Rand anticipated Wrong’s thesis by many years. But she recalled a more classically oriented view of human sociality. Like Aristotle, Rand saw ethics and politics as mutually supplementary. For Aristotle, the good man and the good citizen are identical.9 When Aristotle saw the individual as “by nature a political animal,” he was expressing the conviction that human beings lived naturally in a polity, or political community, and that these existential conditions were necessary for their personal flourishing.10 Rand inherits this classical impulse. She sees human beings neither as solipsists nor as socialized automatons. As Nathaniel Branden (1980) emphasizes:
There are a thousand respects in which we are not alone.… As human beings, we are linked to all other members of the human community. As living beings, we are linked to all other forms of life. As inhabitants of the universe, we are linked to everything that exists. We stand within an endless network of relationships. Separation and connectedness are polarities, with each entailing the other. (61)
In Rand’s thought, social existence enables us to actualize most fully our distinct potentialities. Rand stated, through a character in Atlas Shrugged, that “man is a social being, but not in the way the looters preach.”11 As social beings, we need to live in a rational social world, to bring our goals to fruition, to exchange the products of our effort, and to cooperate in a free association with one another. Our growth and creativity—our very survival—depend upon appropriate social and existential conditions that make such growth possible.12 By extension, Rand argues that there are social practices and conditions that are inimical to our survival as human beings. For Rand, it is the initiation of physical force that is anathema to genuinely human existence.
FORCE
To fully appreciate Rand’s opposition to the initiation of physical force, it is necessary to reiterate some of her basic epistemological assumptions. She believed that we have free will. The essence of our free will is our ability to raise the level of our focal awareness by an act of cognitive volition. If freedom is an aspect of consciousness, it must also be an aspect of human existence. There is no mind-body duality.
Rand argued that the mind cannot work under compulsion or threat. If we are to grasp reality, we cannot subordinate our perceptions and knowledge to the orders, opinions, or wishes of another. The cognitive mechanism can be hampered or destroyed, but it cannot be forced to function in a way that compromises its basic nature.13 In Atlas Shrugged, Rand enunciated this principle:
“To interpose the threat of physical destruction between a man and his perception of reality, is to negate and paralyze his means of survival; to force him to act against his own judgment, is like forcing him to act against his own sight. Whoever, to whatever purpose or extent, initiates the use of force, is a killer acting on the premise of death in a manner wider than murder: the premise of destroying a man’s capacity to live.… Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins.” (1023)
In Rand’s view, this is the basic contradiction at the root of nonobjective ethics. To impose an abstraction of the Good on our lives is to attack our cognitive and evaluative capacities, to invalidate and distort our very ability to be moral. An objective value is contextual; it must relate to an individual’s life and knowledge, specific needs and distinctive goals. A moral action is a chosen action. Outside of this context, action loses its ethical import.
Intrinsicism and subjectivism each subvert the possibility of objective valuation. The religionist-intrinsicist, for instance, identifies a “higher” good and typically sanctions the use of force to compel people to accept their categorical duties. The secular-subjectivist properly denies the reality of such mystic values. But subjectivism is the credo of most contemporary collectivists, who substitute the “intersubjective” for the objective, divorcing values from their existential basis. Rand acknowledges that these opposing ethical orientations may originate with “mistaken conviction,” but that ultimately, “both serve as a rationalization of power-lust and of rule by brute force, unleashing the potential dictator and disarming his victims.”14
Rand focused on the impact that the initiation of physical force has on human cognitive efficacy. She argued that in all historical periods, people have lived by projecting their goals and taking the requisite actions to actualize them. Such efficacious action takes place in a spatiotemporal dimension. People must operate on the conviction that their goals are capable of attainment. This is necessary whether they are primitive hunters and gatherers, farmers, or industrial producers. The need for efficacy is necessary for proper functioning as a conceptual being, regardless of the mode of production. Yet, progress in production techniques requires corresponding evolution in the integrative capacity of the mind. Rand explains: “Agriculture is the first step toward civilization, because it requires a significant advance in men’s conceptual development: it requires that they grasp two cardinal concepts which the perceptual, concrete-bound mentality of the hunters could not grasp fully: time and savings.”15
Time and savings are the “stock seed” of all forms of production. Farmers save their seed to support themselves through bad harvests and to expand the scope of production. The maintenance and expansion of this productive capacity enables them to improve their material welfare and, inevitably, to trade with others. This advancement in production is marked by a further elevation of human conceptual abilities. It requires sustained cognitive effort, which some people seek to avoid. Predation, rather than production, becomes their modus operandi. Historically, such people have seized the products of others by the use of force. Protection against predation remains the fundamental social problem in human existence, and was the ultimate rationale for the establishment of tribal, feudal, and modern governing associations.16
Defense against the initiation of force is not merely a material necessity. By interfering with a person’s material production and consumption, the initiation of force also cripples a person’s cognitive efficacy. By nullifying a person’s material efforts and threatening his or her body, the initiation of force achieves a corresponding nullification of the mind. It ruptures the connection between thought and action, ends and means, action and beneficiary, life and value. If our actions are not based on the judgments of our own minds, our survival is in jeopardy. And if, under the threat of force, we choose to act independently, we have also placed our survival at risk (Peikoff 1991b, 314). Force creates a lethal cognitive contradiction.
There is an inseparable link then, between rationality and freedom, just as there is an internal relation between faith (i.e., irrationality) and force. For Rand, “reason and freedom—are corollaries, and their relationship is reciprocal.” Rand does not posit strict, one-way causality, or logical dependence here. Together, reason and freedom form an organic unity. Each is internal to or constitutive of the other. Rand views freedom as a direct consequence of reason, and reason as a natural result of freedom. Consciousness is volitional. So too, is the capacity for action. We must be able to attain our rational goals free from the interference of other people. Reason is free, conscious activity. Freedom is a condition of rational cognition. Existentially, freedom is also a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for human survival. Throughout history, “when men are rational, freedom wins; when men are free, reason wins.”17
Ironically, Rand projects a view that is similar, at least in some respects, to the Hegelian synthesis. While Hegel’s view of Reason cannot be disconnected from his exhaustive history of consciousness, there are some parallels between Rand and Hegel concerning the relationship between reason and freedom. In tracing the development of consciousness toward philosophy, or “Absolute Knowledge,” Hegel ([1807] 1977) states: “In thinking, I am free” (120). In Hegel’s philosophy, as Marcuse ([1941] 1960) explains:
Reason presupposes freedom, the power to act in accordance with knowledge of the truth, the power to shape reality in line with its potentialities. The fulfillment of these ends belongs only to the subject who is
master of his own development and who understands his own potentialities as well as those of the things around him. Freedom, in turn, presupposes reason, for it is comprehending knowledge, alone, that enables the subject to gain and to wield this power. (9)
Whereas Rand projected a corresponding connection between reason and freedom, she proposed that the relationship between irrationality and force is also reciprocal. Faith and force “are corollaries.” Each is constitutive of the other. The initiation of force is a natural consequence of the reliance on faith. And the perpetuation of faith and irrationality is a direct by-product of the initiation of force. In Rand’s view, “every period of history dominated by mysticism was a period of statism, of dictatorship, of tyranny.”18 Force is irrational; it subverts the very capacity to be rational. It seeks legitimation in mystic creeds and collectivist ideologies. It fragments the requirements of human life, and is a crucial foundation for the proliferation of social dualism. Each of these themes is significant to Rand’s developed critique of statism and culture.
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS
Having traced the anticognitive effects of the use of physical force in human relations, Rand began her social ethics with a libertarian nonaggression principle: “No man may initiate the use of physical force against others.”19 This principle is not an endorsement of pacifism. Rand fully recognized that people have the moral right to defend themselves, and to use force in retaliation against aggressors. She also acknowledged that force may not necessarily entail violence, and that fraud and extortion are subspecies of force, since they involve the appropriation of a person’s property under false pretenses or by coercive threats.
The nonaggression principle has immediate consequences, which Rand explored in her conception of individual rights. The notion of “rights” has had a long intellectual history, emerging from the natural-law prescriptions of antiquity and reaching its apex in Lockean political philosophy.20 Criticism of individual rights has had an equally impressive intellectual history. From Bentham, who saw the doctrine as “nonsense upon stilts,” to Marx, who saw it as a peculiar manifestation of bourgeois economy, the individual-rights perspective has been greatly disparaged. So it is not surprising that Rand’s own contribution to this debate has incited several critical commentaries.21
Rand’s approach, however, differs from the rights doctrines of classical liberalism because it is self-consciously derived from a broader theory of ethics. Whereas some libertarian thinkers, such as Rothbard, begin their defense of rights with an “axiom” of nonaggression, Rand’s theory is the culmination of a full-bodied system of thought. Rand approached her philosophical totality from a variety of vantage points. Since a social existence is necessary for the flourishing of the individual, Rand’s defense of rights is her consideration of this totality from the perspective of social relations. Everything she wrote about being, knowing, ethics, life, survival, reason, and the integrated nature of human beings is internal to her concept of individual rights.
In 1946, in one of her first published discussions of the subject, Rand argued: “A right is the sanction of independent action.” She endorsed a traditional Lockean-Jeffersonian view that the individual has the right to life, liberty (including property), and the pursuit of happiness. Having already written The Fountainhead as a tribute to the human ego, Rand was insightful enough to see this last right as a celebration of the individual’s ability to choose and pursue “his own private, personal, individual happiness and to work for its achievement, so long as he respects the same right in others.” For Rand (1946, 5–6, 8–9), criminal activity is not an affront to “society,” but an infringement on the rights of individuals.
In later years, Rand expanded on her earlier formulations and integrated these into the corpus of her fully developed philosophy. She argued that the concept of “rights” provides a moral bridge between individual ethics and social relations. It “preserves and protects individual morality in a social context,” and is “the means of subordinating society to moral law.”22 Just as life provides the standard of morality, so, too, the right to life provides the basis for all other rights. For Rand, “the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.”23
Rights have both positive and negative aspects. They sanction the freedom of voluntary, uncoerced action, even as they include the provision that each individual abstain from violating the corresponding rights of others. But Rand argued that all rights are indivisible. There is no distinction between the right to life and the right to property, just as there is no duality between mind and body. The right to life cannot be abstracted from its material manifestation. Just as the virtue of productive work derives from the value of human life, so too, the right to keep the products of our labor is the means by which we sustain our own lives. Property rights are a material corollary of the right to life. Since we must appropriate the products of our own efforts in order to survive, “The man who produces while others dispose of his product, is a slave” (94).
In economic terms, Marx endorsed a similar view. He argued that the capitalists’ extraction of surplus value from the laborer’s product is in essence an act of expropriation. Rand, however, rejected this Marxian conviction and maintained that it is the initiation of force that constitutes the fundamental means of nullifying an individual’s ability and right to sustain his or her life.
At this juncture, it is valuable to consider some of the immediate implications of Rand’s formulation. Den Uyl and Rasmussen (1991, 111–15) have argued that Rand’s conception of rights is “ambiguous,” since it is not clear if rights are “normative principles” counseling individuals in their social conduct, or if they are “meta-normative principles,” which provide guidance in the creation of a constitutional order and legal system that protects the individual’s “self-directedness.” They recognize that for Rand, rights include the normative provision that an individual is obliged to respect the self-directedness of others. They argue, however, that rights are metanormative principles. To this extent, rights provide a broad framework for a legal system that applies fundamental criteria to the definition of specific obligations.
The evidence suggests that Rand’s conception of rights is indeed, metanormative, even though it has some obvious normative implications. If rights provide a link between individual morality and a society’s law codes, clearly, they are broad principles that serve as guides for specific legal applications. It was not Rand’s goal to define these applications; this is a social task that relates general abstractions to a specific context.
But in another sense, Rand’s system of thought moves toward the fusion of metanormative and normative considerations. For Rand, an individual has the right to choose between life-affirming and self-destructive courses of action, as long as the latter do not infringe on other peoples’ rights to do the same. The first provision of this formulation is just as important as the second. She made a distinction between what a person has a right to do, and what is the right course of action for a person to take in the pursuit of the ultimate value of life. The most important ramification of Rand’s theory is her view that rights provide a social sanction of the individual’s quest for a moral existence. Crucial to Objectivist epistemology and Objectivist ethics is the human ability to choose. Rand may show contempt for certain individual practices, but this hostility does not translate into a denial of the legal rights of the religious worshiper, the gambler, the drug pusher, the drug taker, or any person engaging in unconventional, consensual sexual activities.
Hence, individuals have the right to pursue even anti-life activities, as long as these activities do not infringe on the corresponding rights of others. In a sense, individuals have the right to pursue suicidal actions, but not homicidal ones. But this is not the whole story; for Rand refuses to disconnect
her notion of individual rights from the broader ethical theory of Objectivism. Since Rand believed that certain actions were immoral, her approach sought to understand and articulate the cognitive and social roots of such behavior as a means to their transcendence. For Rand, the more interesting question was not whether or not a person had the right to poison his or her own body with lethal drugs, but why someone would seek to escape from reality through drugs.
In this regard, Rand’s approach echoes the dimensions of the Marxian perspective. Marx opposed the concept of rights because it seemed to create a dualistic distinction between form and content. The rights doctrine endorsed the form of liberation, namely, free, conscious, human activity, by abstracting it from the content or context within which choices are made. Thus, bourgeois “freedom of conscience” merely tolerates religion, rather than liberating the human soul “from the witchery of religion.”24 For Marx, human beings created religion as the “heart of a heartless world.”
They will not transcend mysticism until they abandon “a condition which requires illusions.”25
Rand would have agreed with the thrust of Marx’s perspective. She viewed religious practices as not much different from drug addiction. Such practices were manifestations of a broader, anti-conceptual cultural bias, social conditions that have engendered a profound sense of alienation. Rand’s exploration of this issue links her libertarian politics to a critical, secular, humanist perspective.
Rand’s ability to rise above the strictures of previous rights theories is indicative of her fundamentally dialectical methods of inquiry. And yet, while Rand shared this integrated approach with Marxism, she departed significantly from Marx’s political orientation. According to Marx, the doctrine of individual rights was based on an atomistic conception of humanity. Private property defined the limits within which someone could enjoy his own possessions, seeing “in other men not the realisation but the limitation of his own freedom.” Marx wrote: “The right of man to freedom is not based on the union of man with man, but on the separation of man from man. It is the right of the limited individual who is limited to himself.… The right of man to property is the right to enjoy his possessions and dispose of the same arbitrarily, without regard for other men, independently from society, the right of selfishness.”26
Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical Page 36