Objectivism

critique and heresy

I had an enjoyable online debate Monday with Michael Liebowitz, an Objectivist — actually two debates, one on my critique of Objectivism and one on my defense of propertarian anarchy. I began the first by arguing that Ayn Rand’s claim to have overcome Hume’s is/ought problem, to have deduced from the facts of reality how one ought to act, contained multiple logical errors. Interested readers can listen to the argument in the first seven minutes of the debate or read the more detailed written version in Chapter 59 of The Machinery of Freedom.¹

The final step of Rand’s argument goes from the claim that an individual should act in his rational self-interest (my terminology not hers) to the conclusion that he should never violate anyone else’s rights:

The basic political principle of the Objectivist Ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. (John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged)

Her argument:

Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal and can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a value if obtained by fraud--that an attempt to gain a value by deceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to a position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their blindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions, while their intelligence, their rationality, become the enemies you have to dread and flee ... . (John Galt’s speech)

According to Rand, values are things you act to get and keep; in that sense cash obtained by fraud is obviously a value for some people. If we interpret "value" in this passage as meaning "value for your life," hence "value of the sort Rand is arguing you should seek," it is still puzzling. Money obtained by fraud will pay for just as much food or medical service as money obtained honestly.

The rest of the quoted passage is a highly colored exposition of a true point. that if you defraud people you have to worry about being detected. The problem is that Rand is drawing an absolute conclusion that her argument does not justify. Different opportunities to defraud people have different risks of detection, victims vary in their ability to retaliate against fraud if they detect it. The implication of the argument is not that one should always be honest but that one should be prudent in one's dishonesty — not the conclusion Rand wants.

"To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgement, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death ... .

To force a man to drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute, with a gun ... is to attempt to exist in defiance of reality."

Using force against someone reduces his ability to use his reason to preserve his life. Reality implies that the victim is less likely to have a long and healthy life. But the coercer is not trying to defy that reality. His objective is not his victim's life but his own.

Rational self-interest, at least in a reasonably functional society, implies that you should usually respect other people’s rights. It does not imply that you should always do so. It implies that you should be a prudent predator, only violate other people’s rights on those occasions, perhaps rare, when it is in your interest to do so. It might be a better world if it were never in anyone’s interest to violate anyone else’s rights but that is not the world we live in. That it would be good for something to be true does not make it true. Wishful thinking is not an argument.

The second half of my critique of Objectivism started where the first half ended, with non-initiation of force, the basic political principle of Objectivist Ethics. I argued that that principle was inconsistent with the Objectivist support for limited government. An Objectivist government, as Rand imagined it, provides some services, such as national defense, which cannot be funded on the usual market basis that an individual who does not pay for it does not get it. How are such activities to be paid for? Collecting taxes would be an initiation of force and so, as Rand recognized, inconsistent with Objectivist ethics.

One solution she proposed was to charge for the service of enforcing contracts. Pay to register your contract with the court system and the government will enforce it and use the profits on that to fund national defense. Using force against someone who refuses to pay back a loan or to deliver the goods he has been paid for is retaliatory force, not initiation of force, so permitted by Objectivist ethics.

The problem with this is not ethical but economic. In a competitive market, services sell for about what they cost to produce since if a producer tries to charge more a competitor can undercut him. Hence, if other actors are free to provide the service of retaliatory force in competition with the government, it will have no surplus revenue with which to fund government activities such as defense. In order for Rand’s proposal to work, the government must have a monopoly of retaliatory force, must forcibly shut down any competitors in order to be able to collect a monopoly profit with which to fund its other activities.

This brings us back to a moral problem. Enforcing contracts either is or is not an initiation of force. If it is, an Objectivist government cannot do it. If it is not, other people can do it. If other people enforcing contracts is not an initiation of force then preventing them from doing so is. Hence an Objectivist government cannot fund itself, at least in the way Rand proposed, without initiating force in violation of Objectivist ethics. The same problem would hold for other ways of using revenue from services it can sell to fund services it cannot.

It follows, unless someone can propose an alternative way of funding the government that does not violate rights, that an Objectivist must be an anarchist. That is an argument first proposed, I believe, by Roy Childs in a letter to Rand.² I have been making it for many years and have not yet been offered a rebuttal that I found adequate.

When I was preparing for the debate it occurred to me that the conclusion of the first part of my critique of Objectivist could answer the second part, provide a solution to the problem of funding a limited government, although a heretical one from the standpoint of Objectivist orthodoxy.

Suppose you accept my prudent predator argument, agree that although respecting other people’s rights is a useful rule it is not an absolutely binding one, that it is proper to violate other people’s rights when doing so is in your rational long-run interest. Further suppose you believe, as Michael Liebowitz, my debate opponent, argued in the second part of our debate, that the market anarchy I was proposing does not work, that the best workable system for protecting rights and allowing humans to thrive is a limited government. You can then justify the rights violations necessary for such a government to work as prudent predation, violations of rights, initiations of force, that it is in your rational self-interest to permit and support.

This is not that far from my own, non-Objectivist, position. I do not base my ethical views on rational self-interest, would disapprove of some forms of prudent predation. But I do believe that violations of rights may be justified if the benefit in other values is sufficiently large relative to the cost in rights violation, that respecting rights is valuable but not infinitely valuable.³

While I believe that a stateless society would be superior to even a limited government I also believe that such a society would not be stable in all environments, have written at some length about circumstances in which it would break down. Under circumstances in which anarchy is not an option I would probably regard a limited government along classical liberal lines, providing police, courts and national defense and funding them by taxation, as the least bad alternative available. It involves some violation of rights, but the alternatives are worse.

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1. For the closest I come to my own solution of the problem see Chapter 61 of Machinery or, for a longer and more professional version, Ethical Intuitionism by libertarian philosopher Michael Huemer.

2. Rand’s response to receiving the letter was to cancel Roy’s subscription to her magazine.

3. I explore some of this in Chapter 41 of The Machinery of Freedom.