Ayn Rand Misunderstood: The Real Connection between Morality and Rights

Ayn Rand’s Philosophy Decoded: Replies to Recent Criticisms of the Objectivist Ethics

Part 5: Subordinating Whom to What? Revisiting the Connection Between Morality and Rights[1]

In a recent essay on ethical naturalism, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl (hereinafter R&D or D&R, as applicable) discuss a controversial paragraph by Ayn Rand in her essay “Man’s Rights” (1963):

“Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. (108)

R&D say (2023) that this paragraph “lacks conceptual clarity” and that Rand engages in “easy elisions between morality, rights, and law” (39, 40). They ask a number of pointed questions about the connection Rand asserts there to be between morality and rights. The pivotal ones for this discussion, however, are these:

Is it society that needs subordinating or certain types of individuals? In the Randian world of only individual moralities, what can “society” mean as a thing to be subordinated? Finally, what started out at the beginning of the passage as a “moral concept” ends up being a “moral law.” Somehow those seem to be rather different concepts. (40)

In reply to these questions (and others not quoted here), I will explain each portion of Rand’s paragraph, beginning with the final, italicized portion first—“individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law”—which is really the linchpin to understanding the other points that precede it. By this process, we will see that Rand’s supposed “easy elisions between morality, rights, and law” are actually the strands of an argument more tightly connected, and more subtle and insightful, than perhaps might appear.

1. Rights as a moral concept is the mechanism for placing all individuals under the one and only moral law that may rightly serve as the foundation for the legal code of a free society. But what is that moral law?

The answer is implied by Rand’s statement (1961) that “A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality” (25). Note that the converse is also true and provides a definition not just of the Objectivist ethics, but of ethics or morality in general: a code of morality is a code of values accepted by choice. In other words, it is an essential feature of any doctrine that counts as a morality that your actions are moral only if they are taken by your own self-directed, autonomous choice, and not under duress. (As Rand famously stated (1965), “Morality ends where a gun begins” (266).)

Because this is not just a principle of the Objectivist ethics, but a universal principle of moral human action, a moral law, the socio-political implication is obvious: the only way that everyone in a society can be reasonably assured of being able to act freely—i.e., to act in accordance with this principle, this moral law—is for that rightful equal freedom, for individual rights, to be defined by a legal code and defended by a political institution (government).

We often hear it said that “no one is above the law.” Actually, it’s more precise to say, “everyone is under the law”—i.e., rightly governed by the law—and specifically, the law is the moral law that is essential to their individual moral code and that in addition defines their rights. It is in this sense that society as a whole—which (to answer R&D) is just all of those myriad, diverse people with their myriad, vastly diverse choices and desires—is subordinated to moral law.

It is a universal moral law, one that transcends the vast multitude of substantive differences between all the diverse moral codes that might be held by individuals in a society.

Granted, this is not some particular substantive moral law, one moral law among many others belonging to one or more specific moral codes. Instead, it is a universal moral law, one that transcends the vast multitude of substantive differences between all the diverse moral codes that might be held by individuals in a society. On this reading, Rand’s view of the foundation for a proper political system of negative rights is essentially the same as that of R&D’s, that of the need to protect everyone’s moral agency.

This also resolves the puzzlement of R&D in their earlier-quoted comment: “Finally, what started out at the beginning of the passage as a ‘moral concept’ ends up being a ‘moral law.’ Somehow those seem to be rather different concepts.” Indeed, they are different concepts, and the moral concept of rights did not, through some Randian verbal legerdemain, become the moral law that rights subordinated society to! That would have been circular: the concept of rights being the means of subordinating society to the concept of rights now relabeled as a moral law.

Thus, R&D are right to question the meaning of the verbiage that has led some Objectivists into just such a circular interpretation. Onkar Ghate, for instance, commits this very error when he says (2019) that “Rand . . . thinks that the . . . principle of individual rights . . . is explicitly formulated to subordinate society and government to moral principle” (211, emphasis in original).

Again, individual rights is the moral principle that was formulated in order to subordinate society, as the means of subordinating society, to moral law, That moral law we have already explained as being a deeper moral principle, prior to and foundational to individual rights, and to which society is subordinated is not rights, but the principle that your actions are moral only if they are taken by your own self-directed, autonomous choice, and not under duress. This is the moral law that society is subordinated to by means of rights.

In the same volume as Ghate’s ill-fated attempt to explicate Rand’s “subordinating” sentence, Fred D. Miller and Adam Mossoff argue (2019) that its “full meaning” is that

The concept of individual rights is not derived from the principle prohibiting the initiation of force but, rather, is derived from the same facts and moral concepts from which the principle of the evil of the initiation of force is derived in her ethical theory—the nature of man as a rational animal, the concept of value, the conditional nature of moral propositions. (125)

None of this, however, is necessary. All that is required to elucidate and justify Rand’s “subordination” statement is the concept of “morality” that I defined above (following Rand) as “a code of values accepted by choice.” Initiation of force is not just morally evil, which it certainly is, but more basically is anti-moral, contradictory to morality per se. Therefore, whether or not one’s morality recognizes initiation of force as immoral (morally evil), one logically undercuts its status as a morality if one tries to impose it on others.[2] (“Morality ends where a gun begins.”)

2. We can now see how “rights” is “the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context.” Rights preserve and protect all individual moralities in a social context.

What all these diverse moralities have in common is the need for their practitioners to be able to act in a self-directed way toward their interests, values, and goals. This means that they need to be free from the forcible or fraudulent actions of others that interfere with such autonomous, self-directed actions.

Again, everyone, regardless of their morality, needs to be accorded this freedom by others and needs to accord this freedom to others. If someone violates your self-directed action, your actions taken under compulsion are not moral actions—and if you violate someone else’s self-directed action, your actions of compulsion are not moral actions either. (Viewed in this light, “Morality ends where a gun begins” is a 360-degree principle.)

The concept of “rights” does not guarantee that any given action will be ethical.

Thus, even though the concept of “rights” does not guarantee that any given action will be ethical (which is impossible to guarantee), since one’s choices and actions may or may not adhere to one’s chosen code of values, “rights” nonetheless preserves the possibility of ethical action. Furthermore, as just indicated, it does so from both perspectives: that of the rights-bearer and that of the rights-respecter.

We can further see that, contrary to R&D’s speculation (2023), Rand is not suggesting that “[s]omething (a right) apparently can have some ethical standing without being specifically directed toward some good” (41). Rights have universal ethical standing, as does their ethical basis which is the universal structural moral principle that (to repeat): your actions are moral only if they are taken by your own self-directed, autonomous choice, and not under duress.

Moreover, the good toward which rights are directed is similarly universal: protecting each person’s freedom to engage in self-directed, voluntary action. In order to live the life proper to a rational being in a social context, one must be free to act freely by one’s own choices and not under the compulsion of others; and further: in order to act by any moral code whatever, which is by definition a chosen set of values, one cannot act in a way that violates anyone else’s free choices and actions.

This requires that we embrace and actualize the principle and ideal of a society that legislates only structural moral law—universal human autonomy (individual rights).

This requires that we embrace and actualize the principle and ideal of a society that legislates only structural moral law—universal human autonomy (individual rights). It also entails the practical corollary of rights, namely, the procedural laws and the criminal and civil codes which are necessary in order to implement those rights.

This further means that the purpose of statecraft is not for the state (i.e., those running it) to craft our individual souls by legislating some code of morality or other, but to clear the playing field so that each of us individuals can craft our own souls as we see fit without interference from others—which means: to keep us from getting in each other’s way, so that we can each act morally or not, as we choose. The way this must be done, and the only way it can be done, is to set up a political-legal structure that “legislates” only the one and only moral law that applies across the board to all moralities, namely, an absolute prohibition of forcible and fraudulent actions that interfere with anyone’s autonomous, self-directed actions.[3]

Thus, if a government tries to go beyond the necessary condition for moral action (protection of self-directed action) and impose a purportedly sufficient condition—trying to make people be good, as it were—it abrogates their autonomy and the very foundation for their being moral. This is the fundamental limitation on government for both Rand and R&D, and presumably it is why D&R subtitled the second book of their trilogy “A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics.” The ideal government does not engage in perfectionist politics—i.e., in the presumptuous project of attempting to perfect individuals and craft their souls. Instead, a good government protects people’s freedom to act as they will in perfecting themselves (or not) and crafting their own souls as they see fit.

3. This brings up a seeming loose end in Rand’s ethics, as expressed in R&D’s doubt (2023) that Rand has fully explained “why one would have the right to do wrong” (41–42).

It may seem that the answer is simply conceptual or definitional: if you only have the “right” to do what is morally right according to what someone in authority approves as morally right, then you have not an actual right, but only a permission, which you have not on principle, but only at the pleasure of the ruler. This is often offered as the basis for the proper limitation on government by a system founded on individual rights. If you are not permitted to do what is immoral by some standard (so long as it’s not an initiation of force against another person), then your being allowed to do what is (supposedly) moral is not by right, but only by permission. Nevertheless, I think we can go deeper than this.

First of all, as is commonly said, we need to be willing to allow ourselves to make mistakes in order to learn what works and doesn’t work, to learn and grow. This requires that we have unbroken contact with reality, so that the feedback information from one action helps us to correct our mistakes so that our next action is more successful. This is true—and similarly, we need to be allowed to be wrong so that we can learn what is right (if we don’t know already) and do that instead the next time around. This, too, requires that nothing interferes forcibly with our contact with reality, so that we can receive the information we need from the aftermath of one action and apply that information in making the appropriate adjustment going forward. This may take a number of attempts before we succeed, but hopefully it won’t be as many as it took Thomas Edison to invent the electric light bulb!

Now, of course we must acknowledge that “doing wrong” in this context does not include doing things that violate other people’s rights. But neither, for instance, does one’s right to use one’s body (as in “my body, my choice.”) If my face is in the way, you cannot hit it with your fist any more than you can do so with your hammer—except in self-defense, of course. As the old saying goes, “my rights end where your rights begin,” and vice versa. So, you do not have an unlimited right to use your body any and every way you want—but only in ways that do not initiate force against others.

Miller and Mossoff (2019), however, take this out of context and accuse people using this phrase as engaging in the fallacy of the “package deal” or worse: trying to obliterate a legitimate concept by using an unnecessary, irrational term which Rand calls an “anti-concept.” The legitimate concept, they claim, is “the right to disagree,” which they say everyone has “as long as neither person initiates force against the other as a result of this disagreement” (138).

Thus, in attempting to refute “the right to do wrong” by dropping the context of its meaning, Miller and Mossoff impose the same context in attempting to validate “the right to disagree.” Against this double standard of argumentation, I would maintain that if context is consistently kept, the two versions amount to the same principle: you can say or do whatever you want, so long as you don’t initiate force against (or defame or defraud) another person.

Secondly, Rand would completely agree with R&D when they say (2023) that “the very purpose of rights has nothing to do with rational conduct” (42), that it instead derives from the fundamental social requirement of individualism. From a quite early date (at least 1947), Rand was adamant that “the essence of Individualism is that nobody, neither you nor I nor Marx, can tell a man what he must live for, nor subordinate his rights to a goal set by us. Individualism is not for ANY purpose, not ‘to promote’ anything, not anything whatever, right or wrong or indifferent” (Berliner 1995, 365; all emphases except final in original).

Requiring any additional moral tenets to be imposed on the political system would violate both individual rights and the “each an end-in-himself” principle on which they necessarily rest.

It is clear from this that she regarded morality as outside the legitimate purview of the state. She said: “as long as men merely agree that no man or number of men have the right to initiate the use of force against any human being (and that includes the forcible seizure of his property), that they have no such right for any purpose whatsoever, at any time whatsoever…that would include all the moral code we need” (366, emphases added). By this, of course, Rand means that an agreement that it is morally evil to initiate force against others is the only shared moral principle needed to undergird a free society—and standing under this principle is the axiom that no one can logically maintain any substantive moral code that they also presume to forcibly impose on others.

Now, Rand’s “all the moral code we need” applies, in this context, to the shared moral tenet of non-initiation of force as the bedrock of a free society. It is not meant to imply that a free society could exist with a population of amoralists, instead of the vast multitude of people holding the various non-shared moral codes that they invariably do. So, while Chris Matthew Sciabarra (2000) is correct to criticize Murray Rothbard for holding that “the concept of ‘nonaggression’ is all that is required of a libertarian society” (217), it is nonetheless true that this concept is all that is required of the political system in a libertarian society.

Indeed, requiring any additional moral tenets to be imposed on the political system would violate both individual rights and the “each an end-in-himself” principle on which they necessarily rest. The operative principle is a specific form of Rand’s “some/all” formula: the people in a free society must hold some specific morality(s), but they may hold any specific morality(s), which by definition must explicitly include, or at least be compatible with, the principle of moral agency, i.e., that each individual human being is a moral end-in-himself and not a means to the ends of others.

This is in stark contrast with those who bemoan the moral decay in our country, and in the Western world in general, and who argue that only a national “awakening” and return to fundamentalist Christianity—or a society-wide conversion to Rand’s ethics, for that matter—will rescue the world from its decline into a global totalitarian state. To the contrary, there is room for all manner of moral creeds, religious and secular, in a humane, free society, so long as everyone realizes that their own creed, as any moral creed that is by definition embraced by free choice, cannot justify asking others to conform to it except voluntarily and through persuasion.[4]

4. Another apparent loose end, or gap, in Rand’s normative philosophy is that it seems to lack a precise and correct derivation of individual rights from her more basic principles.

The above-quoted paragraph from Rand’s “Man’s Rights” essay appears to lend support to the widespread notion that Rand derives her concept of “rights” and her political philosophy from her ethical egoism and to give credence to those critics who find flaws or weaknesses in that supposed derivation. Some questions about the backward connection from rights to egoism include:

“Rights” are a “moral concept”—but is it a concept exclusive to Rand’s egoism? “Rights” are the connecting link between morality and ethics on the one hand and law and politics on the other—but does it connect only the morality and ethics of egoism with a society’s legal and political system? “Rights” are “the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context”—but does it preserve and protect only Rand’s Objectivist morality of egoism?

No, to all of the above. Numerous statements have been made by Objectivists and their critics that Rand’s doctrine of individual rights is derived directly from her ethical egoism, but this is not true. This mistaken belief has been stated by, among others:

Leonard Peikoff (1991): “All rights rest on the ethics of egoism” (354).

Tibor Machan (1999): “Rand derives from her egoistic ethics a political theory in the tradition of Lockean natural rights . . . Rand believes that such rights derive from the ethics of rational egoism . . . ” (22, 23).

Edward Younkins (2021): “The principle of man’s rights, like every other Objectivist moral principle, is derived by way of ethical egoism” (162).

An interesting partial example of this error is Eric Mack. Early on (1981), he was arguing for a form of “ethical egoism” or “eudaemonistic egoism” that “provides the basis for natural human rights” (286) and that “underlies natural rights and obligations” (291). Shortly later (1984), however, Mack had developed a powerful new perspective, instead seeing rights and egoism as deriving in parallel to one another by means of a “dual employment” (i.e., two distinct applications) of “the principle that each is an end-in-himself” (157, 161n28). This crucial point was curiously overlooked by Miller and Mossoff (2019) in their critique, as were Mack’s even more evolved versions of this idea in Mack 1998 and Mack 2004.

Contrary to this misunderstanding by so many commentators, Rand’s doctrine of individual rights is derived not from her ethical egoism, but instead from a principle that is prior to and foundational to both: a principle that she calls (1961) “the basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics,” namely, that “every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others” (30). Further evidence that Rand regarded the end-in-oneself principle as ethically prior to egoism is that she follows up the former with “—and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself” (30).

In other words, both of Rand’s doctrines, egoism and rights, are derived, in independent lines of argument, from the end-in-oneself principle. Her egoism and rights, like her egoism and anti-hedonism, are thus “sibling” doctrines, as it were—not one being “parent” to the other.

As I pointed out in Bissell 2020 and Bissell 2021, egoism is not the fundamental issue in Rand’s ethics. Instead, like her firm rejection of hedonism, egoism is a corollary of (or derivation from) her ethics of rational self-interest and thus flows from more basic ethical premises. What I will now add here is this: between rational self-interest and egoism, as a mediating premise, is Rand’s ethical individualism, the end-in-oneself principle, which is basic to and arises specifically in a social context, as just noted.

Furthermore—and this is the good news for value pluralists who worry about how difficult it may be to find moral common ground is required for mutual assent to a free society based on individual rights—this end-in-oneself premise is the mediating link between any morality’s standard of value and the rest of its substantive moral tenets as well as its advocacy of individual rights.

For instance, if one holds “love” as one’s standard of value, rather than the life proper to a rational being, then in order for one’s ethics to be logically consistent with morality as a chosen code of values, one still must accept the premise of each person being an ethical end-in-himself—and this is sufficient to ground the doctrine of individual rights.

Another example, dear to this writer’s heart, is the book I co-authored with Vinay Kolhatkar, Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics (2023), in which we proudly advocate an ethics of meaning, humaneness, and self-actualization.

Another example, dear to this writer’s heart, is the book I co-authored with Vinay Kolhatkar, Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics (2023), in which we proudly advocate an ethics of meaning, humaneness, and self-actualization. The first and second of our four orders of humanness explicitly uphold a nuanced version of the “end-in-oneself” principle (153–56). These, too, are a sufficient basis for individual rights.

Returning to Rand’s ethics, the end-in-oneself premise is also the mediating link between both her rational self-interest and individual rights;[5] and rights is yet another corollary of rational self-interest. Thus, the social premise of one’s being an end-in-oneself—is how both egoism and rights derive logically from Rand’s basic ethics of “survival as man qua man” or living the life proper to a human being.

What we learn from this is that the human social context underlies ethical egoism—or any other normative ethics that, by definition, must recognize and endorse human moral agency—just as crucially as it does individual rights.

True, one can rationally respect and pursue fulfillment of a good deal of one’s human needs and aspirations without considering the impact on one’s relationships with others and thus without the end-in-oneself issue arising. However, once other people are in the mix, the issue of giving and receiving, of who benefits, is unavoidable, and with it the possibility of social pressure, not to mention compulsion, to forego or surrender one’s own needs on behalf of others, and to accept or compel others to forego their own needs on behalf of one’s own. In fact, our being not just rational beings but also social beings is precisely why the relationship between egoism and individual rights (or between any morality and individual rights) is such a towering one in the domain of normative philosophy—and as just indicated, the principal reason why morality and rights unfold to a considerable extent in parallel with one another.

Perhaps the best elucidation of this point is made by Eric Mack who proposes that the only defensible basis for Rand’s advocating both egoism and rights is what he calls “the coordinate view.” On this view, as he states (1998), “egoism is not the root of rights” (5) Instead, as he said in a later piece (2004), “Rand’s egoism and her endorsement of rights [are] two equal facets of the root idea that each individual is a moral end-in-himself.” Mack continues (1998):

[T]he doctrine of egoism and the doctrine of rights are complementary principles within an ethic which is rational precisely because it includes both of these complementary elements . . . [T]he doctrine of egoism and the doctrine of rights have a common root; they each articulate a facet of some yet more fundamental normative truth. (5)

Neither the doctrine of egoism nor the doctrine of rights have priority over the other. And because they are distinct implications or specifications of the understanding that each person is a moral end-in-himself, neither doctrine is reducible to the other. (11)

However, Mack wonders, if we are to accept “the protean affirmation” (each individual is a moral end-in-himself) as foundational, then what could be the basis for taking this affirmation as rational? (15) He appears, however, to have already answered his question. In noting that the doctrines of egoism and rights are both anti-sacrificial (i.e., pro-moral-end-in-oneself), Mack states that the “self-regarding view” that one is an end-in-himself is paralleled by the “other-regarding view” (13) that others are also ends-in-themselves. This, he says, is rational because it rejects the subjective personal bubble of a self-centered “normative solipsism” (13) that sees oneself not just as the center of the moral universe, but as the only relevant thing in the moral universe—and that denies one’s essential moral commonality with other human beings.

In other words, as Mack says, this second prong of the so-called protean affirmation “is no more than the acknowledgement that other persons have moral significance in their own right and, hence, are not subject to one’s use and exploitation as are entities that lack rational ultimate ends of their own.” (13) Everyone has “moral significance in their own right”—this is another way of stating the fundamental principle of every moral code, the moral law that requires any and all moralities to be adopted by one’s free choice and applied only voluntarily and through persuasion. Absent the acknowledgement of this law, any purported morality is a morality in name only. As Rand might add, if its contradictions are not rooted out, nature will take its course.
 

Conclusion

And thus, we return to our initial point: Rand is advocating not that a free society requires the imposition of laws based on some particular substantive moral code or other (including her own), but that the laws of such a society must impose no substantive moral principles. Instead, the laws of a free society must be based exclusively on the one structural moral principle, common to all moral codes, that guarantees the freedom of everyone to pursue a meaningful, flourishing life. This is why she lauds the Declaration of Independence, in particular the words: “… all men are created [morally] equal, that they are endowed by their Creator [Rand would say by their nature as rational beings] with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In this connection, there is a long-standing controversy over whether Rand’s “life as the standard of value” means survival or flourishing. Rand herself (1961) eschews the notion of mere survival (“a momentary or a merely physical survival”), in favor of “survival qua man,” by which she means “the life proper to a rational being” (pp. 24–24). In any case, it is clear from her discussion (1963) that she holds that one’s right to life includes not just the right to not be put to death, but “the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for [not only the sheer continuance, but] the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life” (p. 110, emphases added).

In other words, Rand views life as a fulsome, holistic process, not just a moment-to-moment clinging to bare subsistence for as long as possible—a meaningful life over mere survival, quality over quantity. Thus, while Ghate (2019) mistakenly portrays Rand as thinking that mere “self-preservation . . . is foundational to the principle of individual rights” (p. 211), she actually regards rights as having a much fuller foundation. In contrast, Miller and Mossoff (2019), for instance, correctly present Rand’s view when they acknowledge that rights “define the full scope of freedom of action necessary for one to live” (121).

Rand’s own words, in print now for over 60 years, show that she clearly viewed the nature of morality as a chosen code of values as being the bedrock axiom that underlies all normative ethics and all normative politics, an axiom which cannot be successfully denied without contradiction. As such, the initiation of force—which is the basic way that individual rights are violated—is not just morally evil, as is held by the Objectivist ethics and numerous others. It is anti-morality, a foundational judgment that cannot be denied by any morality, on pain of contradiction. There is no logical justification for professing to follow a moral code, any moral code, and to also endorse, in speech or action, the initiation of force or fraud.

In other words, individual rights follow not from Christian morality, or from the Objectivist ethics, or from secular humanism, or from any particular moral code. Rights follow from morality per se, i.e., from the basic law underpinning all particular moralities—and the denial of rights is anti-morality per se. Or, as Rand stated in terms cryptic or dubious to some, but in terms which should now be completely transparent in their meaning: Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to the moral law.[6]

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Notes

[2] Many people don’t understand this view of morality as a chosen creed of values, because they equate morality instead with “goodness” in a religious sense—and thus regard you as not behaving morally if you don’t act according to their vision of the good. Yet, they will think it perfectly correct to hold you praiseworthy or blameworthy—i.e., moral or immoral—precisely because and when you make good or bad choices. Thus, it is clear that “goodness” is not the fundamental basis of their morality either, but instead one’s being free to choose good (and thus be moral) or to choose evil (and thus be immoral). My thanks to Donna Paris for her comments on this issue.

[3] There are so-called moralities that advocate genocide, violent jihad, etc., against people who have not themselves initiated force or fraud. I regard these as “counterfeit moralities,” in the same sense that “counterfeit individualism” was used by Nathaniel Branden in his essay of the same name as a label for ethical perspectives that divorce individualism from the requirements of human life. These prescriptions are “out of bounds” of ethical theory.

[4] If this seems too value pluralistic or cosmopolitan for some, please bear in mind that the goal of a rational, humane political philosophy is not to establish and preserve and protect an Objectivist or a Christian or a Utilitarian society, but a free society. As an illustration, if some people wish to not think deeply for themselves but simply follow a religious or secular guru for ethics, they are free to be not autonomous, as long as they do not violate the rights of others. Such gurus or their voluntary followers should not be stopped by law if they are peaceful and not deceitful. I do not recommend it, but this state of affairs is not one where the government ought to intervene.

[5] We now see how “rights” is one of those linking or “bridge” concepts that Rand and her associates occasionally use to tie together different parts of philosophy. Another example, discussed previously in this series and relevant to the present dialogue, “individualism,” was explained at length in Branden 1962 as being both a central component of Rand’s philosophy and also a bridge concept between psychology, ethics, and politics.

[6] I am grateful to Becky Bissell, Donna Paris, and Vinay Kolhatkar for their assistance with this piece.

References

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Bissell, Roger E. 2020. “Eudaimon in the Rough: Perfecting Rand’s Egoism.” The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 20, no. 2 (December): 452–78.

______. 2021. “How to Identity Cause and Effect in Rand’s Ethics” (November 10). The Savvy Street. Online at: https://www.thesavvystreet.com/how-to-identify-cause-and-effect-in-rands-ethics/.

______. 2023. “Down with Soft Tyranny! Ending the Inhumanity of Second-Hand Soulcraft” (October 28). The Savvy Street. Online at: https://www.thesavvystreet.com/down-with-soft-tyranny-ending-the-inhumanity-of-second-hand-soulcraft/.

Bissell, Roger E. and Vinay Kolhatkar. 2023. Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics: Toward a New Art and Science of Self-Actualization. Bradford, United Kingdom: Ethics International Press.

Boettke, Peter J. 2019. “Mises, Rand, and the Twentieth Century.” In Salmieri and Mayhew 2019, pp. 384–400.

Branden, Nathaniel. 1962. “Counterfeit Individualism.” In Rand 1964, pp. 158–61.

Den Uyl, Douglas J. and Douglas B. Rasmussen. 1978. “Nozick on the Randian Argument.” In Paul 1981, pp. 232–69.

______, eds. 1984a. The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

______. 1984b. “Capitalism.” In Den Uyl and Rasmussen 1984a, pp. 165–82.

______. 1995. “‘Rights’ as MetaNormative Principles.” In Machan and Rasmussen 1995, pp. 59–75.

______. 2005. Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.

Ghate, Onkar. 2019. “Rand (contra Nozick) on Individual Rights and the Emergence and Justification of Government.” In Salmieri and Mayhew 2019, pp. 206–27.

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About the Author: Roger E. Bissell

Roger E. Bissell is an independent scholar living in Dickson, Tennessee. A research associate with the Molinari Institute, co-host for The Savvy Street Show, and an editor of The Savvy Street, he has written numerous scholarly essays in philosophy and psychology as well as four books, including How the Martians Discovered Algebra: Explorations in Induction and the Philosophy of Mathematics (2014) and What’s in Your File Folder? Essays on the Nature and Logic of Propositions (2019). A lifelong professional musician, Roger has an M.A. in music performance and literature (University of Iowa, 1971) and a B.S. in music theory and composition (Iowa State University, 1970) and most recently co-authored with Vinay Kolhatkar Modernizing Aristotle's Ethics: Toward a New Art and Science of Self-Actualization (2023).