I can’t imagine Immanuel Kant struggling through 1,172 pages of Atlas Shrugged11 and declaring infinite selfishness a solid universal maxim. T. M. Scanlon seems like a pretty calm and thoughtful person, but it’s not hard to imagine him reading Ayn Rand and putting his fist through a wall. And an Aristotelian in search of a golden mean would bristle at a theory that tells the very concept of a golden mean to go jump in a lake. Nonetheless, we live in a world where “Be as selfish as you can!” is somehow a mainstream moral theory.
