The Virtue of Selfishness

by Ayn Rand

“Ethics is not a mystic fantasy—nor a social convention—nor a dispensable, subjective luxury.... Ethics is an objective necessity of man’s survival—not by the grace of the supernatural nor of your neighbors nor of your whims, but by the grace of reality and the nature of life.”

rational selfishness—

rational self-interest—challenges the altruist-collectivist fashions of our day.

Known as Objectivism, her unique philosophy is the underlying theme of her famous novels.

MORE WRITINGS BY AYN RAND FICTION WE THE LIVING THE EARLY AYN RAND NIGHT OF JANUARY 16TH PHILOSOPHY General OBJECTIVISM: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Dr. Leonard Peikoff THE AYN RAND LEXICON THE AYN RAND READER PHILOSOPHY: Who Needs It? THE VOICE OF REASON FOR THE NEW INTELLECTUAL THE OMINOUS PARALLELS by Dr. Leonard Peikoff THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS Epistemology AN INTRODUCTION TO OBJECTIVIST EPISTEMOLOGY Politics / Economics CAPITALISM: The Unknown Ideal RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE Art, Literature & Letters THE ROMANTIC MANIFESTO THE ART OF FICTION THE ART OF NONFICTION JOURNALS OF AYN RAND LETTERS OF AYN RAND

Copyright © Ayn Rand, 1961, 1964 Copyright © The Objectivist Newsletter, Inc., 1962, 1963, 1964 All rights reserved

Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Introduction Chapter 1. - The Objectivist Ethics Chapter 2. - Mental Health versus Mysticism and Self-Sacrifice Chapter 3. - The Ethics of Emergencies Chapter 4. - The “Conflicts” of Men’s Interests Chapter 5. - Isn’t Everyone Selfish? Chapter 6. - The Psychology of Pleasure Chapter 7. - Doesn’t Life Require Compromise? Chapter 8. - How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society? Chapter 9. - The Cult of Moral Grayness Chapter 10. - Collectivized Ethics Chapter 11. - The Monument Builders Chapter 12. - Man’s Rights Chapter 13. - Collectivized “Rights” Chapter 14. - The Nature of Government Chapter 15. - Government Financing in a Free Society Chapter 16. - The Divine Right of Stagnation Chapter 17. - Racism Chapter 18. - Counterfeit Individualism Chapter 19. - The Argument from Intimidation INDEX

“Why do you use the word ‘selfishness’ to denote virtuous qualities of character, when that word antagonizes so many people to whom it does not mean the things you mean?”

To those who ask it, my answer is: “For the reason that makes you afraid of it.”

It is to them that I will give a more explicit answer.

It is not a mere semantic issue nor a matter of arbitrary choice. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the...

Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern...

This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests....

The ethics of altruism has created the image of the brute, as its answer, in order to make men accept two inhuman tenets: (a) that any concern with one’s own interests is evil, regardless of what these interests might be, and (b) that the brute’s activities are in fact to one’s own inte...

Atlas Shrugged

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There are two moral questions which altruism lumps together into one “package-deal”: (1) What are values? (2) Who should be the beneficiary of values? Altruism substitutes the second for the first; it evades the task of defining a code of moral values, thus leaving man, in fact, without moral guidance.

Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value—and so long as that beneficiary is anybody other than oneself, anything goes.

Altruism Definition

Observe the indecency of what passes for moral judgments today. An industrialist who produces a fortune, and a gangster who robs a bank are regarded as equally immoral, since they both sought wealth for their own “selfish” benefit. A young man who gives up his career in order to support his parents and never rises beyond the rank of grocery clerk is regarded as morally superior to the young man who endures an excruciating struggle and achieves his personal ambition. A dictator is regarded as moral, since the unspeakable atrocities he committed were intended to benefit “the people,” not himself.

He may hope that others might occasionally sacrifice themselves for his benefit, as he grudgingly sacrifices himself for theirs, but he knows that the relationship will bring mutual resentment, not pleasure—and that, morally, their pursuit of values will be like an exchange of unwanted, unchosen Christmas presents, which neither is morally permitted to buy for himself.

Apart from such times as he manages to perform some act of self-sacrifice, he possesses no moral significance: morality takes no cognizance of him and has nothing to say to him for guidance in the crucial issues of his life; it is only his own personal, private, “selfish” life and, as such, it is regarded either as evil or, at best, amoral.

Since nature does not provide man with an automatic form of survival, since he has to support his life by his own effort, the doctrine that concern with one’s own interests is evil means that man’s desire to live is evil—that man’s li...

Yet that is the meaning of altruism, implicit in such examples as the equation of an in...

concern with his own interests

must be the beneficiary of his own moral actions.

The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor must always be the beneficiary of his action and that man must act for his own rational self-interest.

A similar type of error is committed by the man who declares that since man must be guided by his own independent judgment, any action he chooses to take is moral if he chooses it. One’s own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one’s actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation: only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one’s choices.

Just as man cannot survive by any random means, but must discover and practice the principles which his survival requires, so man’s self-interest cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved by the guidance of rational principles.

Objectivist ethics is a morality of rational ...

rational self...

It is not a concept that one can surrender to man’s enemies, nor to the unthinking misconceptions, distortions, prejudices and fears of the ignorant and the irrational. The attack on “selfishness” is an attack on man’s self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.

The Objectivist Newsletter,

The Newsletter deals with the application of the philosophy of Objectivism to the issues and problems of today’s culture—more specifically, with that intermediary level of intellectual concern which lies between philosophical abstractions and the journalistic concretes of day-by-day existence.

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AYN RAND New York, September 1964

What is morality, or ethics? It is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life. Ethics, as a science, deals with discovering and defining such a code.

Why does man need a code of values?

The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all—and why?

Is the concept of value, of “good or evil” an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from and unsupported by any facts of reality—or is it based on a metaphysical fact...

(I use the word “metaphysical” to mean: that which pertains to reality, to the nature...

Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise.

And—since there is no such entity as “society,” since society is only a number of individual men—this meant that some men (the majority or any gang that claims to be its spokesman) are ethically entitled to pursue any whims (or any atrocities) they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang’s desires.

This could hardly be called rational, yet most philosophers have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, and that in the field of ethics—in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life’s goals—man must be guided by something other than reason. By what?

Faith—instinct—intuition—revelation—feeling—tast...

(they call it “arbitrary postulate” or “subjective choice” or “emotional commitment”)—and

the battle is only over the question of whose whim: one’s own or society’s or the dictator’s or God’s.

three things barred from its field are: reason—mind—reality.

If you wonder why the world is now collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell, this is the reason. If you want to save civilization, it is this premise of modern ethics—and of all ethical history—that you must challenge. To challenge the basic premise of any discipline, one must begin at the beginning. In ethics, one must begin by asking: What are values? Why does man need them?

“Value” is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. The concept “value” is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative...

Value