions can form a rewarding, achievable, non-contradictory whole worthy of your striving? The science that answers these questions is ethics, or, the study of moral principles. Morality is the subject that helps you conceive and achieve a life filled with joy.
That is the purpose of this lesson. To define a morality of happiness to guide your choices to that you can build a self and a life that you love.
Many of the goals and actions that will constitute your life will be particular to you. Morality doesn’t tell you whom to marry, where to live, or what kind of work to do. Instead, it takes a mountaintop perspective on human life and identifies the broad categories of needs, goals, and activities that constitute the human way of life. It gives you an abstract summary of what human flourishing consists of, and then leaves open to you the particular ends and means that fit your unique context.
You can think of morality as a travel guide. It doesn’t dictate your vacation. Instead, it lays out for you all the desirable places you might wish to go (and how to get there) and warns you about the dangerous places you should avoid. It’s up to you to choose from among those options based on what you want.
This isn’t how we’re taught to think of morality. We’re taught to think of morality as a set of rules and prohibitions keeping us from doing what we want and commanding us to sacrifice ourselves. It’s not that we’re taught this conception of morality is true, and other conceptions of morality are false. What’s drummed into our heads since birth is that morality means giving up what we want. This amounts to equating the subject of morality with a particular conception of morality we’ve inherited from Christianity. Morality simply is something that places limits on what we want. What we want? That has nothing to do with morality. That is mere prudence and practicality. Morality is about setting aside prudence and practicality in order to obey God’s plan or serve other people or do our duty because it is our duty.
But most people do want to live and enjoy their life here on earth. They yearn for guidance. But what the culture has offered them, tragically, is a false alternative: happiness without morality—and morality without happiness.
Happiness Without Morality
“Do what makes you happy.”
If you’re under the age of 50, you’ve probably heard that message all your life. From your parents, your teachers, your friends, the media, popular entertainment. Maybe you’ve even heard it at church. Sure, you’ll also be told to share your toys, to love your enemies, to serve a cause greater than yourself, to think of others first. But declaring that you want to be happy will not exactly send shockwaves through your community and transform you into a counter-cultural rebel. It won’t even get you canceled on social media.
Probably.
What is true is that the pursuit of happiness is not seen as a moral quest, and the advice offered to help you achieve happiness is not moral advice. Happiness is seen as a perfectly fine thing to want, but that has to do with the practical side of life. The side that involves getting a job, making money, seeking out pleasure and fun. And the people we turn to for such advice aren’t moral philosophers. More often than not, we turn to the self-help industry.
Self-help can definitely be helpful. My own shelves are filled with books by Tim Ferriss, Robert Greene, and Brian Tracy. And if we extend “self-help” to include success advice more generally, then I sometimes wonder where I would be without Cal Newport’s productivity advice, Dan Kennedy’s marketing advice, or John Gottman’s relationship advice.
The problem is not that the success field is unhelpful. It’s that it’s hit or miss. Take today’s most successful self-help author, Tony Robbins. For every good idea about goal setting or breaking out of self-destructive patterns there are an equal or greater number of ideas that are pure junk science—from his obsession with “neuro-linguistic programming” to advice from one of his early books to eat nothing but fruit for the first half of the day because something something alkaline.
Even books that aren’t filled with bad advice are generally superficial. I mentioned goal setting, which shows up not just in Tony Robbins’s work but in probably 50 percent of the self-help literature. I’m a fan of goal setting, but these books almost never answer vital question like: What goals should I set? What is truly worth going after in life? What kind of goals are achievable and how can I select goals that fit together so that I can build a life worth living? Answering these questions is left to the reader—yet these are the hard questions. Yes, it is difficult to get what you want. But knowing what you want, and knowing that it’s worth wanting? That is life’s most daunting challenge.
Given the shortcomings of the self-help genre, more and more people are turning to psychology for guidance. Positive psychologists like Martin Seligman concluded that psychology had focused for too long on helping people escape negatives like depression, anxiety, and addiction. Didn’t it have advice for people who simply wanted to be happier?
Unlike self-help books, psychology promises a scientific approach to happiness. Psychologists use “happiness studies” to attempt to understand the sources of happiness and unhappiness. That seems sensible enough, but the results have been underwhelming.
Happiness studies try to establish a science of happiness basically through polling and statistical regressions. What traits are associated with people who report being happy—and what traits are associated with people who report being unhappy?
Some of these polls literally just ask people how happy they are. Others try to break happiness into components. Here, for example, is the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, which is typical. People are asked to rate themselves 1–6 on each of these, with 6 being strongly agree and 1 being strongly disagree.
Oxford Happiness Questionnaire
1. I don’t feel particularly pleased with the way I am. _____
2. I am intensely interested in other people. _____
3. I feel that life is very rewarding. _____
4. I have very warm feelings towards almost everyone. _____
5. I rarely wake up feeling rested. _____
6. I am not particularly optimistic about the future. _____
7. I find most things amusing. _____
8. I am always committed and involved. _____
9. Life is good. _____
10. I do not think that the world is a good place. _____
11. I laugh a lot. _____
12. I am well satisfied about everything in my life. _____
13. I don’t think I look attractive. _____
14. There is a gap between what I would like to do and what I have done. _____
15. I am very happy. _____
16. I find beauty in some things. _____
17. I always have a cheerful effect on others. _____
18. I can fit in (find time for) everything I want to. _____
19. I feel that I am not especially in control of my life. _____
20. I feel able to take anything on. _____
21. I feel fully mentally alert. _____
22. I often experience joy and elation. _____
23. I don’t find it easy to make decisions. _____
24. I don’t have a particular sense of meaning and purpose in my life. _____
25. I feel I have a great deal of energy. _____
26. I usually have a good influence on events. _____
27. I don’t have fun with other people. _____
28. I don’t feel particularly healthy. _____
29. I don’t have particularly happy memories of the past. _____
The problem? A lot of these questions are irrelevant to happiness (“I laugh a lot,” “I can fit in (find time for) everything I want to”), some of them are arguably negatively correlated with genuine happiness (“I have very warm feelings toward almost everyone,” “I find most things amusing”), and if you take into account the way that people rationalize immorality, roleplay to themselves and to others, and poorly introspect then you would conclude that this whole approach to understanding happiness is hopeless. It’s worth noting, in this regard, that the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire wasn’t developed to study happiness: it was, according to its authors, originally “designed for clinical application with the purpose of diagnosing manic and depressive states of mind.”
To teach us anything about happiness, psychological studies have to decide how to define and measure happiness. But how to define happiness is a philosophic question. For example, is happiness the avoidance of pain? Or is it the achievement of joy? Is happiness temporary jolts of positive emotion? Or is it an enduring state? Is it easy to know whether one is happy? Or does it take an ability for introspection and self-honesty that most people lack?
Here is one example that illustrates why trying to understand happiness while ignoring philosophy can lead psychologists to produce extremely misleading results. A research team led by Katherine Nelson-Coffey performed an experiment where they divided participants into four groups. Group 1 was asked to perform “random acts of kindness” for themselves (for example, going shopping); Group 2 was asked to perform “random acts of kindness” for other people (for example, visiting an elderly family member); Group 3 was asked to perform acts of kindness to improve the world (for example, donate to charity); Group 4, the control group, was asked simply to track their daily activities. Can you guess the results? Groups 2 and 3 rated higher on a happiness questionnaire given to them in the weeks following the experiment, while Group 1’s results were indistinguishable from the control group.
Studies like this one have led many psychologists to conclude that serving and sacrificing for others is part of the formula of happiness. What nonsense. For one thing, being kind to other people is definitely not the same thing as serving and sacrificing for them. Even charity need not be a sacrifice: part of how we pursue our interests is by helping the people and causes we care about. It’s as if you observed that people who owned guns were happier than people who didn’t and concluded that murder leads to happiness.
But there’s also a subtler problem. We live in a culture where people have been taught since birth that serving and sacrificing for others makes you a good person. Most people base their self-esteem, at least in part, on that idea. So should we be surprised that when they see themselves as acting unselfishly, this leaves them feeling good, at least for a while? That is precisely what an advocate of self-interest would predict.
The question is not whether something makes you feel good for a few days or a few weeks, but whether something is good for you in the full context of your whole life. Think of a man whose sense of self-worth is based on the idea that “I’m good because women desire me.” He may very well bask in the glow of his latest conquest for a while, but that only masks the deeper sense of inadequacy he’s trying to compensate for. Altruistic acts perform a similar role for people without a secure foundation of self-esteem, only it’s more powerful because the whole culture tells them that self-sacrifice really does make them good. It’s as if the seducer lived in a society of pick-up artists, where every notch in his bedpost won him lavish praise from his community. Would his positive affect prove that promiscuity was a pillar of happiness?
Emotions, we’ve seen, emerge from your values, and if you achieve something you value, you will experience that as an emotional positive, regardless of whether it’s genuinely good for you. This means that it is a fundamental error to try to establish what you should value by asking, “What makes you feel good?” The answer will be: whatever you happen to value. Irrational values do leave a mark: a positive feeling one day will be followed by a hangover the next; momentary relief from suffering will be followed by worse suffering in the future; the satisfaction of one desire will conflict with other desires. But those second- and third-order effects won’t be captured by a psychologist’s survey. Could happiness studies have any value? Maybe. But their value would depend on first reaching a philosophic understanding of what happiness is and the fundamental values it requires.
The clearest evidence that our conventional approach to happiness doesn’t work is that it hasn’t worked. In a world saturated by bestsellers promising happiness without morality, what we’ve seen is sky-high rates of addiction, depression, loneliness, anxiety, unhappiness.
This has led a growing number of voices to proclaim that we’ve been pursuing the wrong thing. The pursuit of happiness has failed, they argue, because concern with your own personal happiness is the wrong goal. The reason people are so unhappy is because they’re trying to be happy. Instead, they should try to be moral.
The most eloquent spokesman for this view is New York Times columnist David Brooks. A moral person, says Brooks in his bestseller The Road to Character, “wants to love intimately, to sacrifice self in the service of others, to live in obedience to some transcendent truth, to have a cohesive inner soul that honors creation and one’s own possibilities.” Instead, most of us are “career-oriented, ambitious.” We want to “build, create, produce, discover things.” And the tragedy is that our culture has encouraged this ambitious, creative self-assertiveness at the expense of a moral concern with self-sacrifice.
As I looked around the popular culture I kept finding the same messages everywhere: You are special. Trust yourself. Be true to yourself. Movies from Pixar and Disney are constantly telling children how wonderful they are. Commencement speeches are larded with the same clichés: Follow your passion. Don’t accept limits. Chart your own course. You have a responsibility to do great things because you are so great. This is the gospel of self-trust.
The result, Brooks says, is a culture that turns people into shrewd, crafty, fame-hungry narcissists who lead shallow, lonely, empty lives.
Is he right? Is the cause of our unhappiness seeking happiness? And is a morality that preaches selflessness and self-sacrifice the cure?
Morality Without Happiness
One of the laziest, and most common, rhetorical techniques is to offer your audience a choice between false alternatives. When President Obama was promoting the Affordable Care Act, he would often say that his opponents thought the status quo in healthcare was fine, and anyone troubled by problems with the existing healthcare system should support his plan. The possibility that some of his critics recognized the very real problems in American healthcare but thought the ACA would make them worse? Inconceivable.
David Brooks and other crusaders for sacrifice play the same game. You can either lead an empty life of self-interest, which consists of accumulating money, power, and status by any means necessary—or you can recognize that there are things more valuable than money, power, and status and embrace selflessness and self-sacrifice.
To drive home this alternative, Brooks tells the story of two football players: Johnny Unitas and Joe Namath. “Unitas grew up in the old culture of self-effacement and self-defeat,” says Brooks. As a result, he was “unflamboyant and understated,” an “honest workman doing an honest job.”
Namath, by contrast, “lived in a different moral universe” that celebrated the individual, and he embodied this new ethos. Namath was brash and braggadocios, viewing himself as “bigger than the team.” The man titled his autobiography I Can’t Wait Until Tomorrow ’Cause I Get Better Looking Every Day.
Without a reticent bone in his body, he’d bring reporters along as he worked his way through bottles of scotch the night before games. He openly bragged about what a great athlete he was, how good-looking he was. He cultivated a brashly honest style. “Joe! Joe! You’re the most beautiful thing in the world!” he shouted to himself in the bathroom mirror of the Copacabana one night in 1966.
Who do you admire more? Who do you want to emulate? Brooks, of course, intends the answer to be self-evident. And maybe it is. But it leaves out a third alternative: a conception of self-interest that doesn’t involve the amoral pursuit of money, power, and status. A conception of self-interest that takes morality seriously. A conception of self-interest that doesn’t counsel hiding your insecurity behind a mask of false confidence, but which teaches you how to achieve true self-confidence—the kind that doesn’t need to announce itself because it comes from the conviction not that “I’m better than others,” but that “I’m good.”
That is the concept of self-interest I’ll be presenting in the rest of this book. Before we turn to that, however, I want to make clear what it is the opponents of happiness advocate as the alternative to self-interest. Because just as they give us a distorted picture of what it means to pursue your own interests, they paint a distorted picture of what it means to altruistically sacrifice your own interests. When they speak of altruism, they call to mind a vision of people who are warm, joyful, caring, benevolent, helpful. People whose lives are rich in meaning and whose strong moral character challenges and inspires us. Nothing could be further from the truth. What the advocates of morality without happiness are selling is poison. It has nothing positive to offer you.
Even though we’re taught to equate altruism with caring about others or helping others, that’s not how the term is used in practice. Consider this: who is more celebrated for their altruism—Moderna or Mother Teresa? Thanks to its COVID-19 vaccine, Moderna has saved millions of lives. And yet no one calls it altruistic. Why not? Because it profited by helping others. In fact, The Intercept named Moderna and BioNTech executives the worst Americans of 2021 because . . . their revolutionary life-saving vaccines made them billionaires. Mother Teresa, by contrast, is the symbol of altruism. Not because of how helpful she was to the world’s poor, but because of how much she sacrificed for the world’s poor.
Take a simpler example. Who would get the most moral credit? A billionaire who gave away a hundred million dollars to charity—or someone who gave his entire $50,000 life savings to charity? The person who helped the most—or the person who sacrificed the most?
And it’s not just about moral credit. What about moral blame? In late 2021, YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, created a real-life contest modeled after the show Squid Game, and the video quickly gained more than 100 million views. MrBeast, in case you don’t know, is famous for videos in which he gives away enormous amounts of cash (and for charity drives that regularly raise tens of millions of dollars). In his first viral video, for example, he gave away $10,000 to a homeless person. What was the response to his Squid Game video?
WTF? Your bio says “i wan to make the world a better place before i die” but you are wasting money and resources on building some random SQUID game??? You could give millions of dollars to everyone so no one is poor but instead you waste it on this stupid game.
The backlash was so widespread even the media covered it. “YouTube Star MrBeast Criticised for $3.5 Million Real-Life ‘Squid Game’” read one headline. The message was clear. It doesn’t matter if you give away tens of millions of dollars: if you do anything that benefits yourself, you’re selfish and immoral.
Altruism is not a synonym for “nice.” It means, as one dictionary reports, “the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others.” The term was coined by the positivist philosopher Auguste Comte. “Thus the expression, Live for Others, is the simplest summary of the whole moral code of Positivism,” he wrote. Comte is largely forgotten today, but he was highly influential in the 19th century. Even many of his critics happily embraced his moral ideal, which was seen as a substitute for Christian ethics at a time when religion was a waning influence among the era’s thought leaders. Religionists warned that the death of God would mean the death of morality. The altruists said not to worry: instead of serving God, we can simply serve humanity. Indeed, altruists claimed to be morally superior to Christians, who selfishly demanded personal immortality as a reward for virtue. A truly virtuous person, said Comte’s follower John Bridges, believes that “Our duty is to annihilate ourselves if need be for the service of Humanity.”
Though people today are seldom that explicit about the meaning of altruism, it is Comte who they are echoing when they condemn Moderna and MrBeast. Ayn Rand summarizes the doctrine this way:
What is the moral code of altruism? The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.
Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.
Do not hide behind such superficialities as whether you should or should not give a dime to a beggar. That is not the issue. The issue is whether you do or do not have the right to exist without giving him that dime. The issue is whether you must keep buying your life, dime by dime, from any beggar who might choose to approach you. The issue is whether or not the need of others is the first mortgage on your life and the moral purpose of your existence. The issue is whether man is to be regarded as a sacrificial animal. Any man of self-esteem will answer: “No.” Altruism says: “Yes.”
What makes it hard to pin down the meaning of altruism is that few people today explicitly advocate it. Not because they don’t believe it—but because everyone believes it. It’s the same reason why you won’t find many Southerners defending racism in the early 1800s. There was no one to defend it against. One person who does publicly champion altruism today is Peter Singer, who The New Yorker has called “the most influential living philosopher” and who was named by Time as one of the “100 most influential people in the world.” His argument is precisely that everyone believes altruism to be true, but almost no one seriously tries to live up to its demands—no one except the burgeoning movement of Effective Altruists.
In his popular book, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, Singer describes some of the activities that characterize Effective Altruism, a movement that encourages people to “do the most good we can.”
Effective altruists do things like the following:
Living modestly and donating a large part of their income—often much more than the traditional tenth, or tithe—to the most effective charities;
Researching and discussing with others which charities are the most effective or drawing on research done by other independent evaluators;
Choosing the career in which they can earn most, not in order to be able to live affluently but so that they can do more good;
Talking to others, in person or online, about giving, so that the idea of effective altruism will spread;
Giving part of their body—blood, bone marrow, or even a kidney—to a stranger.
By way of illustration, he tells the story of a promising philosophy student who abandons a career in philosophy to work on Wall Street so he would have more money to give away. He tells the story of Zell Kravinsky, who gave away most of his $45 million fortune and, convinced he had not sacrificed enough, donated a kidney to a stranger. He tells us about a young woman named Julia Wise, who struggled with the decision of whether to have children: “she felt so strongly that her choice to donate or not donate meant the difference between someone else living or dying that she decided it would be immoral for her to have children. They would take too much of her time and money.” (Singer reassuringly says altruism is compatible with having children since they too might grow up to be altruists.)
What altruism requires of us is not the occasional donation to the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Indeed, Singer thinks it’s morally dubious to give money to make dying children happy when that same money could be used to stop other children from dying. But his main point is that altruism demands radical sacrifice. To take altruism seriously, you don’t need to give up everything—but you should give up virtually everything.
[I]n 1972, when I was a junior lecturer at University College, Oxford, I wrote an article called “Famine, Affluence and Morality” in which I argued that, given the great suffering that occurs during famines and similar disasters, we ought to give large proportions of our income to disaster relief funds. How much? There is no logical stopping place, I suggested, until we reach the point of marginal utility—that is, the point at which by giving more, one would cause oneself and one’s family to lose as much as the recipients of one’s aid would gain.
What could possibly justify this moral outlook? Why should you treat your career, your wealth, your children, your internal organs, your life as nothing more than a means to the ends of others? Don’t you matter? In his earlier book The Life You Can Save, Singer claims his radical conclusions follow from moral premises everyone accepts. Here’s his argument:
First premise: Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.
Second premise: If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing something nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.
Third premise: By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.
Conclusion?
[Y]ou must keep cutting back on unnecessary spending, and donating what you save, until you have reduced yourself to the point where if you give any more, you will be sacrificing something nearly as important as preventing malaria—like giving so much that you can no longer afford an adequate education for your own children.
How, asks Singer, can a nice house, outfits that make you feel attractive, romantic meals at fancy restaurants, a hard-won vacation to Telluride, or even a savings account large enough to provide enduring financial security be more important than the lives you could save by giving away that money? How can you justify living a middle-class lifestyle when your income could prevent the poorest people on earth from dying?
Singer’s conclusion makes many people uncomfortable, but they can’t spot any flaws in his reasoning. The trick is hidden in his second premise. Singer claims, “If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing something nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.” The question is: more important to whom? Isn’t my life and my happiness more important to me than the life and happiness of a stranger I’ll never meet?
Singer’s basic assumption is that I should not value my own life more than the lives of other people. But why not? Placing priority on my own life doesn’t mean I regard other people as servants or resources I can exploit. On the contrary, to assert my right to exist for my own sake is to recognize that other people have a right to exist for their own sake. On that view, I won’t sacrifice for other people for the same reason I don’t expect them to sacrifice for me.
To the extent Singer’s second premise is plausible it’s because we take it to mean: if you can help someone in an emergency situation without great cost or risk to yourself, you should. And that’s true. Other human beings are values to us. Even strangers are fellow human beings, and absent evidence to the contrary, we see them as potential allies in the quest for happiness. We want them to thrive and to succeed. We don’t want them to suffer. If I see a child drowning and I’m in a position to save him, I will. Not from some sense of duty, not because some professor will castigate me for not helping, but from my love of my own life.
When you love your life, you love human potential and seek to encourage and honor that in action. To save a drowning child when there’s no significant danger to yourself is not a sacrifice. But that doesn’t mean you follow the kid home, and assume responsibility for his food, his housing, his education. It doesn’t mean that you abandon your career and travel around the world in search of drowning children.
Singer is pulling a bait and switch. He brings to mind situations where helping is not a sacrifice and then asks us to draw a moral principle that demands total sacrifice. Here is the correct principle: be loyal to your values, never sacrificing a greater value to a lower value. This may very well mean helping someone in an emergency, but it can’t mean treating human suffering and misfortune as such as a claim on your life.
The reason to help others is precisely because emergencies are rare and exceptional. You can provide aid in emergencies without diverting yourself from pursuing your own happiness. Most people, most of the time, to the extent a country is free, have the power to support their own lives. And they should. They should not surrender their own lives to us—and we shouldn’t surrender our lives to them.
For all their focus on global poverty, Effective Altruists rarely talk about the cause of that poverty. The reason that a billion people continue to live in extreme poverty is not because we’ve given too little to charity: it’s because they don’t live in free countries. If you truly wanted to do “the most good you can,” you wouldn’t promote Effective Altruism. You would promote freedom.
All that said, the practitioners of Effective Altruism are in a sense an aberration. They try to faithfully implement altruism’s demand for sacrifice. But altruism really isn’t intended to be practiced. The best way to understand it is not as a code of morality, but as a psychological weapon. When people invoke altruism, it’s usually not because they genuinely want to help others—it’s because they want to control and exploit you. And the point isn’t that they’re misusing altruism—it’s that this is what altruism is designed for.
Consider this: no one—not even Peter Singer—demands that you sacrifice yourself consistently. To practice altruism consistently would entail suicide, since every bite of food you take is needed more by someone else. A consistent altruist would be a dead altruist.
Altruists will let you get away with living most of the time. But when they want your wealth or your obedience? That’s when they’ll demand that you sacrifice. They will rely on your guilt. You don’t want to be selfish, do you? Who are you to object to my demands? You’re no moral paragon. You’ve been out there enjoying your life while others suffer—now it’s time to serve.
I recently spoke to a young woman whose sick father is insisting that she place her life on hold to take care of him. Doesn’t she realize that’s her moral duty to the family? That is what altruism looks like. A truly moral person may ask for help. But to demand it as a duty? That is depraved, and yet it’s precisely what altruism preaches. If you are in need, other people are your servants.
You might wonder: Aren’t those demanding others serve them being selfish? And isn’t that inconsistent with altruism? Economist Thomas Sowell once posed the puzzle this way: “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.” In other words, if the good is the “non-good for me,” doesn’t that mean that we all should sacrifice—and that no one should be able to collect on those sacrifices? Isn’t altruism self-contradictory since you’re supposed to serve others, but from their own standpoint, they aren’t “others”? They are people bound by the same moral code, which says that the good is non-them? Rand puts the paradox this way:
Why is it moral to serve the happiness of others, but not your own? If enjoyment is a value, why is it moral when experienced by others, but immoral when experienced by you? If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others? Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice? Is the moral purpose of those who are good, self-immolation for the sake of those who are evil?
But, Rand goes on to point out, this is only a paradox—not a contradiction. The morality of altruism allows you to collect sacrifices and gain values—provided you don’t earn them. If you’re a producer, you don’t have a right to what you produce. That’s greedy. But if you’re a parasite who produces nothing? That is precisely what gives you a moral right to what others produce. “It is immoral to earn, but moral to mooch—it is the parasites who are the moral justification for the existence of the producers, but the existence of the parasites is an end in itself.”
According to altruism, if you earn values, you have to give them up. What entitles you to values? The fact you didn’t earn them. A need you’re unable or unwilling to satisfy is what entitles you to have your needs fulfilled by other people’s efforts and at other people’s expense. A lazy bum who makes excuses for his failures is morally superior to the affluent relatives he mooches off of—he is a needy victim while they are selfish and greedy for only sacrificing a small portion of their wealth for him. This is the actual meaning of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
When altruists say they are champions of “the good of others” what they really mean is, “the worst people get to demand to have their wishes satisfied by the sacrifices of the best people.”
This is the dead end of morality without happiness. It has nothing positive to offer, nothing uplifting to sell.
You do need morality—but not a morality that teaches you to throw your life away.
This is the only good part of being hacked by criminals. I can read and share the correct ideas and knowledge that we both share as true Objectivists and moral people with the evil altruists of the world involved in this crime against me everywhere.