Objectivism is a valid ethical system.

Rand is clear on the foundation of her moral philosophy: “[t]he standard of value of the Objectivist ethics – the standard by which one judges what is good or evil - is man's life, or: that which is required for man's survival qua man”.[1] Morality is founded upon the “metaphysical fact” that not only must we be alive to have values, i.e. to have ideas of good and evil, since we must be alive to think, but that it is this “alternative” between life and death which enables us to conceive of good and evil, as if this “alternative” was not present then we would have no conception of “for or against” our interests.[2] This provides us with a moral standard, which is that “an entity's values are determined by its objective life-needs”,[3] because life is the “ultimate value”, the “end in itself”.[4] Ultimately, for an organism, “that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil”.[5] Good and evil are therefore objective truths validated with reference to facts about reality – specifically, facts concerning what it is to live, and what promotes the continuation of that life. As far as I can tell, that exposition coheres with that given by my opponent of Rand’s Objectivism. The political conclusion of such a philosophy is apparently that of laissez-faire capitalism, so as a socialist anarchist I clearly disagree with the philosophy in terms of its application, i.e. the world it would create if adhered to, but I shall attempt to refute the metaphysical/ontological/meta-ethical grounds, as given above, of the philosophy. Strangely, I shall start first by agreeing with Rand. She defines ‘value’ as “that which one acts to gain and/or keep”.[6] Even more strangely, she then proceeds to contradict this definition. My understanding is that ‘X is good’ means that ‘I approve of X’, that X is somehow ‘desirable’ to me, as an individual. As Sartre writes, we are each ‘the unique basis of the existence of values’, and thus ‘nothing – absolutely nothing – can justify me in adopting this or that value or scale of values’.[7] Indeed, to make such a judgement is impossible as it is ‘itself a judgement of value, and accordingly outside the scope of argument’, as A.J. Ayer argues.[8] Value, then, is something projected onto the world by a unique individual (clearly I am a subjectivist). This is not a line of argument I believe Objectivists would question, were it not for their belief that there is the aforementioned ‘metaphysical fact’ which necessitates us all to hold life as an end in itself, thereby enabling an objective account of value. My opponent elaborates on the argument for this position: ‘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’. The conclusion of this analysis, of course, is that life is the ultimate value, the end in itself. The error that has been committed, it appears, is that of misunderstanding the nature of value and existence. Simone de Beauvoir explains that existence, life itself, cannot be evaluated ‘since it is the fact on the basis of which all evaluation is defined’.[9] To illustrate this is as simple as conducting the same analysis upon an experience which is deemed undesirable and bad. If it is the case that I must value life because I value being intoxicated, then I can only see that it is similarly the case that I must despise life because I despise being sober. The desired experience, intoxication, requires that I exist, that I live, but so does the undesired experience, sobriety. The idea that life is an end in itself is absurd in the face of the concepts of good and bad experiences; they make it clear that experience, and thus existence, must be qualified by its specific content in order to be good or bad. A content-free existence is unconsciousness, which is not an experience that can be evaluated, as it is not an experience. To conclude: only existence with a specific content can be evaluated as good or bad, therefore the idea of existence as an ‘end in itself’ is incoherent. Addendum: I am not a drug addict. How could you say feeling good is an addiction?[10] [1] http://aynrandlexicon.com... [2] Ibid. [3] http://plato.stanford.edu... [4] Rand A., op. cit. [5] Ibid. [6] Ibid. [7] Blackham, H.J., Six Existentialist Thinkers, pp. 155-6 [8] Ayer, A.J., Language, Truth and Logic, p. 147 [9] de Beauvoir, S., The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 15 [10] Schoolboy Q, Prescription/Oxymoron (http://rapgenius.com...)