How to Build a Secular, Scientific Morality

Soon ARU Press will release a collection of Ben Bayer’s essays, Breaking Free From Faith-Based Morality. The collection will feature essays previously published in New Ideal on the subject of the religious roots of altruistic morality. The collection is aimed at secular readers who consider themselves rational and scientific, but who are nonetheless in the grip of the morality of altruism that dominates our culture. It argues that altruism is essentially faith-based, and that a principled commitment to reason requires abandoning it. To offer them an alternative, the final chapter of the book shows how Ayn Rand validated a fully scientific ethics. We are pleased to publish this final chapter online in anticipation of the release of the book.

In 2023, Ayaan Hirsi Ali scandalized the atheist community by announcing that she had converted to Christianity. She argued that atheism offers no meaningful positive values, at a time when the West needs to defend its values — whether from militant Islam or the “woke” movement on campuses: “[W]e can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: What is it that unites us? The response that ‘God is dead!’ seems insufficient.”

To Ali, only Christianity can provide the guidance we need. She credits it as the source of “an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom, and dignity.” By contrast, as Christianity’s cultural influence has waned, we are left with the problem that

the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. . . . The line often attributed to G. K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”¹

Here she echoes a theme that religious apologists have sounded for centuries: Only the existence of a divine moral lawmaker who transcends human interests and culture can ensure the existence of meaningful, objective moral guidance.²

Doubtless, religion’s decline has created a cultural void that the secular dogma of “woke” egalitarianism has been eager to fill. And this is due in no small part to atheists’ failure to offer the world a convincing philosophic code of objective moral guidance.

But the alternative to “irrational quasi-religious dogma” is not irrational fully religious dogma. In reality, it’s religious faith that truly makes it possible to “believe in anything” about matters of value, undermining objectivity. In this essay, I will show the real meaning of objectivity, and the arguments that have already been given for the guidance it implies. It’s guidance that many atheists have so far failed to embrace when offered, let alone to formulate for themselves.

Atheists typically try to answer the question Richard Dawkins grapples with in his book Outgrowing God:

Lots of people seem to think you need to believe in some sort of god, any kind of ‘higher power,’ in order to have any chance of being moral – of being good. Or that, without belief in a higher power, you’d have no basis for knowing right from wrong, good from bad, moral from immoral. This chapter looks at . . . whether we need belief in God or gods or some sort of ‘higher power’ in order to be good[my emphasis].³

Dawkins says belief in a God who punishes immorality could motivate ostensibly moral behavior.⁴ He also observes that non-believers like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros can be very generous in their philanthropic giving, and that there are very few atheists in prison.⁵ He then offers biological and cultural explanations for this behavior. The leading cultural explanation is the influence of various ostensibly secular moral philosophies. The implied answer to his question is, we don’t need religion for moral guidance, for other secular theories can provide this guidance as well.

But to say that we don’t need religion for moral guidance implies some people can still get it from religion. This “me too” approach concedes that religion has really offered meaningful guidance worthy of emulation. But we should not be so ready to concede that faith-based religious morality has ever offered meaningful guidance, especially if, as I shall argue, it cannot offer objective guidance.

There is an alternative. We can build a secular, scientific account of morality. As I will argue, only a scientific theory can offer truly objective moral guidance. The point is not that we don’t need religion to find meaningful moral guidance. The point is that religion cannot offer it in the first place.

In this essay I will show how to build a secular, scientific morality from the values of science itself, beginning with the value of scientific objectivity. To clear the ground for building it, we must first brush aside religious misconceptions about objective morality. They fail to appreciate its true meaning, and clarifying this meaning will help show why the value of objectivity explains our admiration for important virtues of character. This will point the way to objectively identifying the factual basis for moral truths.

A fully scientifically objective morality must also be willing to challenge the content that many current secular moral theories have inherited from religious codes. Atheists who truly value the rebelliousness of the Enlightenment must be willing to break free from the dominant culture that surrounds them.

Why religion is the enemy of objectivity

Far from being an exemplar of objective morality, religious morality is anathema to it.

There is a powerful but still underappreciated objection to the idea that divine commandments provide the basis for objective standards of morality. It concerns the arbitrariness of the alleged divine commands themselves.

The classic illustration is the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament. God commands Abraham to kill his only begotten son, and Abraham willingly begins to comply. Believers take solace in the fact that God was only testing Abraham and didn’t make him go through with it.⁶ But what God is testing — and what the story is celebrating — is Abraham’s willingness to kill out of arbitrary blind faith. If God says he should not kill, that makes it immoral; but if God arbitrarily changes his mind and asks Abraham to kill an innocent child, it is moral after all.⁷ A moral code with divine commandments as its basis is shot through with arbitrariness.

This is the answer to those who bemoan that atheists are capable of believing anything. On the contrary, it’s precisely a religious morality of groundless faith that demands arbitrary belief. The example of Abraham’s submission to God’s arbitrary will has too often inspired believers, from Christian inquisitors to Islamic terrorists and mullahs, who arbitrarily believed their acts of murder and oppression to be noble because it was dictated to them by a higher power.

Defenders of religious morality claim that theirs is an “objective” morality because human beings have no say in what God commands, so whole cultures can be “wrong” if they disobey these commands.⁸ But this also means God cannot be wrong, no matter what he commands. What God commands of Abraham, for example, is unaffected by the extreme distress Abraham might feel or the pain Isaac would suffer from being sacrificed.

Does the mere independence of an alleged divine commander’s will from human consciousness make a code based on it “objective”?

“Objective” is sometimes used to mean the sheer mind-independence of a fact. But while a divine commander’s will is imagined to be independent of human minds, it’s obviously not supposed to be independent of every mind. It is itself supposed to be the will of an alleged supernatural mind. That means that according to divine command theory what counts as moral is totally dependent on God’s arbitrary caprice.⁹

In fact, only in a godless universe can any facts be truly mind-independent. In the fantasy of a God who creates the universe, all of nature depends on his mind for its existence and character. Such a God could have made the laws of nature radically different: gravity could work in reverse, living creatures could be immortal, etc. God could suspend any law he authored by permitting “miracles.” He could make all of his creation disappear. There are no objective facts in the universe imagined by theistic religion.

More importantly, religion poisons the very practice of the objective method of discovering truth.

When ordinary non-academics speak of “objectivity,” they don’t simply mean the mind-independence of a fact. They mean the method that minds use to know these facts.¹⁰ Objective journalism and objective science are objective not because the perfect newspaper article or lab report already exists out there in reality, waiting to be discovered.¹¹ Rather, they’re objective because they are products of human beings who have attended to the relevant mind-independent facts because they practice objectivity, the logical method of committing to discovering the truth, come what may.

The objectivity of human value should be thought of in the same way. Values are not mind-independent entities. Rather, valuing is something human minds do: It’s the conscious evaluation and pursuit of certain objects by conscious beings. We have a choice about how to evaluate these objects: We can do it by rationally deciding what furthers our lives, or we can default by acting on unprocessed emotional reactions.

Refugees who flee a primitive, oppressive country for a modern, civilized one, are often valuing objectively, not subjectively. It is not wishful thinking that their life would be better in one country rather than another; they can have perfectly good reason to think it is true. In this approach, objective values are what we form through a commitment to the truth, while merely subjective values ignore or defy it.

Far from being objective, the values of religious morality are thoroughly subjective. The whole lesson of the story of Abraham is that God is testing Abraham’s blind willingness to follow a command to kill. He hears a voice in his head and is expected to follow its demands without being able to know where it comes from, whether from the imagined God, a demon, or just his own delusions. He’s relying, at bottom, on an unscrutinized feeling of fear, not any commitment to the truth.

This is why religious moralists in practice do not appeal to any kind of reasoning from first principles to justify the content of their moral code. Instead, they appeal directly to the arbitrary authority of scripture, scriptures purporting to contain revelations about God’s will like the one experienced by Abraham. We are given no reasoned explanations for why scriptural commandments serve any purpose, human or divine. Though some religious commandments may have been informed by the life experience of their human authors, they often command us to surrender what is actually good for our lives. Like Abraham, most follow these commandments not out of reverence for real values in their lives but out of irrational fear of disapproval or punishment by real and imagined authorities.

Because objectivity means following a scientific method to know the truth, faith-based morality is the enemy of objective morality. Atheists should not seek to show why one does not need to be religious to uphold an objective morality. They should be clear that religious faith cannot uphold an objective morality. Only a scientifically objective approach that rejects blind faith can.

Being a truth-seeker rather than a blind-faith believer also accounts for the essence of other morally admirable character traits. Seeing this is the first step to building a truly objective code of morality.

Admirable character traits of the truth seeker as moral virtues

Consider what was so admirable about Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s story, at least before she converted to Christianity.

Ali was born and raised in a fundamentalist Muslim family in Somalia. At an early age she was indoctrinated by clerics, beaten by her mother, even subjected to horrific female circumcision. When her family left to live in Nairobi, Kenya, she received a more cosmopolitan education that opened her mind to new books and ideas. When her family tried to arrange her marriage with a man she’d never met, she rebelled and escaped to Europe to make a new life for herself. Famously, she rejected Islam and became an atheist.¹² She spoke up intransigently against injustice and oppression, even in the face of death threats year after year.

When Ali first rose to prominence, her secular admirers agreed that the primitive, Islamic society she had rebelled against was vicious and celebrated her escape from this society as a real act of moral heroism.

Notably: admiration is a moral emotion that responds to admirable character traits. We admired the will to overcome obstacles and speak up even in the face of grave threats. These are the same character traits that many admire in other great activists, dissidents, and artists. In admiring how they all “speak up,” we are admiring their indefatigable commitment to learning and telling the truth.

But that is also the central value of the scientist.

Consider Katalin Kariko, one of the co-developers of the Covid mRNA vaccines. To identify the biochemistry behind this new and dynamic form of vaccine technology, she had to engage in the right methods of thinking. To achieve the value of knowledge, objectivity demands not only a commitment to use the right methods to discover the truth, but also to reject the temptation to blind oneself by convenient fictions. So Kariko had to form the right general habits of thought like: the intellectual honesty to avoid lazily fudging data because of confirmation bias, the courage to move forward without external support and in the face of hostility, and the independent thinking needed to experiment with entirely novel genetic methods.

Kariko’s story shows that the character traits of the great scientist are just supremely clear examples of the character traits of the morally virtuous man or woman. The intellectual virtues of science are continuous with moral virtues. Because human action is guided by thought, choosing the right ways of thinking — the ways that keep us focused on the facts rather than fantasy — is essential to choosing the right way of acting, and hence of forming the right kind of character.

Many widely recognized moral virtues have the same relation to the value of seeking the truth. Honesty means commitment to the truth, not faking it. Integrity means valuing the truth enough to act on it. Justice means recognizing the truth about the characters of other people.¹³ And this is only a preview: There’s more to be said about how many other virtues relate to a basic virtue of the rational pursuit of the truth.¹⁴

But what does it mean to identify moral virtues? Can there be such a thing as scientific truth about what’s the right or wrong virtue to practice? What could make the principles of morality objectively true, i.e., provable by reference to observable facts?

The factual basis of moral value judgments

Part of the reason atheists are so late to the game in defending a secular code of morality is that secular skeptics have long thought moral value judgments have no basis in facts. They have sided with David Hume’s view that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.”¹⁵ Morality, they say, is a subjective relic of religious superstition, and if God is dead, morality is a joint casualty.

One source of this skepticism is that moral value judgments contain very abstract concepts, not closely tied to the observable things around us. We can’t see honesty or integrity or justice or goodness in the way we see tables or chairs, dogs or cats.

But a concept’s high level of abstraction doesn’t make it just hot air. The concept of the “atom” refers to something totally invisible. Full proof of the existence of atoms came only in the 19th century, when scientists were about to infer their existence as the cause of a variety of observed effects. Now everyone (aside from a few highly skeptical philosophers) thinks that scientists refer to real facts when they talk about atoms, even if the concept is highly abstract.

Highly abstract concepts can refer to real facts by means other than causal inference. Sometimes they simply condense a wide array of disparate observable facts. Consider concepts of the scientific method like “experiment,” “hypothesis,” “replicable,” etc. They refer to real activities, mental products,and their qualities in relation to a scientific purpose. Thermometers, sheets of gold foil, and cathode ray tubes have no visual resemblance. But scientists use these various objects to do experiments that helped prove the atomic hypothesis, provided that the results were replicable.

We need to conceptualize the actions of the scientific method because our thoughts are not automatically true — we are fallible. Thinking the world is flat doesn’t make it so: To learn its shape, we need to make systematic astronomical and terrestrial observations. Wanting to be pregnant doesn’t make one pregnant: Only specific biochemical tests reveal whether the effect has been brought about by its actual causes.

So precisely because we need to base our thinking on the facts, we also need concepts of methods of rational thinking, concepts of norms. There are better ways of doing experiments, of forming and testing hypotheses, and there are worse ways. Experiments should be replicable, evaluation of results should often be double-blind, and experimenters should not fall prey to confirmation bias, etc. There are definite courses of mental action that help us identify the truth. Our concepts for these scientific and logical norms refer to real facts because the methods are real facts, and we need to use these methods to discover further real facts.

Importantly, scientific and logical norms don’t just describe the research process; they prescribe courses of actions that scientists ought to pursue if they are to achieve the value of the truth. So if concepts of scientific norms refer to real facts, concepts of moral norms could do the same. What if moral norms simply identified the fundamental means to achieve some other salient end?

We obviously need concepts of practical norms to guide action toward success more generally. These norms are themselves based on scientific findings, most obviously in the life sciences. Biology describes and explains the processes of growth, locomotion and metabolism. Physiology describes and explains specific living activities of specific organisms: respiration, circulation, digestion, excretion, etc. But biological explanation itself is an essentially normative practice, and this has normative implications.

For all that secular moralists invoke evolution in the attempt to explain the ethical beliefs of human beings, they miss the key aspect of evolutionary science that bears most directly on value theory.¹⁶ Evolutionary biology explains the origin of the structure, traits and behavior of living things by explaining how those features came to be good for the organism, resulting in the replication of its species. See how quickly Richard Dawkins resorts to this language in his defense of evolutionary explanation in The Blind Watchmaker:

[B]iologists can be much more specific than that about what would constitute being ‘good for something’. The minimum requirement for us to recognize an object as an animal or plant is that it should succeed in making a living of some sort. . . . It is true that there are quite a number of ways of making a living — flying, swimming, swinging through the trees, and so on. But however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.¹⁷

We appeal even more directly to value judgments about the good of the organism in the applied life sciences. Fields like medicine and nutrition not only describe but prescribe methods needed to fend off or cure illness and sustain health: methods of immunization, medication, surgery, nutrition, etc. A new virus or poison or mental pathology hinders life; a new vaccine or antidote or therapy helps sustain it. The actions and products that actually result in self-perpetuation of life are those we regard as healthy or proper, as good for the life of the organism.

What if principles of morality are like the principles of the applied life sciences? They would concern not just the health of one’s body but the health of one’s soul. Here “health of one’s soul” only means the health of one’s personal character, one’s basic, psychologically characteristic mode of operation, the basic premises and emotional dispositions one works from habitually. The existence of the entire field of clinical psychology demonstrates that there are healthy and unhealthy psychological characteristics. Moral norms could identify the actions needed to become the kind of person with the kind of character who lives successfully. Virtues like honesty, integrity, courage, and justice could help one to acquire the knowledge one needs to find and make a better life.

Importantly, while such moral norms could help us strengthen our character to navigate our relations with other people, they need not be limited to rules for social relations. Indeed, what makes dissidents and scientists so courageous is precisely their commitment to live free from others’ influence, to go by the judgment of their own mind in answering the big questions of life. And it can also be courageous to act in the face of great challenges, even when imposed not by others but by nature. Consider the courage of someone battling a deadly cancer. The relationship that morality governs is not primarily that between you and other people, but that between you and reality.

Because there are scientifically knowable facts that make it true that moral virtues are good for human beings (ultimately, biological facts), a code of such virtues could be an objective morality.

Dramatizing a morality that celebrates objectivity

In my opinion, the philosopher who did the most to show how the values of science inform secular objective morality was Ayn Rand. She was a radical whose absolutism about the value of reason led her to challenge conventional views about morality, whether religious or otherwise. That attitude systematically informed her social and political analysis, creating her reputation as a cultural iconoclast.

Some may find it odd that a non-academic novelist would have special insight into the foundations of an objective morality. But recall how early in the essay I observed the character traits of admirable people. I modeled this on Rand’s own method of inquiry.¹⁸ As a novelist interested in projecting ideal characters, she made careful observations of real people she admired, and conceptualized the character traits that distinguished them from others. Her creative process began with collecting the data about moral character with which the science of ethics must begin.

Rand’s earliest fictional heroes and heroines are, above all, truth seekers and truth tellers in search of freedom. Kira Argounova of We the Living strives to escape the Soviet Russian communist system that works to crush her career as an engineer and the man she loves. Equality 7-2521 of Anthem escapes from the dystopian totalitarian society that rejects his reinvented light bulb after he’s rejected his society’s moral code. Howard Roark of The Fountainhead is an architect with a new vision of how to build who is unwilling to compromise it for wealth or fame, or to cater to society’s irrational moral demands.

Rand held up her heroes and heroines as admirable precisely for their devotion to objectivity. As a practitioner of objectivity herself, she was not content to simply admire them. This is where her work as a novelist shaded into her work as a philosopher, as she sought to understand why they were admirable. In both the traits she celebrates in her fiction and in her nonfiction conceptualization of them (in speeches in the novels and in later nonfiction essays), we see her moving from firsthand observations to highly abstract standards of value that integrate and explain the more concrete virtues and values she had earlier identified inductively.

After writing The Fountainhead (1943), Rand had identified certain key moral virtues animating her heroes in the pursuit of their values, especially the value of the truth: virtues like honesty, integrity, and independence.¹⁹ By the time she had written Atlas Shrugged (1957), she had identified the fundamental virtue linking all of these (and others): the virtue of rationality.²⁰ She saw all of the virtues as actions of recognizing important facts of reality that bear on human living.²¹ As forms of rationality, they each govern both thought and action as each is subject to the same basic questions:

A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? — Right or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow — right or wrong? Is a man’s wound to be disinfected in order to save his life — right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power — right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have — and the answers came from a man’s mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.²²

In Rand’s view, “right or wrong” applies to both thought and action generally, because both are exercised by choice, and both are evaluable by reference to reality-oriented standards. They can be justified or unjustified, rational or irrational. Thought itself is the crucial human action that guides all others.

But Rand’s work as a philosopher did not end with simply finding a common denominator among the moral virtues. She was also deeply concerned with the question of how and why moral norms count as cognitively meaningful truths, the kind of truths that skeptics and relativists would consider impossible.

The philosophic foundations of Rand’s objective morality

In her nonfiction treatise “The Objectivist Ethics” (1961), Rand explores the foundations of morality that she first identified in a speech by the hero of Atlas Shrugged. Here I’ll only highlight some of the essentials of her view of the foundations of objective morality.²³

She begins by asking her readers to be deeply philosophical about the very starting point of ethics:

The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?

Let me stress this. 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, on an unalterable condition of man’s existence?²⁴

One hallmark of her concern for objectivity here is first her unwillingness to begin by simply choosing among the conventional codes of values our culture already has to offer. She is preparing the way for a radical critique of nearly all of those codes and an independent reconstruction of a new moral code from the ground up.

A second hallmark is her concern to do this reconstruction with attention to basic philosophical questions about what could make a code of morality true or false in the first place. Rather than looking for a theory that captures popular “intuitions” about moral case studies — asking how applying the concept of “value” makes us feel — she asks about the metaphysical basis of the concept of “value,” i.e., what if any facts it refers to in reality.

She goes on to argue that it is the fact that a class of entities faces the alternative of existence or non-existence that explains the need for and thus the meaning of value concepts like “good” and “bad.” Only living organisms, unlike inanimate entities, face this alternative in the sense that they must engage in “self-generated, goal-directed action” to maintain their existence. To maintain their existence, living organisms must follow a specific course of locomotion, nutrition and growth:

That which is required for its survival is determined by its nature, by the kind of entity it is. . . .[T]he fundamental alternative of its existence remains the same: if an organism fails in the basic functions required by its nature — if an amoeba’s protoplasm stops assimilating food, or if a man’s heart stops beating — the organism dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action.²⁵

Inanimate entities can of course be destroyed, but they don’t need to do anything to remain in existence. If the universe were lifeless, with nothing but stars, rocks, and energy fields, there would be no goal pursuit to succeed or fail, no entities to which anything could be good or bad. In such a counterfactual unbiological universe, we would not need to invoke value concepts to explain the continued existence or change of various inanimate entities. Physical and chemical explanations would suffice.

Rand had been thinking about these basic questions about the foundations of value theory while writing her novel Atlas Shrugged, and she even found a way to dramatize this very issue, one that might otherwise seem like a technical theoretical issue, in an important scene. A minor character, a recent college graduate who had been enamored of skeptical-relativist ethical theories comes to abandon his jaded worldview after having been inspired by the admirable rationality of his boss (Rearden). Fueled by this inspiration he stands his ground when their factory is attacked by agitators, and is mortally wounded. His philosophical development in favor of moral objectivity reaches its denouement as he comes face to face with the value significance of the life or death stakes of his predicament:

His eyes wandered over the vast darkness, then rose to Rearden’s face; the eyes were helpless, longing, childishly bewildered. “I know . . . it’s crap, all those things they taught us . . . all of it, everything they said . . . about living or . . . or dying . . . Dying . . . it wouldn’t make any difference to chemicals, but — ” he stopped, and all of his desperate protest was only in the intensity of his voice dropping lower to say, “ — but it does, to me . . . And . . . and, I guess, it makes a difference to an animal, too . . . But they said there are no values . . . only social customs. . . No values!” His hand clutched blindly at the hole in his chest, as if trying to hold that which he was losing. “No . . . values . . .”²⁶

Tragically he dies, and Rearden observes that “what he was carrying in his arms was now that which had been the boy’s teachers’ idea of a man — a collection of chemicals,” dramatizing how value concepts apply only to the living, not the inanimate.²⁷

Understanding the connection between life and value also points to the ultimate value that sets the standard of evaluation. “Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action.”²⁸ What is living action (nutrition, locomotion, growth) good for? It’s good for more nutrition, locomotion, growth.²⁹ Life is an end in itself, not in the sense of being an end state, but in the sense of being a self-reinforcing activity that is the means to the end of more of itself.

And there is nothing else beyond an entity’s engagement in such self-reinforcing activity that is a stake. Value concepts identify success and failure conditions for this activity. They have no other factual basis. As she cashes it out, “To speak of ‘value’ as apart from ‘life’ is worse than a contradiction in terms. ‘It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.”³⁰

This represents a crucial part of the answer to Rand’s question: do we need values at all, and why? Fundamentally, we need them because we are living organisms. This in turn explains how the concept of “value” can be used to grasp and express truths: the concept is used to identify the truth of what furthers the life of an organism.

Rand goes on to explain that human beings need a code of values — moral values — because we are a distinctive kind of living organism that must consciously choose the values we pursue, and so we need guidance in our choices. Objective moral values are values that are chosen because they’re consciously, rationally validated by reference to the facts about what is required to further one’s life.³¹

By using a scientific method to search for the basis of the concept of “value,” Rand also formed a theory of value that accounted for the value of the scientific method itself. A consequence of her unwillingness to defend a value theory that simply rationalizes cultural moral prejudice is its distinctively modern approach to key issues in moral philosophy.

Rand’s distinctively modern objective morality

Rand was ahead of her time in realizing the philosophic significance of the difference between the living and the inanimate.

We have already seen (in the passage from Dawkins about how biologists think about what it means to be “good for something”) how judgments of biological value are implicit in evolutionary explanations. In recent years, certain philosophically-minded scientists have started to catch up with Rand, unpacking the implications of biology for value theory. Steven Pinker, for instance, puts it this way:

Life and happiness depend on an infinitesimal sliver of orderly arrangements of matter amid the astronomical number of possibilities. . . .[The second law of thermodynamics] defines the fate of the universe and the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and knowledge to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.³²

Explaining how living things resist entropy requires the attribution of goals or aims (“to fight back…” is teleological language). These are not usually conscious purposes (as they are for human beings). In his book articulating the neuroscientist and bioanthropologist Terence Deacon’s theory of natural teleology, Jeremy Sherman describes the aims of a simple bacterium:

Of all the possible work that glucose could do, within the bacterium those possibilities get channeled, limited, narrowed, constrained, or aimed into work that benefits the bacterium. Work isn’t possible without energy, but glucose energy doesn’t aim itself. The bacterium does the aiming. . . .

The bacterium’s means include its capacity to aim or channel that glucose into the bacterium’s functional work, which among other things includes finding more glucose.

And the bacterium’s most fundamental end? As I’ve already suggested, it’s circular. The bacterium’s fundamental end is regenerating its ability to aim work. It regenerates its own aims, and reproduces them, regenerating its aims in its progeny selves.³³

Sherman goes on to explain how recognizing these natural goals is the key to solving Hume’s “is-ought” problem.³⁴

Moral theories based on facts about the biological requirements of human life are nothing new. In the last few decades, prominent philosophers like Phillipa Foot and Michael Thompson (among others) have followed the lead of the arguments first offered by Aristotle in ancient Greece to formulate codes of morality that derive from the “human form of life.”³⁵ But Rand’s approach breaks even with these traditional life-based accounts of ethics in favor of a more scientific approach.

Even the contemporary Aristotelians are still working from a pre-modern view of biology. The idea they borrow from Aristotle is that there is a kind of proper functioning for each distinctive type of living organism. There’s something right about this, but they have little to say about what explains a given organism’s distinctive form of life.³⁶ They will say, for instance, that it’s the function of the bacterium to pursue glucose, or the function of bobcats to hunt, without explaining what makes this process out of so many others so special.

While Rand also revered Aristotle, her deeply biological perspective on value made her approach to ethics much more modern.³⁷ Her understanding of what explains an organism’s distinctive form of life is informed by a post-Darwinian approach to biology.³⁸ Living things are distinguished from the inanimate insofar as they are engaged in a constant struggle for existence. Everything about a living organism’s physiological structure, its use of energy, and its behavior makes a difference for better or worse in that struggle. Its distinctive form of living is the most distinctive and powerful activity it relies on to help win that struggle for existence. Here we see her surveying the range of distinctive forms of life according to their survival value:

The simpler organisms, such as plants, can survive by means of their automatic physical functions. The higher organisms, such as animals and man, cannot: their needs are more complex and the range of their actions is wider. The physical functions of their bodies can perform automatically only the task of using fuel, but cannot obtain that fuel. To obtain it, the higher organisms need the faculty of consciousness. A plant can obtain its food from the soil in which it grows. An animal has to hunt for it. Man has to produce it.³⁹

We’ve already seen how the content of her moral code, i.e. the values she’s celebrating in the person of her fictional heroes and heroines, are implicitly the values of the scientist: virtues such as honesty, independence, integrity. The fact that the distinctively human form of life depends essentially on human consciousness is a sign of how Rand, unlike almost any other thinker, appreciates the biological value of the pursuit of truth itself.

The content of her code, her celebration of objectivity, is equally modern in its orientation. And it depends on an especially objective survey of what makes human life possible.

The modern code of the producer, not the predator

Even as Rand argues that basic value concepts derive from organisms’ struggle for existence, she does not mean that human life is “red in tooth and claw.” She was far from a “social Darwinist.” Our basic means of survival is not predation or exploitation of others of our species, but the discovery of causal connections that enable us to discover the resources, build the tools, trade with others, and otherwise reshape our natural environment to our purposes. In other words, she saw rationality itself as the distinctively human form of life:

Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. . . . He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available — but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no “instincts” will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge — and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.⁴⁰

For human beings, nothing better enables thriving in defiance of entropy than grasping the truth about what enables successful living.

Rand realized that reason’s power to discover the truth included fundamentally the truth about the practical requirements of successful living. So she uniquely added productiveness to her list of the moral virtues.⁴¹ Human life requires not only the pursuit and attainment of the values needed for survival, but the creation of these values out of the raw material of nature. This is at the root of her view that human beings survive not by exploiting each other but by trading the values they’ve created with those created by others. Here again we see her sensitivity to the differences between organisms’ distinctive forms of life:

The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals. But just as animals would not be able to survive by attempting the method of plants, by rejecting locomotion and waiting for the soil to feed them — so men cannot survive by attempting the method of animals, by rejecting reason and counting on productive men to serve as their prey. Such looters may achieve their goals for the range of a moment, at the price of destruction: the destruction of their victims and their own. As evidence, I offer you any criminal or any dictatorship.⁴²

It’s this rejection of a life of force and the embrace of productiveness that is at the root of her embrace of the “trader principle” and with it, her case for capitalism.⁴³

Here Rand’s theory significantly updates the old Aristotelian view. Aristotle held that practical and theoretical reason were essentially distinct functions, and that the latter was a superior faculty dedicated to the contemplation of timeless truths for its own sake. Aristotle thought that those who were better suited for philosophic contemplation should be served by “natural slaves” who could not engage in such superior forms of reasoning.⁴⁴ For Rand, whose thinking is informed by the scientific and the industrial revolutions, “theoretical” reason is a powerful practical tool, not a form of play.⁴⁵

Here too Rand was ahead of her time. For too long philosophers sympathized with Nietzsche’s irrationalist idea that believing useful falsehoods is what helps us survive.⁴⁶ Religious philosophers like Alvin Plantinga ape Nietzsche’s amateur take on evolutionary theory when they blithely assume that cognitive faculties evolved to survive could not be adapted to know the truth.⁴⁷

Some philosophically-minded scientists like Steven Pinker and Kevin Mitchell have started to catch up with Rand’s seemingly obvious idea that our mind’s grasp of truth serves our survival.⁴⁸ Brains that developed to grasp truth, especially highly abstract truth about the causal dynamics of the world, are better suited to explain, predict and control it. So they are also more likely to be favored by a process of evolution by natural selection.

In recognizing and celebrating the power of individual human productive ability, Rand makes a case for individual freedom and by implication repudiates the old Aristotelian arguments for slavery.⁴⁹ Importantly for Rand, human reason is not automatic but must be operated volitionally. It’s precisely because this must be chosen that we need political freedom to make choices if we are to live. Her celebration of rationality also implies that justice is a virtue: the virtue of applying rationality to the judgment of the character of other men, by recognizing and rewarding the value of friends, repelling and punishing the evil of enemies, and the need to respect the rights of all.⁵⁰

But the fact that reason operates volitionally also means that we must choose which values to pursue and even whether to value our lives or not. This is why we need the guidance of morality. But the fact that we must choose the values we pursue — including the overall ends that dictate our means — is the basis of a skeptical worry we should now address.

Answering relativism by evaluating the ultimate ends

At the heart of our need for a moral code, for Rand, is our need to guide our volitional choices. This is one of the reasons she rejects the “categorical imperative” approach. We have no unconditional duties because all moral norms are understood only as identifying the causal requirements of achieving chosen values, including the value of life itself.⁵¹

But philosophers sometimes think moral norms can’t just express knowledge of the means to a chosen end. They argue one could then choose any arbitrary horrific goal and thereby justify it. This would amount to a form of relativism.

For example, they’ll object that we could choose death as our goal and evaluate a suicide terrorist as good because he’s highly effective at killing, even at killing himself. What if Mohammed Siddique Khan (one of the 2005 London Underground bombers) exclaims “we love death as you love life?” That’s his chosen goal — shouldn’t we now just evaluate his means to his chosen end? He was very effective in his ability to destroy and so would count as virtuous in relation to that end.

Indeed the difference between the suicide terrorist and the productive builder is emblematic of the civilizational conflict that exploded on September 11, 2001. If we can’t explain why one is objectively evil and the other is objectively good, the modern religious apologists will object that we need values more robust than those based on the choice to live.

It is possible to assess the causal efficacy of some “means” to any arbitrarily chosen “end,” but moral evaluation is also concerned with evaluating the ends themselves.⁵² Here Rand’s defense of why it’s only the fact of life that makes the fact of valuing possible shows why we can evaluate one chosen ultimate end as good and everything else as evil.⁵³

One can say that death is one’s goal. But one can’t say it with any cognitive meaning. Rand’s whole reason for thinking that life is what makes values possible is that one must do certain things to live while one doesn’t need to do anything to become inanimate. Death is the default state if one does nothing at all. So there are no “musts” or “should” governing action toward it. This is why it’s important that what makes life an end in itself is not simply being one of many possible end states. There are many such end states one could pretend to treat as a goal. “Life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action.”⁵⁴

So it’s true that the end of life has to be chosen. All values are in relation to the choice to live, and there is no categorical imperative “Thou shalt live.” But Rand’s point is that, while one can choose not to adopt it, there is only thing that can be chosen as an end in itself: one’s own life. Any other choices incompatible with that end are evil.

From this perspective, one can not only rule out the “ends” of nihilistic killers, but also many of the other highest “goods” proposed by moral philosophers. To the extent that these codes seem plausible, they draw their plausibility from implicit reliance on the end of life. For example, the utilitarians who identify the greatest happiness of the greatest number cash in on the sense that pleasure is good because in fact it’s the sensation that indicates the successful attainment of a biologically necessary goal. But they go astray when they try to treat an aggregate sum of many individuals as a kind of ultimate good, when it’s not good to any living entity for any purpose, because there’s no super-organism to whom this aggregate sum matters.

Just as one might wonder what fact lets us privilege one’s own life as an ultimate end, one might also wonder what permits regarding the value of scientific rationality as a basic virtue. How do we know that the value of rationality isn’t just a “Western prejudice,” a purely emotional preference derived from Enlightenment culture? When suicide terrorists say they love death more than life because their faith compels them to, how can we dispute their preference for avowed irrationality? This parallel skeptical worry is addressed in the same way.

Importantly, the commitment to know the truth is not a preference but a choice. It’s the choice to ask questions and pursue the truth, vs. refusing to ask questions out of fear of the truth. Seen this way, it’s not a choice between two coequal alternatives, like chocolate and vanilla. It’s a fundamental choice to engage one’s reason or to subvert it. It’s only once we engage reason that we can make deliberative choices between alternatives and reveal or begin to habituate our preferences.

Just as life is not a co-equal alternative to death, so choosing to engage one’s mind to grasp the facts is not a co-equal alternative to closing one’s mind through blind faith. The ultimate value of life is not an arbitrary end but the precondition for the possibility of values as such, and rationality is not the product of an arbitrary preference but the precondition of evaluating anything else as arbitrary.⁵⁵ These points are parallel because for Rand, embracing reason comes to the same thing as embracing life, since in fact rationality just is the distinctively human way of life.

The close linkage of accepting rationality and accepting the ultimate value of one’s life is another sign that there is no special skepticism about objective morality that isn’t just skepticism about the possibility of rational knowledge as such. As I’ve argued throughout, to accept the scientific world view is already to accept a set of values. Formulating an objective morality is simply working out the implications of this set of values for practical action in the world.

By the same token, anyone serious about rejecting religious faith in the name of rationality should also reject every implication of religious morality, including any of the content of its moral code that’s been unwittingly inherited by secular ethics.

Rand’s radical rejection of all religious morality

Because Rand saw rationality as the basic virtue, indeed because she thought human life required embracing reason as an “absolute,” she was radically opposed to religious morality. She rejected all faith-based morality, including any attempt to secularize faith-based morality via appeals to intuition or convention.

Rand saw faith not just as a failure to exercise rationality, but as a negation of the moral virtue of rationality and hence as anathema to morality. In reality, she saw faith as “fear of independence,” a vicious choice to submit one’s mind to the authority of others, as Abraham is supposed to have done before almost killing his only son.⁵⁶

As a minor character in Atlas Shrugged puts it, morality is “judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.”⁵⁷ Religious believers who accept their moral dogmas on faith, fearing disapproval by authorities or God himself, know no such dedication. A moral code based on fear of disvalue is the opposite of one based on love for values.

What’s more, if morality is fundamentally based on the needs of human life, there is a demonstrable incoherence in the religious view that the will of God is the font of moral authority. To illustrate her point that it’s onlyliving things that can pursue goals, Rand offers the following thought experiment:

[T]ry to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; it could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals.⁵⁸

Everything she says about the hypothetical robot applies in spades to a hypothetical God. In the religious fantasy, God too is immortal, immutable, and indestructible. But then he too can have nothing that makes a difference to him for better or worse. Thus, it makes no sense to attribute to him the will or plan to achieve any higher purposes, in accord with which human actions can be judged as good or bad, right or wrong.

As with utilitarianism, religious morality gains its plausibility to the extent that it mimics a life-based morality. If we were to imagine God as a living being, we could imagine that some events could serve or thwart his purposes.⁵⁹ If we thought of ourselves as like his children we might think of his moral guidance as like the wisdom of a more experienced human being about living life. Religious morality cashes in on these confusions by drawing from the roots of morality in the needs of individual life and then tearing up those roots by transferring its ultimate goal to an imaginary immortal higher being.

In light of this and other parallels between the method of religious and utilitarian morality (note also the connection between faith and the method of intuition), it’s natural that they also share similarities in the content of their moral code. While utilitarians talk about the basic value of happiness, they also argue that morality sometimes demands that an individual sacrifice his happiness to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number.⁶⁰ So the utilitarian “consequentialists” share with their Kantian “deontologist” rivals the idea that morality concerns impersonal, impartial, or agent-neutral value. The influence of both of these theories is the reason secular ethics today is dominated by one version or other of altruism, the idea that morality is essentially other-regarding or “unselfish.”

Given how Rand understands value per se as a relationship between actions and successful living, she rejects the idea that morality is concerned with impartial or agent-neutral value. She embraces the connection between value and interests, in particular self-interest, and rejects the equation of morality with altruism. And she must, because the very basis of value is the requirements of a living thing’s struggle for its own existence. This is why she is an avowed opponent of all versions of the morality of self-sacrifice, religious or secular.

Rand’s idea that there is a “virtue of selfishness” is obviously controversial and raises many questions (which have been answered at length in various books). Many stem from a confusion between her view and a Nietzschean predation view that we have already addressed.⁶¹

Rand portrays human social life as healthy and successful when it’s characterized by win-win mutual exchange to mutual benefit, not by win-loss exploitation. Just as she denies that one should sacrifice others out of irrational desire, she likewise denies that one should sacrifice oneself to others’ desires. This is part of the reason she adds a final virtue to her list, one seen by Christian morality as a mortal sin: pride.⁶² As she sees productiveness as the virtue concerned with the creation of material values, pride is the virtue concerned with creating psychological values like self-esteem, an effect of which, she claims, is

your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.⁶³

Conclusion

Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells us that she converted to Christianity in part because “atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?”

On several levels, she is correct. Atheism fails to answer that question because atheism is simply the lack of belief in God, and a simple absence of belief answers no question. It’s also true that many atheist thinkers have failed to take seriously people’s need for these answers and have simply failed to do serious work formulating a secular, rational ethics. To the extent that many have tried, they’ve often modeled their attempts on ideas they take from religious ethics and so fail to offer a true alternative.

But in light of the alternative I’ve now presented, Ali’s sweeping implication that no atheist thinker has offered serious answers to these big questions cannot be taken seriously.

Ayn Rand was born in a repressive, authoritarian society (Soviet Russia). She had the independence to flee from it and take refuge in the West (she came to America in 1926). She too was an atheist. But when Rand came to the West, she did not take the thinkers in her midst as offering a satisfactory alternative to the system she escaped. She was not content to pick one of the dominant moral or political philosophies of her day off the shelf, even though they were revered in the country that was her salvation. She took the best elements of the philosophy of the West (the Aristotelian worldview), but proceeded to try to answer the major questions of morality on her own.

As a radically independent thinker, Rand was willing to challenge the basic dogmas of religious morality that were embraced by religious and secular thinkers alike. Anyone who admires the independent pursuit of truth, anyone who does not need truth to be dictated to them by external authorities, should be willing to do the same.

Image credit: bjdlzx / E+ / via Getty Images

1. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “Why I am now a Christian,” Unherd.com, November 11, 2023.
2. Consider William Lane Craig: “[B]ecause of its coherence and internal consistency, the Nazi ethic could not be discredited from within. Only from a transcendent vantage point which stands above relativistic, socio-cultural mores could such a critique be launched. But in the absence of God, it is precisely such a vantage point that we lack. One Rabbi who was imprisoned at Auschwitz said that it was as though all the Ten Commandments had been reversed: thou shalt kill, thou shalt lie, thou shalt steal. Mankind has never seen such a hell. And yet, in a real sense, if naturalism is true, our world is Auschwitz. There is no good and evil, no right and wrong. Objective moral values do not exist” (“Can We Be Good Without God?”, ReasonableFaith.org).
3. Richard Dawkins, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide (New York: Random House, 2019), 95–96.
4. Ibid., 99.
5. Ibid, 101–2.
6. In other parts of the Old Testament, the Judeo-Christian God commands his followers go through with his command to kill innocent, non-threatening people (see Deuteronomy 7 and 20, where God instructs the Israelites to kill all the Canaanites—men, women and children—for the “crime” of worshipping false gods). Contemporary advocates of the divine command theory like William Lane Craig bite the bullet and say this killing really was justified. A morality dictated by the commands of a God is basically arbitrary, not based on objective standards.
7. This is not just an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Abraham story. Prominent philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas have affirmed that if God says killing Isaac is right, it must be (see Summa Theologica, I.II, Question 100, Article 8).
8. William Lane Craig again: “Consider, then, the hypothesis that God exists. First, if God exists, objective moral values exist. To say that there are objective moral values is to say that something is right or wrong independently of whether anybody believes it to be so. It is to say, for example, that Nazi anti-Semitism was morally wrong, even though the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust thought that it was good; and it would still be wrong even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them.
   On the theistic view, objective moral values are rooted in God. God’s own holy and perfectly good nature supplies the absolute standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. God’s moral nature is what Plato called the ‘Good.’ He is the locus and source of moral value. He is by nature loving, generous, just, faithful, kind, and so forth” (“Can We Be Good without God?”).
9. The subjective method of religious morality (discussed later in this section) is at work in its defenders’ very attempts to answer the arbitrariness objection. Apologists for religious morality say that because God is defined as a perfect being and is therefore perfectly good, his will is constrained by his nature from choosing nefarious commands. But why should we believe any of this and what does it even mean? For example, what is this perfect “goodness”? What does it mean for something to be good or bad for an immortal, indestructible being? He doesn’t need to pursue or achieve anything to remain in existence. Is perfect goodness what’s good for his creatures? Why then do so many of his commands demand them to sacrifice themselves for his ostensible glory? Is God good because he “loves” us? Love is a response to the virtuous character of a select few, as against the vicious. But God supposedly “loves” everyone equally, which empties “love” of any meaning. And what is God’s “will” if it is constrained, i.e. it cannot choose between good and evil? It’s unlike any human will we know through ordinary means. These concepts of “goodness,” “love,” “will” are products of mystical faith and have no relation to observable evidence. This arbitrary redefinition of terms, unconstrained by evidence but made to order to deliver the desired conclusions is always the pattern of theologians’ evasions of more general problems with the notion of “God.” (How could an all-powerful, all-good God create a universe filled with natural disasters that cause suffering? We can’t understand God’s mysterious ways, so this suffering must serve some higher, good purpose, and we must accept this on faith. Here “purpose” is used arbitrarily, in the same way that Old Testament conquerors, Christian inquisitors, and Islamic terrorists arbitrarily claimed that their acts of violence serve some purpose we cannot understand.) When theologians appeal to faith to arbitrarily redefine key concepts, they double down on dismissing the need for scientific objectivity.
10. As it happens, the philosopher’s notion of “objectivity” as the mind-independence of facts is a novel one in intellectual history. Philosophers originally used it to refer to a property of ideas, and before that scientists used it to evaluate the quality of scientific illustrations, a product of human minds. See my essay “The History of Objectivity in Light of Rand’s Epistemology and Ethics,” AynRandSociety.org, January 9, 2016, which concerns Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
11. I owe this imagery to Greg Salmieri.
12. See Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (New York: Atria, 2007).
13. These are formulations are based on Ayn Rand’s views of honesty, integrity, and justice. I elaborate on the foundations of her moral theory below.
14. Of course, there are other commonly accepted virtues, like chastity and humility, that don’t clearly relate to truth in this way. But there is no reason to fetishize the commonly accepted list of virtues. As we get clearer on a rational standard that unites the virtues, we may find that we need to discard some commonly accepted “virtues” as not actually virtuous.
15. David Hume, P.H. Nidditch, L.A. Selby-Bigge (eds.) A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 469 (III.I.1)
16. “Most directly” because this use does not try to explain beliefs about morality that may be true or false. Rather, it presupposes what is directly factually good or bad for the organisms, whether or not they have beliefs about what’s good. An evolutionary argument explains the origin of a trait by explaining why it would have survived to have the adaptive value it has now. The fact that it has this adaptive value is the observable fact to be explained, not the explanation of the fact. This is one reason why evolutionary arguments about ethics often fail to even address the questions people have about morality. Most people don’t want to know what explains why they believe something to be good or bad. They want to know just what is good or bad in the first place. Explaining the cause of a belief does not necessarily help one determine whether the belief is true or false. Indeed evolutionary arguments are often interpreted in a way that implies the belief they explain is thereby debunked. For instance if you only believe you should help your kin because you’re programmed to believe it by your evolutionary past, it tends to undermine the idea that you should help them because it’s true that doing so is good. See Richard Joyce, The Evolution of Morality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 179–84.
17. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), 9 (Dawkins’ emphasis).
18. See Ayn Rand, “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” in Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature (New York: Signet, 1971), 9; and “The Goal of My Writing” in The Romantic Manifesto, 155–59.
19. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Bobbs-Merril, 1943), 710–11.
20. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957), 1018. For an overview of her intellectual development here, see Darryl Wright, “Ayn Rand’s Ethics: From The Fountainhead to Atlas Shrugged,” in Robert Mayhew (ed.), Essays on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 253–74.
21. For more on the code of virtues articulated by Rand, see Tara Smith, Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
22. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1017.
23. For more on the structure of Rand’s explanatory argument in “The Objectivist Ethics,” see Mike Mazza “How Ayn Rand Argues for Egoism,” forthcoming in New Ideal. For answers to common misinterpretations of Rand’s argument, see also Mike Mazza, “Why Can’t Professional Philosophers Get Rand Right?,” New Ideal, February 21, 2024.
24. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, 1964), 13–14.
25. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 17.
26. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 991.
27. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 994.
28. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 18.
29. Reproduction is characteristic of life as well, but it’s not the essential: there can be living things that don’t reproduce, and what’s reproduced when they do is an entity capable of sustaining itself. For more on why reproduction is not the defining characteristic of life, see Sherman, Neither Ghost Nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017) 34–35, 71–72, 135–136. Arguably reproduction itself is just a limiting case of a living thing’s sustenance of itself. To sustain oneself already involves a constant recycling of biological material. A multicellular organism that sustains itself does so by reproducing its constituent cells. The most primitive multicellular organisms are themselves ambiguous between organisms and colonies of separate individual unicellular organisms, and surely evolved from such colonies.
30. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 18.
31. Ibid., 22–24.
32. Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (New York: Viking, 2018), 16–17; see also 18–19, 344, 414–15. Later Pinker even touches on the issue made explicit by Sherman, the goal-directedness of living action, which he regards as having the appearance of teleology (21). Sherman realizes it’s not merely apparent, but that not all teleology need involve conscious purposes.
33. Jeremy Sherman, Neither Ghost Nor Machine, 64; 66.
34. Sherman, Neither Ghost Nor Machine, 256–262. Sherman, unfortunately, thinks we have to understand morality itself as relating to how “self-regeneration can become subordinated to other aims, as when humans willingly sacrifice their lives, and therefore their self-regenerative aims” because “we care about some other selves’ values and aims, real or imagined.” This point emerges entirely unmotivated from the rest of his theory. For more on what’s wrong with it, see the penultimate section of this essay (“Rand’s radical rejection of all religious morality”).
35. See Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), Michael Thompson, Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), and Aristotle, Terence Irwin (transl.), Nicomachean Ethics (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2019).
36. Consider how Foot tries to answer the question of what distinguishes the teleological from the non-teleological, e.g. the rustling of leaves in the wind from the way flowers open when the sun comes out. The first, she says, plays no part in the life of the living thing while the second does. What is “playing a part”?:
    [I]n plants and non-human animals these things all have to do, directly or indirectly, with self-maintenance, as by defence and the obtaining of nourishment, or with the reproduction of the individual, as by the building of nests. . . . What ‘plays a part’ in this life is that which is causally and teleologically related to it, as putting out roots is related to obtaining nourishment, and attracting insects is related to reproduction in plants. (Foot, Natural Goodness, 31)

    The placement of self-maintenance and reproduction on equal footing here is telling. Reproduction of a kind of thing is not characteristic of life as such: crystalline forms reproduce chemically but are in no sense alive. Reproduction is characteristic of life only insofar as it involves the reproduction of more life, which means we need to understand what life is before we can understand its reproduction. We could identify the very first living thing even if it had not been reproduced from another as long as it was engaged in self-maintenance: acting in a way to preserve its ability to preserve itself against the degradation otherwise necessitated by entropy. Foot and Thompson simply neglect the role of the struggle for existence that could identify even the first living thing that was not reproduced from another.

37. Rand celebrated the “biocentric” foundation of Aristotle’s ethics, the “enormously ‘pro-life’ attitude that dominates his thinking.” (See Ayn Rand, “Review of Randall’s Aristotle,” in Ayn Rand, The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (New York: Meridian, 1990), 6–12. But she lamented that he never developed a fully scientific approach to the content of his ethics: “he based his ethical system on observations of what 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” (Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 14). Notably Rand herself begins her work as an ethicist but observing virtuous individuals, but moves on to answer the next question Aristotle did not answer.
38. I owe this point to Onkar Ghate. Rand claimed she herself was not a student of Darwin’s theory. The point is that her outlook about biology reflects the overall spirit of thinking associated with the post-Darwinian age. For more on how Rand’s theory is situated in a wider understanding of biological teleology founded on a Darwinian basis, see Harry Binswanger, The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts (ARU Press, 2025), and Harry Binswanger, “Life-Based Teleology and the Foundations of Ethics,” The Monist, 75 (1) (January 1992), 84–103, reprinted in Harry Binswanger, Ayn Rand’s Philosophic Achievement: And Other Essays by Harry Binswanger (ARU Press, 2025), 57–81.
39. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 19.
40. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 23.
41. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 28–29; Atlas Shrugged, 120.
42. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 25–26.
43. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 34.
44. See Aristotle, Carnes Lord (transl.), Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 43-44 (1255b15-40): “The science characteristic of mastery is expertise in using slaves, since the master is what he is not in the acquiring of slaves but in the use of them. This science has nothing great or dignified about it: the master must know how to command the things that the slave must know how to do. Hence for those to whom it is open not to be bothered with such things an overseer assumes this prerogative, while they themselves engage in politics or philosophy.”
45. For more on this contrast, see Gregory Salmieri, “‘Man’s Life’ as the Standard of Value in the Ethics of Aristotle and Ayn Rand,” in James G. Lennox and Gregory Salmieri (eds.), Two Philosophers: Aristotle and Ayn Rand (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), 111–47.
46. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Kauffman (transl.), Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 10–12 (I.2, 4), 45–46 (II.34). For the contrast between Rand and Nietzsche, see Lester Hunt, “Ayn Rand’s Evolving View of Friedrich Nietzsche,” in Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri (eds.), A Companion to Ayn Rand (Cambridge, UK: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 343–50.
47. Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 344–345.
48. See Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now 20–21, 26–27, and Kevin Mitchell, Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2023), 166–69, 252–55.
49. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 36–37.
50. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 28; Atlas Shrugged, 1019.
51. See Ayn Rand, “Causality versus Duty,” in Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet, 1984), 128–36.
52. For more on this point, see Darryl Wright, “Reasoning about Ends: Life as a Value in Ayn Rand’s Ethics,” in Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox (eds.), Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand’s Normative Theory, Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies, Vol. I (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 3–32. It’s also true that in delimited contexts we can describe someone as e.g. a “good killer,” as we might say about an effective assassin. But this makes sense only in a highly delimited context that holds fixed the assumption of other life-based values: he’s able to kill quickly, without using much energy; he’s able to do so without being killed or captured himself. It’s also possible to make these evaluations while bracketing the purpose of the assassin’s killing only if we assume the assassin really wants to live. If it turns out that the assassin’s purposes are themselves anti-life, that he wants to destroy good people and a good civilization, our assessment that he’s a “good killer” is only in the context of bracketing his overall anti-life stance. Put it this way, if we the evaluators didn’t ourselves hold pro-life goals and imagine killing in that context, to speak of a “good killer” would be incoherent. This is all based on the assumption that in the end, the reasons to regard one’s own life as good also generally give one reasons to respect the lives of others, something to be fleshed out in the next section.
53. For more on her answer to this problem, see Darryl Wright, “Reasoning about Ends: Life as a Value in Ayn Rand’s Ethics,” in Allan Gotthelf and James G. Lennox (eds.), Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand’s Normative Theory (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), 3–32.
54. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 18.
55. See Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Meridian, 1993), 248.
56. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1044.
57. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 165.
58. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 16.
59. I owe this point to Onkar Ghate.
60. See John Stuart Mill: “The utilitarian morality does recognize in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others. . . .[T]he happiness which forms the utilitarian standard of what is right in conduct is not the agent’s own happiness but that of all concerned. As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility” Utilitarianism (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2001), 16–17.
61. See especially Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness), Tara Smith, Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics, Greg Salmieri, “Egoism and Altruism: Selfishness and Sacrifice,” in Gotthelf and Salmieri (eds.), A Companion to Ayn Rand, 130–56, and Don Watkins, Effective Egoism: An Individualist’s Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Independently published, 2024).
62. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 29–30; Atlas Shrugged, 1020.
63. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1020.