morality — VOICES for REASON

I am thrilled to announce that ARC’s Yaron Brook and I will now be regular columnists at Forbes.com. The co-authored column will appear twice a month and will focus mainly on issues related to business and economic freedom. The first installment addresses a debate that’s been raging over whether President Obama is anti-business. Our answer: Of course he is–but so is the rest of today’s political establishment.

Quick excerpt:

While Republicans often express admiration for Ayn Rand, the one thing they refuse to rein in is today’s massive regulatory-welfare state. To the extent they oppose Obama, it’s not on the grounds that businessmen have a right to function free from government coercion, but on the grounds that the amount of coercion Obama advocates goes a little too far.

The article’s title: “The U.S. Anti-Business Epidemic”

Finally, Yaron and I would like to thank the fine people at Forbes.com for this opportunity. We’re both excited to be writing for the Forbes audience.

image: Wikimedia Commons

Investor’s Business Daily has published an essay from ARI’s executive director Yaron Brook on  Atlas Shrugged. The piece begins:

In the years leading up to 2008—09′s financial meltdown, government control over mortgages, interest rates and America’s banking system was at an all-time high.

And yet when crisis struck, free enterprise took the blame.

The cure, therefore, was to give government even wider powers. Washington can now bail out any company, fire CEOs, override contracts and print billions of dollars to “stimulate” the economy — all in the name of the public interest. The result? Our deficits and debt continue to mount, and there’s a real possibility of a future like Greece’s.

This is the state of our world today. It’s remarkably similar to the state of the world in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” a mystery story about a future America whose economy is disintegrating and whose government is accumulating power faster than anyone thought possible. This parallel is a big reason a record 500,000 people bought “Atlas Shrugged” last year.

So what can we learn from a book that foresaw in 1957 what few believed possible in 2007? We can learn a lesson the heroes of the novel learn: the cause of the government’s greater, destructive control of business. And we can learn how to oppose it.

Read the whole thing.

My colleague Onkar Ghate has written a guest post for the Division of Labour blog answering a question on the moral views of Adam Smith and of Ayn Rand. The question was prompted by a recent debate between ARI’s Yaron Brook and Prof. James Otteson (a scholar of Smith). That spirited debate took place at the annual conference of the Association of Private Enterprise Education. The question:

Take Smith’s famous thought experiment about — by some fantastic unstated mechanism — you (“a man of humanity in Europe”, in 1759) could prevent an earthquake in China by cutting off your pinky. Smith says that of course you would do so, and then addresses why. Yaron, would you cut off your pinky? Assume that knowledge of the whole affair would necessarily remain entire personal. If yes, and you claim to square that with “selfishness,” aren’t you using words in an opportunistic and unmanageable way?

In response, Dr. Ghate begins his post:

The question’s undertone is that everyone “just knows” it’s right to cut off your finger. Moral theory’s task is to rationalize this incontrovertible conclusion; Rand’s theory can’t, however, because it’s an abuse of language to call the action selfish.

But it’s a mistake to think that Rand’s ethics begins with the moral beliefs that happen to saturate the culture, not with reality. True, it would be an abuse of language to label the action Smith envisions “selfish”: it is self-sacrificial. Precisely for this reason, Rand’s ethics would pronounce the action immoral.

To understand the radical difference between Smith and Rand here, one must grasp the principles at work.

Read the whole thing.

image: wikimedia commons

A follow up to my post on Obama’s policy and “just war” doctrine: NPR ran a story Friday that eloquently illustrates how this approach undermines our military, how it (understandably) frustrates our troops, and how it needlessly exposes them to greater risks. The story describes a clear-cut incident where U.S. forces observed insurgents planting a road-side bomb, but under newly tightened, even more restrictive rules of engagement, the soldiers had to let them get away with it.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the report are the comments from Gen. Stanley McChryrstal who champions this approach and believes it will bring us success.

Listen to the audio (4m55s).

image: Flickr/dvids//CC BY 2.0

When accepting his Nobel Peace Prize — a ludicrous, debased award also bestowed on murderers like Yasser Arafat — President Obama spoke about his foreign policy. Pervading his Nobel speech there was a peculiar undertone of contrition. If translated into words, it would go something like this: “Ideally, we would behave like Gandhi, never resorting to the use of force in asserting our rights . . . but alas, as commander-in-chief of the United States, I’m duty-bound to protect the lives of Americans, and that now means having to fight. Sorry about that.”

This apologetic drift flows naturally from the substance of Obama’s foreign policy.

A key point in the speech is that America must uphold — but has lately fallen short of — the standards set by “just war” doctrine. Summarizing this widely held view of morality in war, he explains that a war is justified only “when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Onkar Ghate took part in a BusinessWeek debate on whether Ayn Rand’s philosophy of rational self-interest is relevant to today. There’s a stark contrast in the attitude of the two sides regarding the seriousness of the issue, and it’s heartening to see from the comments that that fact has not been lost on many readers.

Here’s an excerpt from Dr. Ghate’s argument:

If Ayn Rand’s philosophy of rational self-interest is irrelevant today, then so is the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration gave sanction to selfishness: to the moral right to live your own life, to exercise your liberty, to pursue your happiness. No more taking orders from king or society. Each was free to live for himself.

You can read the rest here.

I’d like to direct you to an excellent blogpost by Dr. Greg Salmieri (visiting assistant professor of philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill) on the attention that Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged have been receiving of late. Much of the hype, he observes, is missing the point.

Most of the recent discussion of Atlas has focused on its political themes, creating the impression that the novel is essentially a condemnation of government intervention in the economy. However, its scope, its relevance to the current crisis, and the reasons for its enduring appeal go much wider and much deeper than this. Galt goes on strike not simply against high taxes and unjust regulations, but against the morality of altruism, which Rand identifies as the cause of such measures, and against the world-view of which this moral code is an expression-a philosophy that denies the efficacy of reason and the absolutism of reality.

If you’re intrigued by Dr. Salmieri’s comment, you’ll be able to read more in an upcoming new book: Essays on Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”. See the table of contents here. (Dr. Salmieri is one of the contributors to that forthcoming collection of essays.) This is the latest and final volume in Dr. Robert Mayhew’s Essays series, which focuses on each of Ayn Rand’s major works of fiction. If you’re interested, you can check out the others in the Ayn Rand Bookstore.