Ayn Rand – Maverick Philosopher

Levi Asher Writes Book on Ayn Rand

Levi Asher of Literary Kicks e-mails:

Your blog is just about my favorite philosophy blog on the web — not because I often agree with your political opinions (I don't) but because you write with clarity, humor and just the right amount of personal touch. Salut! I also write about philosophy on my blog Literary Kicks, and you may remember a cross-blog interchange between Litkicks and the Maverick Philosopher over the meaning of Buddhism late last year.

I'm writing you now to ask if I could send you a PDF or Kindle copy of my new book Why Ayn Rand Is Wrong (and Why It Matters), which is currently #21 on the Amazon Politics/Ideologies Kindle bestsellers list. This book offers an unusual and original approach to Ayn Rand's ethical philosophy, and aims to present an alternative conception of practical ethics that cherishes individual freedom while allowing a greater regard for the important place of the collective soul in all our lives. Since you haven't paid much attention to Ayn Rand on your blog, I gather that she is not very present on your philosophical radar, but I hope you'll consider spending a few minutes checking out my short book regardless, because I think this book has wider value as an original approach to popular ethical philosophy.

Here is a brief explanation of why I wrote it. Thanks for your time, and please let me know if I can send a PDF or Kindle version of "Why Ayn Rand is Wrong" for your consideration and/or review. Have a great day!

Thanks for the kind words, Levi, and do send me the PDF file. Actually, there has been a fair amount of discussion of Ayn Rand on this blog. It is collected in the Ayn Rand category. In early 2009 there was a heated debate here about Rand. The posts with open comboxes drew over 200 comments. There were numerous other comments that I deleted. Rand attracts adolescents of all ages and they tend to be uncivilized. I was doing a lot of deleting and blocking in early aught-nine.

But I agree with you: Rand's ideas ought to be discussed, not dismissed.

Ayn Rand on Abortion

The following quotations from Rand can be found here, together with references.

An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).

Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?

If Ayn Rand weren't so popular among adolescents of all ages, if she were an unknown as opposed to a well-known hack, I wouldn't be wasting time refuting this nonsense. But she is very influential, so it is worthwhile exposing her incoherence. If you complain that my tone is harsh and disrespectful, my reply will be that it is no more harsh and disrespectful than hers is: read the quotations on the page to which I have linked. He who is strident and polemical will receive stridency and polemic in return. You reap what you sow.

In the first paragraph above Rand equates the unborn with the not-yet living. This implies that a third trimester fetus is not living. What is it then? Dead? Or is it perhaps neither living nor dead like an inanimate artifact? Obviously, a human fetus is a living biologically human individual. Obviously, one cannot arbitrarily exclude the pre-natal from the class of the living — unless one is a hack or an ideologue.

Let me expand on this just a bit. One cannot answer philosophical questions by terminological fiat, by arbitrarily rigging your terminology in such a way that the answer you want falls out of the rigging. Would that Rand and her followers understood this. My post Peikoff on the Supernatural carefully exposes another egregious example of the shabby trick of answering philosophical questions by terminological fiat.

Now consider the enthymematic argument of the first two sentences of the first paragraph above. Made explicit, it goes like this. (1) Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. (2) An embryo is a potential being. Therefore, (3) An embryo has no rights.

A being is anything that is or exists. So if x is a merely potential being, then of course it cannot have any rights. A merely potential being is either nothing or next-to-nothing. But a human embryo is not a merely potential being; it is an actual human (not canine, not lupine, not bovine, . . .) embryo. Indeed it is an actual biologically human member of the species homo sapiens. That is a plain fact of biology. So the second premise is spectacularly false.

If Rand were to say something intelligent, she would have to argue like this:

(1*) Rights do not pertain to potential persons, only to actual persons. (2*) An embryo is a potential person. Therefore, (3) An embyo has no rights. Unlike Rand's argument, this argument is worth discussing. But it is not the argument Rand gives. I have countered it elsewhere. See Abortion category.

The second paragraph quoted above is as sophomoric as the first — if that's not an insult to sophomores. It is a clumsy gesture in the direction of what is often called the Woman's Body Argument. Follow the link for the refutation.