Objectivism is a valid ethical system.

There are two different mutually exclusive states that an entity can be in at any given time – they are the states of life and death, or the states of the animate and the inanimate. The dead cannot act with direction – they are subject only to the external forces outside of their bodies or the matter that once made up their bodies. They cannot move towards anything with a goal in mind – they are completely passive in all aspects. The living, on the other hand, are capable of choosing their values, acting to achieve their goals, etc. This does not, however, imply that plants are able to grasp the concepts of anything – neither does it imply that an animal understands what it is trying to gain by pursuing values. The lower living entities are able to act without knowledge – they are instinctual creatures, able to survive by sucking water out of the soil or by pouncing on a passing rabbit. In determining what a human should do, one must first find the goals of whatever actions will take place. One cannot call blind and goalless acting a code of ethics – it would only be able to tell us that we should do something, not that we should something because of any particular reason. A system of ethics needs to be clearly defined, with specific situations being paired with certain correct courses of actions in order to achieve a certain outcome in a non-contradictory and non-self-defeating way – for example, if a system of ethics were to say that the correct responses to seeing an unlocked car are to steal it or walk away, it can be rightfully be called out as a fraud, because it is not consistent – there is no reason why the same situation would call for two courses of actions that are based on premises that, if all from both are accepted at once, will certainly be found to contain contradictions. In this way, it is shown that any true ethical system will only have one objectively correct answer for each individual scenario – and that it will definitely have more than none. What, then, are the goals one should strive towards? In order to answer this question, one must recognize that there is a hierarchy of goals or values – for instance, if one claims that being able to see the colour green is a value, that person must also accept that seeing anything at all is a value, and, by extension, that eating in order to stay in the physical condition necessary for sight is a value. Naturally, the deeper into this chain you go, the more basic the values become. You will be able to search until you hit the “bedrock” – the foundational value without which any other value would be possible. This value will serve as the standard of value, or the “ultimate” value – all other values rest directly on this one, and it is necessary for this to be recognized as a value for any ethical system to be considered to be solid. This standard of value is life itself – one cannot value anything at all if he is not alive. In this sense, it can be shown that, since going against life would be going against all the values built on it, and doing so would render an ethics system without any descriptions of ethics itself, the only values one can hold in a logical manner are those which maintain and further one’s life. Man, contrary to lesser creatures, is not built in such a manner that he can live on primal instincts or by automatic processes alone – he is the rational animal, a creature able to use reason in order to understand reality. Even the most powerful brute would not be able to live on a deserted island or in an empty field without rationality – you cannot beat a seed of wheat in order to make it grow, and, likewise, you certainly cannot determine how to build a house by smashing logs together. It is the use of his mind that makes Man unique, and that mind is the only thing allowing the species to thrive in the way it has been for thousands of years. The mind is what is able to comprehend basic facts of reality – it is able to form concepts via the interpretation and categorization of the data of the senses. It is able to recognize that A is A, that contradictions cannot exist, and that the denial of any of these or other fundamental logical axioms will destroy the mind. The physical world exists outside of the human mind – if all humans were to die at once, suddenly, the world would still exist without being perceived. It is only through perception, though, that Man is able to come to conclusions about reality, and it is, more importantly, reason that allows the sense data to be made into anything even close to a concept. Without reason, no valuable information about the outside world can be gained, and, as such, reason is directly responsible for human life to the extent that it is found in the modern day. The only way for a code of ethics centered around reason and life to be useful is for a man to be able to apply it in his life – it is here that the issue of rights come up. If Man is to survive via rationality and productivity, or, as Rand put it, as “man qua man”, he needs to recognize that he, by the virtue of his nature, he has several absolute rights – the right to his own property, as any action in physical space constitutes a claim to that property in some regard, the right to personal autonomy and freedom from outside aggression, because living via rationality entails being able to make your own choices – otherwise, you would be living on your faith on someone else’s level of rationality or dead. Man needs to be able to evaluate each situation and choose the best course for him – a gun revokes this ability of his, by forcing him to act as a slave to someone else’s mind. At the root of all of this is the right to life – not meaning the right to live, but the right to not have your life ended, whether by enslavement or by death. It is only if these rights are granted to man that he is able to live and value, at all. A properly rational man would recognize that, if these rights are reasonable for him to have, they also apply to all other humans – meaning that any sort of aggression that violates any one of the individual rights of another is wholly immoral, as it goes against a construct that was previously accepted as being rational (and, therefore, that aggression would be anti-life). The right to life is a protection against aggression, not a claim that allows one to override the right to property of someone else. Man is needed to recognize that, by killing another man either mentally or physically, they are shooting themselves in the head – they are revoking their own right to anything in the world. If one is unable to respect a right of another, they should not expect that right themselves. To the rational man, it is their life that matters the most – it is only their specific life that gives them the ability to value at all, so, logically, their own life must be put above the lives of all others, else ethics as a whole would be rejected. This man would also recognize that, much like with rights, if this argument applies to him because he is a man, it must apply equally to every other man – therefore, he will live for himself, and will not expect others to do differently. He neither offers himself up as sacrifice, nor does he allow the blood of others to run down his cheeks. The rational man would not be a recluse – he would still be able to have interactions with others. He would not demand that others give him that which they value for nothing in return, however - that would go against his ethical code. Imagine a scenario in which two people are trading – both have objective reasons for why they value certain things, but they might not hold the same values – this does not mean the values are subjective, rather, it means that they recognize that they are different people in different scenarios. They can still hold objectively correct values, because they can still rationally evaluate their own individual positions – they can just come to different outcomes (but, if two men were clones of each other, one of the pair would have to be objectively wrong if the pair had a disagreement in terms of values). Because of this inequality in the evaluations of certain things between the two people, a trade can be made – one that mutually benefits both participants. If, say, one were dying of thirst in a desert, and the other was in need of money, it would be absolutely moral for the water to be sold to the man – it is not some type of extortion for two reasons: firstly, the man in the desert has no claim to the water in the first place, and secondly that both men directly benefit – there is a net positive exchange in values between the two. The importance and moral worth of trade has been made obvious, and it can be shown to extend past material goods – two people in a relationship, for instance, are in a long-term trade – each is giving to the other what they can in payment for what the other can give that person. All human relationships can be modeled this way, and all human relationships can result in mutual benefit, assuming complete rationality. I've almost ran out of space now, but I think I’ve at least laid out the most important parts of the ethical portion of Objectivism, and I really can’t wait to read the case that CON’s going to make next round!