A Rational Critique of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism

This is not the standard definition of “axiom” that most people use. Compare Rand’s definition above with how Wikipedia and most dictionaries define “axiom”:

A statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments.

These definitions are not the same because true axioms aren’t necessarily supposed to “identify the base of knowledge”. Nor are axioms required to “defeat their opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it”. Axioms are synonymous with “assumptions” or “premises”. Since axioms already have a standard definition that is quite different from the one than Ayn Rand is using, it would’ve been more appropriate for her to call them “performative contradictions”, since that’s what they actually are, in standard English language.

Anyway, Rand argues that propositions that can be proven by performative contradictions are implicit in all statements. This is true to the extent that they are implied by self-contradiction, but this doesn’t mean that humans are compelled to accept them because anything can be questioned. In order to be rational, people have to choose to be rational. There is nothing that compels people to accept the results of a proof by performative contradiction. There are plenty of people who do so, however irrational it may be. However, that is not to say that we argue against the validity of statements proving by performative contradictions. We endorse them, but we want to be very clear about what they are.

Rand’s goal was to identify the base for knowledge, which she partially accomplished through her support for empiricism and rationality being the only valid sources of knowledge, and the concepts of existence, consciousness, identity, causality, etc that she identified. However, she still fell short on multiple points:

1. Once you have experience, the Axioms of Classical Logic are a superior set of axioms for epistemology, but they aren’t enough to axiomatize all of epistemology. Regardless, they actually count as real axioms, by the standard definition that’s actually used in dictionaries.
2. There are many other performative contradictions that can be made besides the ones that she identified.
3. Supposedly, the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) is a corollary of the Identity Axiom. It would be more appropriate to establish the LNC as a separate axiom. In order to conclude the LNC from the Identity Axiom, you would have to assume (or implicitly assume) what you’re trying to prove.
4. It would be more appropriate to establish existence and consciousness as corollaries of the Axioms of Classical Logic instead, since they are proven using performative contradiction proofs.

Axioms must also be as parsimonious as possible. The goal is to derive as much knowledge as possible from as few propositions as possible. Knowledge is information compression.

Logic does follow from the existence axiom. Logic exists because it’s built into how humans think. It’s not possible for humans to think without assuming the laws of logic, even if they don’t know them or aren’t using them explicitly. The ability to use and understand logic is procedural knowledge.

The induction and understanding of the laws of causality, logic, time, etc can gradually become more explicit and formal as the subject continues to learn, think, and formalize these laws in a formal language. You can and should acknowledge reality and existence before formalizing the laws of classical logic, but you do not have to do so before using logic.

Causality is not derived from the identity axiom. Causality is a property of the universe. So much so that human cognition evolved to think about causality automatically. Same with time. There’s no way for a human to ever think without implicitly assuming the existence of time and causality. We cannot escape them because we cannot escape our subjectivity.

Many philosophies aim to affirm assumptions instead of questioning them. Unfortunately, Objectivism has also failed to live up to its proclamation that all ideas and theories should be questioned, as we shall see in the rest of this essay. An example is how Objectivists affirm life as being an objective or “ultimate” value, without questioning it further. Since many Objectivists are only interested in having some guidelines by which to live their lives, many of them are not interested in questioning their assumptions or exploring the Abyss.

There’s no straight-forward answer to whether the mind is tabula rasa or not.

Objectivism is correct to embrace empiricism, and it proposes a good theory for how concepts are constructed. However, Objectivism proposes a foundationalist theory of knowledge, rather than a coherentist theory. Everyone has assumptions because they are necessary in order to think, but knowledge is ultimately not foundationalist. Knowledge is gained by Empiricism and structured according to Coherentism. Read More:

• Solving The Munchhausen Trilemma.
• Belief Networks and the Structure of Knowledge.

I would go a step further that nothing is self-evident at all since anything can be questioned, including sensory input.

Rand holds “causality” to mean that entities act according to their nature. Indeed, an entity like you or me is acting according to our nature precisely by acting consciously.

In other words, Rand believed that free will and causality are compatible with each other, which is correct. However, she didn’t believe that free will and determinism are compatible, which is a mistake.

Rand’s definition for “free will” is a valid notion (and equivalent to my definition for Subjective Free Will). However, it’s not necessary to reject Determinism or Physicalism in order to affirm the validity of Subjective Free Will. Instead, we can resolve the conflict between free will and determinism using the subject | object dichotomy.

Moreover, Objectivism rejects determinism in favor of Libertarianism (metaphysics), but this conclusion is simply bogus. There is plenty of evidence that the Universe is deterministic to some extent.

• Parents have the power to make many decisions that will have life-lasting effects on their children, which the children have no control over.
• Agency is always dependent on external factors.
• There is mathematics for better understanding the deterministic nature of the universe.
• People cannot defy their brain structures.
• If the world is materialistic, then it is also deterministic.

Read More: Free Will, Determinism, And Reductive Physicalism.

In this claim, we see that Rand’s conception of morality is interfering with her understanding of reality.

The Hard Problem of Consciousness was first published in 1995, after Ayn Rand’s death in 1982. However, we can conclude that Rand and most of her followers are likely to reject physicalism since Objectivism rejects determinism. Since Objectivism rejects physicalism, it’s not clear how it would resolve the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

Leonard Peikoff has written about this topic, so I shall critique his claims. I prefer the term “physicalist” instead of “materialist” since the latter is sometimes used to describe a consumerist ideology, but Peikoff used the term “materialism”, so I shall use both terms in this section.

Materialism is not mysticism, nor does it requiring viewing Man as a “body without a mind”. Consciousness can be understood via the Subject | Object Dichotomy. As subjects, we each have a consciousness that enables us to sense, perceive, and theorize about reality. As objects, our consciousness is ultimately a biochemical system of atoms and molecules.

I don’t claim that “consciousness” is unscientific. Consciousness can be defined as will and awareness.

As a physicalist, I do not reject consciousness. Consciousness can be scientifically analyzed as matter since it’s ultimately made up of atoms and molecules, just like everything else in reality.

None of these facts disprove materialism. Once again, we can accept both consciousness and materialism by explaining them via the Subject | Object Dichotomy.

The book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (GEB) by Douglas Hofstadter, does a good job of comprehensively explaining how consciousness arises as a result of physical processes.

Although it is possible in theory to use pure physics to describe how human brains work, no physicalist would ever propose that we should always analyze and understand it via physics and chemistry. Every field of knowledge requires its own concepts after a certain level of complexity is reached, and those may not be reducible to its parent field’s concepts, lest the field of knowledge be too overwhelming and incognizable. We can define types of order: metaphysical presuppositional, physical, biological, psychological, cultural, social. Each requires its own concepts and theories.

The Correspondence Theory of Truth is not a valid theory of knowledge because it doesn’t explain how ideas in the mind relate to reality. Beliefs don’t correspond to reality. That’s naive. They represent reality, from our perspective as a subject.

For example, it was considered “true” hundreds of years ago that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Everyone was as strongly convinced that that was a fact as we are now of the opposite belief. Would a Geocentrist be accurate if he confidently claimed that Geocentrism corresponds to reality? Of course not (from our perspective). Instead, what can be accurately said from both perspectives is that the belief that the Sun revolves around the Earth represents reality from the perspective of the people who believe it. Even though Geocentrism may seem unreasonable to most people today, there were seemingly good reasons why people used to believe in it in the past. Even if a person disagrees with Geocentrism, most people would agree that the reasons given for believing in it are still valid observations about reality.

If a person believes in the barycentric coordinates theory, then they would judge the Geocentrism theory to be false. They are using a different model of reality to make that judgment. I believe in the barycentric coordinates theory, and that theory represents reality to me, from my perspective.

I could claim that barycentric coordinates corresponds to reality, but what does that mean? In practice, people who say “X corresponds to reality” are essentially saying “I think X is true”. This is problematic because saying “X is true” is also defined as “X corresponds to reality”. The so-called “correspondence” is not well-defined. People can’t even agree on what the “correct correspondences” to reality are.

A proper theory of knowledge has to explain why a Geocentrist judges the barycentric coordinates theory to be false. The answer is that a geocentrist and a proponent for barycentric coordinates both have different models of reality. Each person believes that their model of reality is true knowledge. To each person, their knowledge represents reality, from their perspective. That’s possible because knowledge is subjective. For more information, see: What is Subjectivity?

The problem with the Correspondence Theory of Truth/Knowledge is that it does not use the subject | object dichotomy to describe what knowledge is. Contrary to popular belief, Truth is not objective.

This doesn’t explain anything. Facts are the same thing as Truths, so this is a circular definition of “truth”. Moreover, the word “fact” is naive, because it assumes objective truth. In ordinary usage, that’s fine because we take a lot of things for granted in ordinary discourse. But that’s not okay in philosophy, because we’re not taking truth for granted in an epistemological context.

If truth pertains to statements (which includes facts), and facts pertain to reality, then truth also pertains to reality. So “truth” and “fact” both still mean the same thing. Another thing is that nobody can agree on what all the “facts” are or what the “truth” is, and not everybody can be right if they believe in different positions. This suggests that facts and truth are subjective, not objective. What people assert to be “true” is always the same thing as what they know or think is true, so “truth” is de facto the same thing as knowledge.

Read More: The Problems with the Correspondence Theory of Truth.

As a final note, Objectivists tend to argue that people shouldn’t spend/waste their time doing things if they don’t perceive it to benefit them. They usually don’t care to understand things like the abyss for truth and value, or to understand life and human nature from a bio-evolutionary perspective, under the premise that they think it won’t benefit their lives. In these cases, they’re actually following a Pragmatist Theory of Truth instead of a Correspondence Theory of Truth. Pragmatism Consequentialism is not a valid theory of truth because truth judgements cannot be based on value judgments.

Read More: Theories of Truth and Knowledge.

It seems that Ayn Rand and most Objectivists would agree that intersubjectivity is a valid concept, even if they don’t use the term specifically. Nevertheless, the point of this section is that intersubjectivity is an important concept for explaining reality, and I don’t believe that Objectivism emphasizes it or has made it explicit enough.

Intersubjectivity is similar to subjectivity since it is also mind-dependent, except that it occurs within multiple separate conscious minds. Intersubjective phenomena are phenomena that exist within (or “agree”) between multiple minds.

Language is a good example. The English language exists in a distributed way, in the brains of English speakers. It is part of culture. The word “tree” means what it means because English speakers map it to the same concept in their brains. A language is a system of knowledge that is shared by multiple brains, and used to communicate ideas between those brains.
Money is another example. What makes money valuable is that people believe it has value. If people stopped viewing money as valuable, then it would no longer be valuable. The value of money exists intersubjectively.
Norms of behavior, such as politeness, are another example. In Japan, it is polite to bow when meeting someone. In America, it is polite to look into their eyes and shake their hand. These behaviors are polite because people view them as polite. There is no objective standard of politeness, just different cultural standards. – Blithering Genius, What is Subjectivity?

One of the great strengths of the subject | object dichotomy is that it enables us to clearly understand intersubjectivity. Objectivism does not recognize that language, money, culture, morality, and rights are intersubjective. Those concepts exist between minds, not within a reality that is outside of human minds.

The extent to which one can know what it’s like to be another person (or subject) is limited by the amount of intersubjectivity that they share, and one’s ability to infer what it’s like to be the other subject based on their knowledge and ability to relate similar experiences.

As established in the last section, language is intersubjective.

In order to persuade someone, an individual must analyze the beliefs and language of the person that they want to persuade. They must determine how the other person maps words and beliefs between each other and in which contexts. If done strategically, the individual can preemptively predict how other people will positively or negatively respond to the language that they use, and they can craft their language accordingly to affect the other person’s beliefs and predispositions towards what they’re talking about.

Language thus has a huge potential to influence and affect thought via the Sapir-Whorf Effect. The linked essay explains how it occurs and shows many applied examples of how that happens in everyday speech. No philosophy could ever be complete without understanding how language influences our thoughts, what could be done to avoid this, and how we could use our awareness of this phenomenon to think more deeply.

We agree that claims should be dismissed if they have no evidence to support them. However, a distinction should be made between claims that we could potentially evaluate as subjects, and claims that could only be answered by escaping our subjectivity. For the former, anybody who asserts a claim without any supporting evidence has the burden of proof. For the latter, it is impossible to answer such claims definitively, but it’s not rational to dismiss them as “undiscussable”. The proper way to deal with questions and claims that pertain to reality outside of all subjectivity is to acknowledge that we’ll never know the answers, that we shouldn’t try to figure out the answers (because it’s impossible), and to carry on with our lives as before.

When I say that “we cannot know what reality really is” or that “we cannot escape our subjectivity”, what I mean is that we can never truly know what’s it like to be someone else, to not be human, or even to not be a subject at all. For the last case, we have no way of knowing whether we are just brains who each live in a vat, or if we all live in a dream or a simulation. Our genes limit what aspects we can sense from reality. For example, most human’s genes cause them to only view within the visible light spectrum. We cannot see other sections of the electromagnetic spectrum with our bare eyes because they are invisible to us. If we already know that there are some aspects of reality that we cannot sense, then it’s reasonable to recognize that it’s possible that there are other features of reality that we also cannot sense as well, even with the help of technological equipment. In order to get to the bottom of these hypothetical questions, we would have to be able to view life outside of our subjectivity, but we’ll never be able to do that because that is one of the conditions of being a philosophical subject. For our practical day to day lives, we can assume that we don’t live in a vat, a dream, or a simulation, but if we want to be honest and rigorous, then we would have to say that we will simply never know the answer, and that we shouldn’t try to figure out the answer since it’s impossible for us to do so.

There are many other questions that we’ll never be able to answer. For example, we cannot determine what caused the Universe to exist (i.e. what caused the Big Bang to happen) because any explanation of that would be within a cause-and-effect Universe. In order to explain it, we would have to prove it within a reality that has no casualty, but that is impossible.

1. A simpler thought experiment that arrives at the same conclusions and provides better insight would be to imagine a universe that has no sentient life at all. This thought experiment takes less explaining to get the point across, and it is more readily apparent that all value ultimately originates from sentient life, because a universe with no sentient life is a universe with no value at all.
2. This proves that all value is subjective, since value originates from sentient organisms, and different organisms have different values. “Objective Value” is an oxymoron.
3. Most humans do intuitively derive their purpose and meaning from doing things that sustain their lives (the power process), but that doesn’t necessarily make it the chosen life purpose for all humans.

Reason is not synonymous with morality, nor can reason alone serve as a basis for morality because the true basis for morality is value, not reason. Moral relativism is a corollary that follows from this. The subjectivity of morality debunks the entire foundation of the Objectivist theory of ethics, to the point that everything must be re-thought from the ground up. Although a lot of the political philosophy ends up the same in the end, and it is important to understand the different reasoning that arrived at these conclusions. Most so-called “moral progress” is only advancements in technology.

Irrationality is not the origin of all evil. “Evil” people aren’t evil because they’re irrational. They’re “evil” because either: 1. they have to fight against others for scarce resources to survive, or 2. they have values that are opposed to other people’s perspectives. Deeming anything “good” or “evil” implies a value judgment of some kind, and we cannot make judgments unless we have already adopted an theory of value beforehand. Believing that it’s “immoral” to hurt others is an assumption, and it’s often necessary in order for individuals to survive in nature (except in a world with non-scarce resources and/or a society that prohibits such violence via the rule of force).

If anything, it’s irrational to unilaterally declare anything to be “evil” or to view morality as black and white because that entails having unquestioned implicit assumptions. Even if morality were objective, there’s always more ways to be wrong than there are ways to be right, so anybody who thinks that they are abiding by supposedly objective moral standards is probably wrong. Many people would use their belief that they are imposing the one and only true “objective” morality as a justification to rule with an iron fist.

Read More:

• The Case Against Moral Realism
• What is Morality?
• Morality FAQs

You can’t understand what selfishness really is until you understand why it exists in the first place. Hence, selfishness must ultimately be defended using bio-evolutionary reasoning, but Ayn Rand didn’t use any evolutionary reasoning to defend selfishness and explain why altruism is self-defeating. In order to be truly and uncompromisingly selfish, one must reject morality. It’s not enough to say that maximal selfishness must avoid infringing upon other people’s rights. That often isn’t an option in a resource-scarce environment. There’s also no reason why someone should avoid infringing upon other people’s rights if they know that they won’t face any significant game-theoretical consequences, unless they strongly value cooperation and the more prosperous civilization that it would entail. The game-theoretical evolutionary conception of selfishness is thus more selfish than the Randian conception of selfishness.

Humans will go to any length justify themselves, their values, and their actions for selfish reasons, even if doing so is hypocritical. Rationalizing is only anti-virtuous and irrational thing when dealing with things that don’t pertain to value knowledge (i.e. ethics and axiology). Rationalizing in ethics and axiology is natural, not anti-virtuous. Rand condemns this rationalizing as “irrational”, even though it’s both natural and a consequence of evolution. Instead, it would be better to accept that it’s natural, to understand the underlying evolutionary reasoning for why people do it, and to recognize that this is one reason why morality is an illusion.

Read More: Altruism and Selfishness: An Evolutionary Perspective.

Read More: What is Morality?

Objectivists find Objectivism appealing because it fits their moral intuitions and justifies them, within their belief networks. Objectivism preaches that people should never murder, never steal, and never harm others, and it also proclaims that the good and evil dichotomy is symmetrical to rationality versus irrationality. But this is not the case. Objectivism ignores that value judgments are both positive and negative, especially when a population of organisms reaches the carrying capacity of its environment.

Every human has ancestors that had to kill, rape, and steal in order to be reproductively successful. None of the humans living on Earth today would exist if that never happened. Life on Earth is a game where humans kill, rape, and fuck other humans over, and predator eats prey. This has occur for literally millions of years. Humans can also cooperate with each other, but they only do when it’s in their self-interest. This is the reality of Life on Earth. Objectivists deny reality because they cannot accept that Life on Earth is intrinsically violent.

The competitive nature of life ultimately originates from the scarcity of resources on Earth and the tendency of organisms to reproduce to infinity. Nature selects for selfish, competitive organisms because life evolves to maximize reproductive success. A successful society can (and must) outlaw murder, theft, and violence within the society, but it only does so by redirecting the violence outwards towards other societies and outsiders. Additionally, just because societies outlaw murder, theft, and other crimes against other members of society, that doesn’t conclude that it can’t still be within one’s self-interest to commit crimes against others, especially if the individual knows that he can get away with it.

Read More:

• Life is intrinsically violent.
• Circles of Order and Chaos.
• Circles of Control and Freedom.

Technically, we are part of reality, so emotions do inform us of reality, in terms of the biological imperatives that we need to fulfill in order to survive and reproduce. For example, hunger informs me that my body is low on energy. Physical pain informs me that part of my body is being damaged. Emotions exist to make people better at reproducing and raising offspring. Emotions are needed to generate actions in the real world. Note that I am not saying here that we should put emotions before reasoning, or anything like that. I’m only explaining why animals evolved to have emotions, and the function of emotions.

Ayn Rand viewed love from a subjective point of view, instead of an objective point of view, so she failed to explain why love exists and the purpose that it serves. Love exists because it made our ancestors more efficient at procreating and raising children who would live to adulthood to have children of their own. In the past, male and female organisms who didn’t have love or strong emotional bonds towards each other were less likely to stay together to raise their offspring, which endangered their offspring’s probability of survival. On the other hand, animals who did evolve to a capacity to romantically love one another were more likely to stick together to protect their children from accidents and predators, thus increasing their reproductive success.

It’s true that humans can sometimes reprogram their emotions by changing their value judgements, but this cannot be done to a great extent. Emotions serve biological functions that are often beyond our control. Emotions are a condition of subjectivity.

Rand is correct that pain and pleasure are biological motivators. Pain and pleasure are evolutionarily designed to trigger and provide impetus for sentient organisms to do things that sustain their lives and reproduction.

Rand didn’t make any normative statements in this quote. Rand is right that people often intuitively learn to associate value with pleasure and/or pain. She made a good description of how people often discover values. However, I want to be explicit that I don’t believe this value association is rational. The associations of pleasure with positive value and pain with negative value can be rejected with rational justifications. One reason is that pain is an emotion that is necessary for generating motivation. Pleasure is a decrease in motivation. Pleasure isn’t always a good thing, since a low state of motivation would make it difficult for humans to do anything in their lives. I’m pointing these things out because I have seen many Objectivists make normative statements about pain and pleasure, and I’m arguing that those value judgments are naive.

Also, “evil” implies some sort of intention. If I accidentally trip, break my leg, and feel of lot of pain, that’s not “evil” because the pain wasn’t caused by an agent intending to inflict pain on me. The pain was inflicted by nature, and nature is not an agent or a conscious subject. Claiming that “nature inflicts pain” would anthropomorphize nature. This is kind of nit-picky, but it would have been more accurate to replace “evil” with “bad” in that quote.

Read More: The Drive-Reduction Theory of Emotions, Pain, Pleasure, and Motivation.

See: Philosophy of Race FAQs.

All of these statements are correct. Racism is collectivist and irrational. To be clear, there is nothing about race realism that implies that we judge a person based on race instead of their character (assuming that we know their character well enough). Race realism is simply about recognizing the biological consequences that evolution has had on humans beings.

Understanding race realism is important to having a realistic worldview, for many reasons. Objectivists tend to deny that different races have different strengths and behavioral characteristics, but it’s not clear what they mean when they say that “race is a social construct”. To deny the physical and mental differences between human races is to deny biology, reality, and its implications.

Read: How is overpopulation a threat to humanity?

TL;DR: Once there’s overpopulation, it’s basically game over for civilization. Overpopulation causes civilizations to fight wars over scarce resources, until they finally collapse from decimating each other.

Wrong. The consequences of overpopulation are: global civilizational collapse, billions of people dying, and a permanent dark age. So yes, if you think those things are undesirable (as most people do), then there is a reasonable and “moral” basis for regulating how many children people can have. Overpopulation is a free-rider problem, so it is irrational to oppose population control if you strongly oppose civilizational collapse and mass death.

Read More: Overpopulation FAQs.

Rand argues that using “force” is unethical and irrational because it supposedly takes away a person’s ability to reason. There are multiple problems with this:

1. “Force” is arbitrary and poorly defined (a “floating abstraction” as Rand would call it), especially if it’s defined according to the Non-Aggression Principle Spectrum.
2. A person can still reason even if there’s force being exerted against them. People do it everyday. People who pay taxes aren’t able to reason any better or any worse than people who don’t. Defendants must also use reason to argue for their release when they are held in a courtroom.
3. Agency is circumstantial. Most people have to deal with decisions that are much more “forceful” than taxation or complying with legal codes, in the sense that they have the agency to pay taxes, and have comparatively far less agency to make tougher decisions between greater conflicting values.
4. It does not follow that force is unethical or irrational on the basis that it takes away another person’s ability to reason. This argument is rationalizing, not a rational argument. In fact, there are many cases where it’s rational to prevent or weaken another person(s)’s ability to reason if they have conflicting values.
5. It is impossible to eliminate force / violence from Nature.

Now we shall address some Objectivist arguments regarding why they think force is objectively bad.

You don’t eliminate violence with “reason”. You eliminate it within a society by using a government that solves game-theoretical problems. And as we’ll see in the future, this unusual era of peace that has largely persisted in humanity for the last 80 years will only continue to exist if governments are reformed to also manage resource scarcity and population control. In a resource-scarce environment, people hurt others because they’ll starve to death if they don’t. This is why warfare occurred throughout human history for thousands of years.

A society can eliminate violence within the society, especially if it’s intelligent and prosperous, but we still have to recall that the elimination of violence in that society occurs because the society resolved the prisoner’s dilemma with respect to violence. People (usually) don’t commit violence in such a society because they live under circumstances that discourage violence while making it easy to make a living without resorting to violence. Since the human propensity for violence is always circumstantial, we cannot assume that that non-violence is a natural consequence of being “rational”.

This claim ignores that robbing people in our current world would occur in the context of a society with rules that outlaw violence, a society that solves the Societal Prisoner’s Dilemma. On the other hand, if a thief can manage to steal things without getting caught, then the thievery works out for the thieves. They manage to acquire free stuff without having to pay for it.

Objectivists tend to counter-argue that the thieves would feel guilt and would be unable to go through the power process of obtaining items/money via their own labor, but there’s no reason why they should feel that way if they understand that they have a different conception of morality and/or they recognize that there’s no foundation for value or morality.

Humans have been stealing from each other for all of human history, including the ancestors of everybody who’s reading this webpage right now. We wouldn’t exist if humans didn’t steal from others, because humans are selfish, violent, and competitive. I’m not saying that stealing is a “good” thing, I’m saying that if humans have to do in order to survive, then they will.

Committing crimes may endanger a person’s survival and ability to procreate within a functioning society, but values and morality are still subjective. There are no objective reasons why a criminal should value his own life and reproductive success over committing crimes. On the other hand, if raping, killing, and stealing are reproductively successful strategies in an environment, then that’s exactly what evolution will select for. That fact is not changed by reason or “basic logic”.

This is also an example of Objectivists trying to hide game theory arguments inside moral arguments.

Not really. Different genes and different circumstances affect people’s propensities for violence, so violence is often beyond people’s control, on an individual level.

At most, we can define a theory of value and use it to justify itself, hence why life and reproduction are intuitively good values. But that doesn’t conclude that life is objectively good.

We can select a theory of value based on its alignment with biological or psychological value, but there is no prior basis for doing so. It would be the naturalistic fallacy (leaping across the is | ought gap) to assume that biological or psychological value is philosophical value. To have a rational theory of value, we must understand that it has no prior basis, and that we choose it.

However, that does not mean that we are free to choose any philosophical theory of value and live by it. Consider the value theory “green bottlism”, in which making green bottles is intrinsically good, and nothing else has intrinsic value. You could propose this theory as a joke or a thought experiment, but you could not live by it, because it does not fit your nature. A philosophical theory that conflicts with human nature could never be adopted. – Blithering Genius, What is Value?

The instinctive generation of pro-life values by our brains does not provide us with a basis for value, unless we make a conscious choice to an important question, and we recognize that it technically has no rational basis. Answering Lucifer’s Question to affirm or reject life is the point at which a subject crosses the is-ought gap.

Objectivists view Life as a more important value than Reproduction, but Reproduction is actually equally important, if not more important, from a bio-evolutionary and causality perspective. Without reproduction, life would cease to exist at all.

Biological value is objective in the sense that it is an objective property of events. The oak tree’s objective purpose is to reproduce. Cutting the oak tree down is objectively bad for it. Biological value is objective, but organism-relative.

Biological value is not cosmic. There is no telos to life as a whole. Life is not instrumental to some higher purpose. Evolution creates entities with purposes, and each individual organism has its own purpose: to reproduce.

Biological value emerged from causality via the loop of reproduction. The form of an organism has been selected to reproduce, and every part of an organism has a function that is instrumental to reproduction. – Blithering Genius, What is Value?

All of our biological and psychological values (as well as many social values) exist because they made our ancestors more reproductively successful in some way. In those respects, reproduction is a more fundamental value than life. Regardless, if you choose to accept reproduction (and life) as values, then you can use those values to justify and affirm each other and themselves. Reason can justify itself as well.

There are some objections to address on this important topic.

Being alive is a requirement for action, but that doesn’t make life the highest value. The Objectivist argument that “you can’t value anything if you are dead” implicitly appeals to a collection of values that life is instrumental towards achieving (e.g. that we should have values at all, we should be alive, we should be “happy” we should go through the power process, etc). Hence, the Objectivist doesn’t truly view life as the “highest value”. The Objectivist actually views life as a means to an end, even if he is in denial about it.

Valuing life (and the values that can be achieved by being alive) also implies valuing a collection of values that are necessary and instrumental for sustaining life. For example:

• We can’t act without being alive, therefore life is the fundamental value.
• Can’t live without eating, therefore eating is the fundamental value.
• Can’t eat without masticating, therefore masticating is the fundamental value.
• Can’t masticate for long without brushing your teeth, therefore brushing your teeth is the fundamental value.

– Felix, Life, Value and David Hume

The hierarchical structure of values thus goes both ways. Valuing life (or any value for that matter) implies: 1. a collection of values that are instrumental towards achieving that value (life in this case) and 2. a collection of values that the value in question is instrumental towards. And as mentioned earlier, you can value reproduction (and life) so that you can use those values to justify themselves, but only if you choose to accept those values.

This attempt simply repeats the same sentence twice, so it’s not a real argument. Nobody is debating that life is necessary for action (premise #2), but you can’t assume the conditional proposition P -> Q (premise #1) unless you first prove that Q logically follows from P. Since the first premise assumes P -> Q without proving it, it’s only begging the question.

Also, Life is a consequence of entropy, so we can just as easily make the following argument:

1. Entropy is required for life.
2. Life is required for action.
3. If Entropy is required for action, then entropy is the primary value.

Conclusion: Entropy should be our primary value. We can increase entropy by reproducing more.

Note that this chain of reasoning isn’t valid either because it assumes premise #3 without first proving its conditional. This is just another way to show that the Objectivist argument doesn’t prove what it wants to prove since an endless number of instrumental primary values would follow from it. And just like the first modus ponens argument, the entropy argument implicitly assumes other values, so it’s not a rational argument because it has unquestioned premises.

Life is necessary to achieve all values either. The counter-example is that if one chooses to value non-existence, then life and reproduction would be vices, not virtues.

The next section goes over the fallacies and problems that Objectivism makes on the other end of the instrumental value hierarchy.

Life doesn’t exist for achieving happiness or for the sake of living. Life exists to reproduce. All life on Earth has been naturally selected to reproduce, and no organism would continue to exist if its ancestors didn’t reproduce as much as possible. Biological value emerges out of reproduction. It is perfectly natural and normal for organisms to die for the sake of reproducing their offspring. A salmon swims upstream to reproduce and die. So is the elephant seal fighting over a harem. Or the black widow father getting eaten alive by the mother. Or the epitokes that die once their gametes have been released into the water. Or the human who dies in an effort to save his or her children from a terrible accident. Survival is instrumental to reproduction, not vice versa for the most part. Reproduction is thus a more rational value than life or survival, if only one of these values could be chosen, especially when viewed from a biological perspective. The inability of Ayn Rand to have recognized the importance of reproduction in life, biology, and evolutionary is one of the greatest scientific failures in the Objectivist philosophy.

This is not true. If you truly question your values as rigorously as possible, then you realize that there is no objective foundation for value. That is, there are objective reasons to positively value life or non-existence, and no objective reasons to negatively value life or non-existence. There are intuitive and compelling subjective reasons to positively value life since it fits our evolved instincts, but there’s also compelling and intuitive reasons to value non-existence, especially if one chooses non-existence as a core value within a rational theory of value.

People are certainly free to value something else besides reproduction (e.g. happiness) since there’s no foundation for value, but if they’re going to do so, they can’t claim to be rational unless they acknowledge that their chosen values are subjective.

Lastly, the Objectivist value in “happiness” is better described as valuing the Power Process.

As a counter-example, Efilists value exterminating all the life on Planet Earth, and they could justify it with reasons that many people would find appealing. There are no objective reasons why the Efilist’s values are “better” or “worse” than the Life-Affirmer’s values.

Why? Saying that it’s “irrational” to value non-existence appeals to the belief that it’s rational to value life. That appeal is not convincing or persuasive to someone who doesn’t value life.

Also, there are people who don’t necessarily reject life. Some people (like nihilists) are neutral about whether life continues to exist or not.

Neo-Luddism / Anarcho-Primitivism is another counter-example where technology that would extend life isn’t necessarily virtuous since the consequences are perceived to be greater than the benefits. The goal of Neo-Luddism is to just exist, and go through the power process.

Objectivists have failed to prove that it’s rational to value life to people who have chosen not to accept life (or rationality) as a value(s). At most, Objectivists have only assumed that people should value life.

Why should people value having reasons for or against anything, if they don’t value life? The Efilists, Euvalists, and Nihilists don’t care if value ceases to exist once they destroy the Earth and/or achieve non-existence. It’s obvious that they don’t care if there are reasons for or against anything, once they stop existing. That’s the whole point. It’s hard for most people to comprehend this because it doesn’t fit their intuitions. Regardless, this is not a logical inconsistency with the Efilist or Euvalist worldviews.

So? Just because a person continues to live, that doesn’t mean that they have to value life. It would probably take decades to create a fail-safe plan to create a nuclear bomb that’s big enough to destroy the entire Earth. People have to be alive in order to act and execute the Benevolent World Exploder.

Moreover, people need to recognize that it’s incredibly difficult to create and execute a successful suicide plan, especially when it’s illegal to die by suicide and when life evolved to have many instincts to prevent people from killing themselves. Objectivists may think that those points imply that it’s just more rational to value life, but they don’t. That’s because someone can instead conclude that it would be more rational if life doesn’t exist at all (i.e. humanity should destroy the Earth). Due to the Abyss, there are no objective reasons, but you can always come up with a subjective reason to justify anything.

The bottom line is that there are simply no valid rational arguments to value life, unless you choose to accept life as a value. To be completely rational, you have to understand that there’s no prior basis for valuing what you do, besides that you chose it. This is part of a more general, overarching philosophical concept called the Abyss. Once you discover and understand the philosophical abyss, real philosophy will begin, and you’ll realize that there is no foundation for value. So just as there are no rational reasons to value life, there’s also no rational reasons why someone should not value life. Regardless of which option a person chooses (if any), valuing life or non-existence will each imply an overarching framework of values that are necessary to sustain life or necessary to achieve/cope non-existence.

If you choose to value rationality and logical consistency, it’s not a “bad” thing to acknowledge that there are no “objective” reasons to value life unless you choose to view it as being “bad”. Again, if you subjectively choose to affirm life as one of your core values, then you can use your values of life (and reproduction) to justify themselves as values. Likewise, you can also use rationality to justify itself as well. I have personally chosen life, reproduction, rationality, and civilization as four of my core values, because I wanted to. But unlike Objectivists, I am honest in knowing that they aren’t “objective values”. Objectivists simply can’t let go of their assumption in objectivity, so they aren’t able to comprehend subjectivity.

One of the main reasons why it matters so much to prove the conclusion of this section is that it’s necessary in order to show that there is no objective basis for morality. It’s necessary to understand that morality is subjective in order to have a coherent political philosophy and worldview.

First, Life doesn’t necessarily have to be a virtue. There are several counter-examples for demonstrating this. Nor is life the “ultimate virtue” if a subject chooses to affirm it. There is no objective foundation for value, so there’s no reason why values aligned with Efilism, Eulavism, Nihilism, Neo-Luddism, or some other worldview should be deemed as inherently anti-virtuous.

I agree with Objectivism that people should strive to have rational values, and that values are things that one acts to gain and/or keep. I have personally chosen to affirm life, but it doesn’t follow that life is the ultimate value. Objectivism also affirms life as a core value, but the difference is that Objectivism claims that life is an objective value, whereas I recognize it as a subjective value, according to how I defined “objective” and “subjective”. Objective values don’t exist. While life is not an objective value, I am in favor of living on Earth, having children, and creating a long-term prosperous (and selfish) society.

My core values are rationality, reproduction, and civilization. Humans are biological organisms, so they can and should be viewed from a completely biological point of view. Objectivism doesn’t explicitly value reproduction, but the fact is that if life wasn’t designed to reproduce, then life wouldn’t exist today. All life evolves to reproduce as many offspring as possible. If we dedicate our lives primarily towards anything besides our objective purpose, then our subjective purpose is not aligned with our objective purpose in life, i.e. we would be doing things that we’re not designed to do. I’m not saying that that’s necessarily bad. It just doesn’t align with my chosen values.

Objectivism also believes the goal of life should be the “pursuit of happiness”, but this is a pointless endeavor, if happiness is defined with a hedonistic connotation. Zero Sum Emotions Theory (ZSE Theory) implies that pleasure and pain balance out. Hence, Long-term happiness is not possible, so this shouldn’t be the primary goal of life. Hedonism is not a rational theory of value.

Read More: Philosophy of Axiology

Read More: Book Summary of Debunking the Selfish Gene by T. K. Van Allen

People can and should lie to a criminal or an abusive government if it will lessen the harm that the perpetrator does. It is also true that lying in most other situations will require that the individual must avoid getting caught and punished. I agree that lying can cause a person to lose their independence in the sense that they become dependent on other finding out about their lies, but there’s no reason why a person shouldn’t lie if lying will benefit them and they can get away with it without any negative consequences.

Perhaps a liar or a thief would feel guilt and would be unable to go through the power process of obtaining items/money via their own labor, but there’s no reason why they should feel that way if they understand that there’s no foundation for value or morality. The benefits of honesty are not enough to compel people towards “good” behavior in the absence of government and other means of resolving game-theoretical problems.

Objectivists have said that it’s “bad reasoning” to “hide moral arguments in game theory” when critiquing my rational understanding of society. In actuality, they have it backwards. The Objectivists are the ones who are trying to hide game-theoretical arguments inside moral arguments. A perfect example is how they point out that thieves face the dilemma of getting caught or having the owners retaliate against them for trying to steal their property. That’s a game-theoretical argument against theft, not a moral one. Despite this, they still don’t present a complete explanation of how game theory applies to society and such.

Academia is designed to cultivate just as much intellectual dishonesty as it promotes honest research, but Objectivists don’t recognize or address this.

Objectivism emphasizes judging everybody and everything according to reason. This is a reasonable position that I do not contest. What I do object to are the values that Objectivism preaches for judging everything.

A minor thing that I will nitpick here is that Objectivism thinks that there’s no rational basis for judging people based on race. Every person should initially be given the benefit of the doubt, regardless of what their race is. However, the reality is that some races are genetically predisposed to be more/less violent, more/less intelligent, and more/less cooperative than others. It is reasonable to take someone’s race into account when judging the probability that they will do a given type of action. It is also reasonable to reassess those probabilities after getting to known an individual well enough.

Rand gives mostly good advice on pride, but it still encounters the same problems as the other virtues, i.e. a rational theory of value for establishing the virtue (what we should be proud of) must be determined beforehand.

The definition of “Pride” is dependent on how it’s defined. One can be proud of oneself, but one can also be proud of others. If it’s okay to be proud of family members and other people in our lives who we cannot choose, then there’s no reason why we can’t also be proud of our racial heritage. Of course, an individual should strive for individual pride and self-esteem in oneself, nonetheless.

Work is required by nature, and it’s often important to a “fulfilling” life. Objectivism does a good job in defining and preaching productiveness in the context of a modern, industrial society, but there are still problems with it.

• Objectivism doesn’t recognize that the psychological need to go through the Power Process (the reason why most humans value doing work of kind) arises from evolution.
• Objectivism doesn’t recognize that modern technology interferes with the power process by causing evolutionary mismatch
• The Industrial World has made it harder for humans to go through the Power Process by eliminating or making it more difficult to do the things that humans used to do to derive their joy and life purpose (e.g. hunting, farming/gardening, chopping wood, violence, relationships, etc). This is a negative consequence of technology.
• Objectivism preaches that people should do what they’re passionate about, but that’s not realistically possible for everyone’s career.

If every single person was doing what they absolutely love in life, then the world economy would not continue to function properly. A better and most realistic way to think about life, careers, and relationships is like fishing. The people who say that “people should follow their passions” and/or “people should do what they love” are already passionate about doing what they do, so their advice sets an impossible high bar for everyone else. Some spots are beautiful to you and will help you catch fish, but other spots won’t, but you can’t know where you would like to spend time until you go there and you can’t know how many fish you will catch there until you try. The younger you are, the more time you can spend sailing to different spots and the older you are, the more time you get to spend in places you know you like, refining your abilities to catch fish there.

See: What “Follow Your Dreams” Misses | Harvey Mudd Commencement Speech 2024 - Grant Sanderson

This quote projects moral bias onto what it thinks governments should be, instead of describing what they actually are and what they do. It’s more productive to think about government in terms of game-theory, since there is no objective basis for morality. The correct goal of government is to resolve Prisoner Dilemmas and Tragedies of the Commons. Government comes from the necessity to create a reasonable set of laws that would create a societal framework from which selfish individuals can cooperate together for greater mutual gain (than if they didn’t cooperate together). Cooperation is the foundation of civilization, and the best legal code is the one that enables that to the greatest extent possible.

It’s not possible to create “objectively defined laws” because every set of laws would benefit one person or another more than everyone else. Every human is selfish, so from a game-theoretic perspective, every human would prefer a set of laws that is tailored to suit their needs the best, even if it comes at the cost of others. However, for a functional and ideal society that has a high average amount of prosperity and wealth for everybody, an ideal set of laws would treat everybody equally and enable the highest levels of cooperation between individuals as possible. This is a compromise that everybody must make to achieve outcomes where everybody is collectively better off.

Read More: Game Theory and Society.

The true source of a government’s authority is its power. It doesn’t matter whether most of the people consent to the government’s authority or not. If the government has the power and the will to continue enforcing authority on its people, then it will continue to have authority. Since governments have to resolve game-theoretic conflicts, it’s also not possible for a government to have the consent of every person that it governs. For more information, see: The Power Structure Of Collective Entities.

It’s not “evil” to attack people since life is a struggle for scarce resources. Rights exist to solve the game-theoretic problems that arise due to the nature of life. In the absence of a law enforcement that would punish people for committing crimes, every person has an incentive to kill, abuse, and steal from other people because these actions make it easier to gain the resources for supporting oneself and one’s desires, compared to if they had labored and traded with other people instead. Laws against theft, murder, rape, etc prevent these game-theoretic problems from arising, thus leading to collectively better outcomes for a functioning society.

This is an arbitrary definition of freedom. Most people also don’t want freedom for its own sake because freedom in and of itself is meaningless. What really matters is power or agency, not freedom.

Read More: Freedom Only Exists Within A System Of Constraints.

No one is claiming that collectives are not composed of individuals. But you can’t think of collective entities as isolated individuals (e.g. the United States government, Ford Motors, the Free Software Foundation, etc). Collectives exist as a mental concept because it’s useful to think of them that way. We don’t achieve anything by denying that we can think of them as concepts. The United States government, Ford Motors, the Free Software Foundation, etc are not single individuals. They could never function as the work of only a single person. Collective entities are defined as individuals who work together in specialized roles within a power structure to create a functional system that dedicates itself towards a goal.

The existence of minorities does not cause collective entities to break down as a concept. As mentioned, all collective entities consist of a power structure, so it is implied that most people in the collective do not have equal power (in most cases) to get exactly what they want (which would be world-domination for most people, because life is selfish). Minorities can be harmed by collective interests, but that’s just part of nature (1), (2), (3), (4). If a collective entity should never override the desires of a minority, then laws against theft, murder, rape, etc shouldn’t exist either because they override the desires of criminals. People can opt out of society any time they’d like, but as soon as they do so, they become an outsider. Freedom exists within a system of constraints, and agency is always circumstantial.

Read More: What is Morality?

Read: Inclination Towards Individualism Is Determined Mostly By Genetics.

Read: The Problems With Deontological Ethics.

Objectivism promotes a one-sided view of technology.

Humanity will never run out of problems. We can solve third-world problems with technology, but the many simultaneous technological changes, malevolent actors, and evolutionary mismatch that would result from that would only create just as many (first-world) problems as it solves. People tend to be more oblivious to the downsides of technology than they are to upsides.

Read more: Industrial Society And Its Future - Ted Kaczynski.

Read more: Philosophy of Technology.

“Capitalism” isn’t the be-all end-all solution to economics.

This is not true. As established in other sections of this essay, successful societies have to resolve game-theoretic problems using government policies. Some problems simply cannot be solved with government, such as the following cases:

• Planned Obsolescence. The right-to-repair is enormously important for preventing planned obsolescence in many cases, and it is best guaranteed by government regulations.
• The tragedy of commons regarding natural resources (and especially land).
• The best infrastructure and urban planning can only be built by governments.
• An economy cannot have optimal economic performance (or market prices) if it doesn’t bootstrap the prices of natural resources.

Having an equal right to land is a negative right and is necessary for a truly free-market economy, and this can be proven via multiple different arguments: See section 11 of this page.

Natural resource taxes don’t deprive people of the fruits of their labor. Consider the following propositions:

1. Taxation is slavery with extra steps if it deprives people of the fruits of their Labor.
2. Natural resources are not created by Labor.

Conclusion: Taxes on natural resources are neither theft nor slavery.

Read More: Georgism Crash Course.

Video: The Case Against Patents - PolyMatter.

Video: How to Fix the Broken Patent System - PolyMatter.

It’s true that Ayn Rand did not self-identify as a Libertarian, but the problems with Libertarianism still need to be addressed. Virtually all of her followers subscribe to Right-Libertarianism (and sometimes even Anarcho-Capitalism), because they are the most compatible political ideologies with her philosophy.

Read More: The Case Against Libertarianism And Anarchism.

Although Rand was a harsh critic of Anarchism, many of her followers are Anarcho-Capitalists since Objectivist Ethics are a gateway into believing in Anarcho-Capitalism. Anarcho-Capitalists are just as ignorant about human nature as Communists are, and their political ideology is equally dangerous to Modern Civilization. Many of them will be reading this critique, so this has to be addressed.

The Anarcho-Objectivists are a case of purity spiraling among the Objectivist community. For that reason, Objectivism is a net-negative to civilization because Ancaps are more opposed to Georgism than literally every other political ideology out there. They are thus the greatest opponents to solving the greatest economic problems that are facing the modern world. So although Objectivism advocates for a pro-free-market philosophy, it ironically (albeit indirectly) promotes an extremely anti-free market philosophy since it’s not possible to have free markets at all without a government to establish them, nor is it possible to have free markets without equal negative land rights for everybody.

Read More: The Case Against Anarcho-Capitalism.

Setting Anarcho-Objectivism aside, even standard Objectivism still promotes ideas that are harmful to the preservation of modern civilization due to its obsession with individualist libertarian morals. Racial denialism, opposition to eugenics, and free-range immigration policies will increase the proliferation of dysgenics in modern society, cornucopian delusions will increase the risk of civilization collapsing due overpopulation in the long run, and an overly optimistic and one-sided view of technology will distract humanity from addressing the problems created by the evolutionary mismatch in our world.