“The Ethics of Emergencies” Now Available Online

Certain topics loom large in university ethics courses. From whether it is moral to divert a trolley from killing five men to killing one, to what we should do about famine abroad, there is a striking fixation on what Ayn Rand calls “emergency situations.”

“The Ethics of Emergencies,” originally published in The Virtue of Selfishness in 1964, challenges this focus and explains its philosophical and psychological roots. It has been published online by ARI for the first time.

The purpose of morality, Rand explains, is to guide a person in achieving his own values, not to adjudicate disaster after disaster. Her concern is with the choices that fill most of life, where moral guidance is most needed and acting long range is possible.

Rand shows how altruism corrupts our thinking about how to help others, leading to an obsession with helping strangers in emergency situations. Relationships with others can be a source of rational, selfish value, and fighting for others who matter to you selfishly is not a sacrifice, but an act of upholding your values. Because altruism forbids us from considering how others matter to us, it is incompatible with friendship, affection, and love. Nevertheless, Rand has an answer to how we should act in emergency situations, such as described in the Trolley Problem, and it is not one you will hear in philosophy courses. To learn Rand’s answer, read “The Ethics of Emergencies” here.

The psychological results of altruism may be observed in the fact that a great many people approach the subject of ethics by asking such questions as: “Should one risk one’s life to help a man who is: (a) drowning, (b) trapped in a fire, (c) stepping in front of a speeding truck, (d) hanging by his fingernails over an abyss?

Consider the implications of that approach. If a man accepts the ethics of altruism, he suffers the following consequences (in proportion to the degree of his acceptance):

1. Lack of self-esteem — since his first concern in the realm of values is not how to live his life, but how to sacrifice it.
2. Lack of respect for others — since he regards mankind as a herd of doomed beggars crying for someone’s help.
3. A nightmare view of existence — since he believes that men are trapped in a “malevolent universe” where disasters are the constant and primary concern of their lives.
4. And, in fact, a lethargic indifference to ethics, a hopelessly cynical amorality — since his questions involve situations which he is not likely ever to encounter, which bear no relation to the actual problems of his own life and thus leave him to live without any moral principles whatever.

Read the the full essay here.