• Tara Smith (University of Texas, Austin), “Reason Breathes: Notes on the Reason-Desire Relationship in Rational Egoism”

• Steven John Warden (University of St. Andrews), “Rand on Values and Desires”

• Gregory Salmieri (University of Texas, Austin), “Remarks on Valuing and Desire (in response to Tara Smith and Steven W…

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There were about seven audience members, not including the panelists, but most of them participated actively in the discussion, which was sustained, astute and lively. Many of our regulars from past APA meetings did not attend either because they were in other sessions or because they were not able to make the conference. The attendees included several philosophy students who had not been any of our prior sessions, and some people who I haven’t met before.

The papers are now available at this link. to members and contributors of the society.

Out session is scheduled from Thursday, January 9th from 7pm to 10pm at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel. The specific room will be listed in the final conference program ad on the associated app.

The session will open with a new paper by Tara Smith (University of Texas, Austin) called “Reason Breathes: Notes on the Reason-Desire Relationship in Rational Egoism.” In it, Dr. Smith revisits the topic of desire, treated in chapter 1 of her 2024 book Egoism Without Permission, expanding on the role of reason in desiring and correcting some possible implications of her earlier treatment that she thinks are incorrect.

This will be followed by a paper by Steven Warden (University of St Andrews), "Value and Desire,” on the relationship between these two phenomena in reality and in Rand’s work.

I will serve as chair and short comment on the pair of papers. Then there will be time for discussion among the panelists and with the audience.

The papers, comment, and a report of the event will be circulated to Society members in the weeks after the event.

The first piece of news is that we have moved our web content and our communications to Substack. This message should be reaching you through that platform. If you were a contributor to the Society for AY 2023-24 or have paid your dues in AY 2024-25, we’ve set you up with a one-year subscription. After that you can contribute simply by re-subscribing annually to our Substack. If you had a recurring subscription to our previous website, this will be cancelled in the coming days so that no future payments are taken via that means.

The next two pieces of news concern our book series with the University of Pittsburgh Press. As of this summer, the series includes Tara Smith’s monograph, Egoism Without Permission. Here’s a description:

Ayn Rand controversially defended rational egoism, the idea that people should regard their own happiness as their highest goal. Given that numerous scholars in philosophy and psychology alike are examining the nature of human flourishing and an ethics of well-being, the time is ripe for a close examination of Rand’s theory. Egoism without Permission illuminates Rand’s thinking about how to practice egoism by exploring some of its crucial psychological dimensions. Tara Smith examines the dynamics among four partially subconscious factors in an individual’s well-being: a person’s foundational motivation for being concerned with morality; their attitude toward their desires; their independence; and their self-esteem. A clearer grasp of each, Smith argues, sheds light on the others, and a better understanding of the set, in turn, enriches our understanding of self-interest and its sensible pursuit. Smith then traces the implications for a broader understanding of what a person’s self-interest genuinely is, and, correspondingly, of what its pursuit through rational egoism involves. By highlighting these previously underexplored features of Rand’s conceptions of self-interest and egoism, Smith betters our understanding of how vital these psychological levers are to a person’s genuine flourishing.

Until now, the series had consisted of three multi-author collections of essays, each related to a different aspect of Rand’s thought. Further such volumes are planned (more on the next one later), and we’d intended for the series to consist exclusively of books of this sort. However, when the Press offered Tara a contract on her book, they suggested that we incorporate it into the series, pointing out that this would aid the promotion of all the relevant books. The Editorial Board agreed, and working with the press we’ve decided to split out series into two streams—edited volumes of the sort we’ve produced before, and single-author books like Tara’s. (You may notice that the visual design of her book has some features that connect it to the rest of the series and some that differentiate it, marking its status as the initial offering in a new sub-series.)

The next collection in the series is now scheduled to be released in the Fall of 2025. Edited by Jim Lennox and myself, it is titled Two Philosophers: Aristotle and Ayn Rand. The volume has been through peer review, and the contracts have been signed. Contributing authors are completing some (minor) revisions, and the completed manuscript will go to the press before the end of the calendar year. Since we did not have an ARS session in the 2023–24 academic year, we are releasing penultimate drafts of three chapters from the book to Society members and contributors whose dues are paid through that academic year. If you fall into either category, you should be able to access the papers now at the above link.

That brings me to my final piece of news, which is that we are holding a session on January 9th at 7:00pm in New York City at the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. The topic is Valuing and Desires, and the session will explore some of the themes raised in Tara Smith’s aforementioned book.

The speakers will be Steven John Warden, Tara Smith, and myself. Steven is a graduate student at the University of St. Andrews writing a dissertation on valuing. He also was the indexer for Egoism Without Permission, and he is currently visiting at the University of Texas, Austin, where he, Dr. Smith, and I have been regularly discussing values, desires, and related issues. The panel will be an occasion to continue this discussion in a more public and formal form.

The first is a new comment by Jason Rheins on James G. …

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• Alex Silverman, “Ayn Rand’s New Concept of Metaphysics”

• Jason Rheins, Comments on Alex Silverman’s “Ayn Rand’s New Concept of Metaphysics”

• Transcript of discussion between Alex Silverman, Jason Rheins, an…

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• Lester Hunt, “Why Aren’t Movies Better Than They Are? Ayn Rand’s Comments on Film Aesthetics”

• Andrew Kania, “Comments on Hunt’s Why Aren’t Movies Better Than They Are?”

Hunt, Why Arent Movies Any Better Than They Are Ayn Rands Comments On Film Aesthetics

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Kania, Comments On Hunt

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The first event—the one not put on by the ARS—is a panel at next week’s conference of the British Society for the History of Philosophy. The theme of this year’s conference is “Women in the History of Philosophy” and there will be a panel on Ayn Rand on Thursday (4/22) from 4 – 6pm BST (=11am – 1pm ET). 

Here are the speakers and talk titles:

• James Lennox (University of Pittsburgh) – Introduction

• Gregory Salmieri (University of Texas, Austin) – Ayn Rand and Aristotle on the Standard of Value

• Lisa Downing (University of Birmingham) – An Unimagined Encounter: Rand with Foucault

• Robert Mayhew (Seton Hall University) – Ayn Rand on Atheism, Religion, and Values

• Ben Bayer (Ayn Rand Institute) – Ayn Rand’s Defense of Abortion Rights Vs. Contemporary Kantian Defenses

The second event will be this year’s ARS session. We usually put on sessions at the meetings of the American Philosophical Association, but this year we’ve decided to hold a stand-alone (online) session separate from the the (online) APA conferences. It will take place on the evening of 4/27 from 7–9pm ET, and feature a paper by Neera Badhwar on the Unity of the Virtues and a response by Ben Bayer. We expect versions of both papers (along with a response by professor Badhwar to Dr. Bayer’s comments) to appear in the next volume of our the society’s Philosophical Studies series, which will focus on the relationship between Rand and Aristotle.

The session information is as follows:

Topic: The Unity of Virtue

Neera Badhwar (University of Oklahoma / George Mason University), “Aristotle and Rand on the Unity of Virtue”

Ben Bayer (Ayn Rand Institute),  “Ayn Rand on Moral Virtue and Moral Character (comment on Badhwar)”

Chair:  Gregory Salmieri (University of Texas)

Members of the society whose dues are current and contributors who have donated for the current year, should be able to download the papers by clicking on the above links (or from the relevant portion of the society’s website). The session will begin with the panelists reading abbreviated version of their papers. Then Professor Badhwar will reply to Dr. Bayer’s comments, and then we’ll have a period of open discussion.

• Neera Badhwar, “Aristotle and Rand on the Unity of Virtue”

• Benjamin Bayer, “Ayn Rand on Moral Virtue and Moral Character”

Badhwar, Aristotle and Rand on the Unity of Virtue

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Bayer, Ayn Rand On Moral Virtue And Moral Character

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• Gregory Salmieri, “Aristotle and Ayn Rand on the Standard of Value”

• Joseph Karbowski, “Comment on Salmieri, Aristotle and Ayn Rand on the Standard of Value”

Salmieri, Aristotle And Rand On The Standard Of Value

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Karbowski, Comments On Salmieri

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• James G. Lennox, “Ayn Rand & Aristotle: Axioms and their Validation“

• Michail Peramatzis, “Commentary on J.G. Lennox’s Ayn Rand & Aristotle: Axioms & Their Validation”

Lennox, Ayn Rand And Aristotle Axioms And Their Validation

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Peramatzis, Comment On Lennox On Aristotle And Rand On Axioms

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Professor Lennox’s paper is available to members of the Society whose dues are paid up and to contributors for the current academic year. It can be found in the papers section of the ARS’s website. Professor Peramatzis’ comments and Professor Lennox’s response will also be made available to members and contributors after the session.
As we have not posted here in some time, let me also alert you to some other society news. In addition to the program at the APA Eastern Conference this year, we will also for the first time be holding a session at the APA Central Division meeting in Chicago on Februrary 27. The subject will be “Aristotle and Rand on the Standard of Value.” I will be presenting a paper and Joseph Karbowski of Ludwig Maximilian University will be commenting, with Professor Lennox serving as chair.

This year’s sessions are both on Aristotle, because the papers being presented are slated for the fourth volume of the Society’s book series, which will concern the relation between Rand and Aristotle. And this brings me to the topic of the series. The third volume in the series, Foundations of a Free Society: Reflections on Ayn Rand’s Political Philosophy edited by Robert Mayhew and myself was released in the Spring. And now, all three volumes in the series are available in e-book formats (the first two having previously only been available as traditional publications).

• Carrie-Ann Biondi, “Being Integrated: A Labor of Self-Love”

• Carrie-Ann Biondi, Handout

• Christian Miller, “Comment On Biondi’s Being Integrated: A Labor of Self-Love”

• Gregory Salmieri, “Comment On Biond…

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Wright Reason Force And The Foundations Of Politics

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Salmieri Selfish Regard For The Rights Of Others

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My usual practice is to turn to the ‘Science and Technology’ and ‘Book Review’ sections first, and two reviews, in particular, caught my eye, one of John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism (Nov. 10th) and one of Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism (Nov.3rd).

I have no idea if the same reviewer was responsible for both (their reviews are anonymous), but despite how different the ostensive topics of the books were, the reviews had identified a common philosophical tone: a deeply critical attitude toward the traditional philosophical defenses of their respective subjects (atheism and capitalism) combined with the absence of any sort of systematic, positive alternative.

This prompted the letter to the editor below, which they published in their November 24th issue. In fact, while I didn’t stress this, I am convinced that this absence was in both cases intentional: Gray and Collier are both ‘pragmatists’ who are skeptical of any principled, systematic answers to moral questions. Here is a link to this post that will take the reader to my LTE. (The link is to the entire LTE page of The Economist. You need to scroll down to the 4th letter, which they titled ‘In praise of individualism’.)

by James Lennox

This year our topic is the virtue of integrity, and the panel is built around a new paper by Carrie-Ann Biondi (Marymount Manhattan College) on “Being Integrated: A Labor of Self-Love.”

The paper will be followed by comments by Christian Miller (Wake Forest University) and me. As is typical for such sessions, Carrie-Ann will have the opportunity to respond to our comments, and plenty of time will be left for discussion with the audience.

I’m looking forward to the session. Rand had a distinctive perspective on the self and on the role of integrity in forming and sustaining a self. I know from conversations with Carrie Ann that she has much illuminating to say on Rand in general and on this subject in particular. Christian takes virtue and integrity in particular very seriously but comes at it from a wholly different philosophical perspective, so it will be fascinating to see what points of agreement and disagreement he raises. I expect that my own comments will focus on issues of Rand-interpretation or on connecting the themes Carrie-Ann raises to texts she doesn’t deal with directly.

As is the Society’s practice, members and contributors will have access to the paper and comments (and to Carrie-Ann’s responses) as soon as they are available. We hope that we will also see some of you at the session itself, though (as with all events at APA meetings), the session will only be open to people registered for the whole conference. I expect that will include most of our members who are in the greater New York area, but that it will not include many contributors.

I thought it might be useful to reproduce here the things I wrote to the reporter, both so that the parts he quoted are on record in English (rather than in Danish translation), and because I said more than he was able to quote, and some readers of this blog may find the other things I  said useful.

Rather than quoting his questions (which I assume I’d need his permission to do), I’m putting my comments under headings that reflect the gist of what I was responding to. I’ve also lightly edited a few sentences to fix grammatical errors. Here goes:

Re whether Rand would approve of the controversial tax practices:

Rand was very critical of those business people who she thought got rich not by productive achievement, but by using special government favors to plunder others.  The main villains in Atlas Shrugged are corrupt businessmen of this sort.

But the tax laws and regulations in most countries are so complex that it’s often hard to know who is plundering and who being plundered. And claiming whatever deductions or benefits are due one under existing law is a very different thing from defending or advocating for laws that unjustly advantage your business. So in order to morally judge the tax practices of the groups you mention or to speculate on how Rand would judge them, I’d need to know more than you’ve said in your email.

Re the objection to egoism that if all life has value one should pursue the interests of all living things, rather than just one’s own:

This objection presupposes that value is an intrinsic property that things have independent of their relation to any valuers. This “intrinsic theory of value” is one common view held in philosophy (e.g. G. E. Moore held it), but it is not the only theory. Rand rejected it. Values, on her view, are things that one acts to gain and keep (or create and sustain). So the concept of value  presupposes an entity capable of valuing and a purpose for which that entity acts to produce, obtain, or sustain it. Only living things are capable of valuing and their lives are the ultimate value to which their other values contribute in various ways.  Different things will be of value to different organisms. For example: if we think of a fish in a school of fish, the other fish in its school are of value to it, because they contribute to its life as companions, protection, mates, etc., but the fishermen who want to catch and eat the fish and the bacteria that make it sick are not of value to it, even though both the fisherman and the bacteria are alive.

Which things (living or otherwise) are of value to a given organism will depend on many factors, but most importantly on that organism’s nature. Human nature is such that other human beings (both certain specific other human beings and living in a human society) is of tremendous value to any rational individual, and such individuals will properly feel a generalized good will towards humankind as such. But this does not mean that a rational person will value others’ (much less all others’) interests as highly as he values his own. Nor does it mean that he will value every individual human being. I, for example, do not value Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, much less Kim Jung Il, at all.

Re whether egoism implies that one should hurting others when it is his interest to do so:

Rand’s ethical egoism doesn’t tell you to do whatever you think is in your interest, regardless of what that may be and what effects it may have on others. Rather, her view is that you need moral principles (based on human nature) to determine what is in your interest in the first place. She argues that an individual’s interests lie in living a rational and productive life in which one’s relationships with other people are to mutual advantage by mutual consent. Morality shows us that it is not in our interest to attempt to live by preying on other human beings. 

So if preying on others (steeling, raping, etc.) is what you mean by “hurting” others, then it’s wrong according to Rand’s egoism. That wrongness depends on one’s interests in the sense that it is wrong because it is bad for you. But it doesn’t depend on the details of you specific interests or circumstances or choices. Human nature is such they it is necessarily contrary to the rational interests of any human being to attempt to live in that way.

But of course there are lots of other cases in which it is morally permissible or even mandatory to “hurt” someone. For example, it’s wrong to remain in a romantic relationship that is making you miserable, even if your partner would be hurt by the breakup.

It is nice to see both that Rand is being included in projects on the history of philosophy, and that the editors of this project found someone knowledgeable about Rand to write the piece. This has not always been the case with pieces on Rand in reference volumes, but things have improved since the embarrassingly unprofessional entry on Rand in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy both have articles on Rand by authors who take her seriously and are well acquainted with the primary and secondary sources. Hicks is the author of the Internet Encyclopedia piece, and he has written insightfully in other contexts about Randand about various figures and movements in the history of philosophy, so he’s a good choice to author an article that situates Rand’s conception of self-interest relative to more familiar views in the history of philosophy.

The article is illuminating on the issue of how philosophers’ views of self-interest (and their evaluations of it) reflect deeper views of the self. And I think Hicks is right to draw connections between Rand’s position on these issues and Aristotle’s. However, I was disappointed to see nothing in the piece on what makes Rand distinct from Aristotle (or from the Aristotelian tradition). Despite its title, the article doesn’t read as a piece on Rand at all. Indeed, her name appears only in the following sentence:

Aristotle and Ayn Rand, in contrast to both positions above, have a positive view of self-interest based on a view of the self that is potential, but with objective physical and psychological needs and the capacity to develop itself in a way that self-responsibly and productively meets its needs.

This sentence begins the last of the article’s four paragraphs. The paragraph goes on to elaborate on the consequences for ethics of the views expressed in the first sentence, and it does so without differentiating Rand’s ethics from Aristotle’s. I can see why one might proceed this way, if one were mentioning Rand in an article about different schools of thought on self-interest. But in an article titled “Self-interest in Ayn Rand,” it creates the impression that she had nothing distinctive to say on the subject and that the only reason to take cognizance of her is that substituting her in for Aristotle on certain topics introduces a female voice (though one that’s not saying anything that hadn’t already been said by a man).

In fact, however, there is much in Rand’s writings about the self and self-interest that sets her apart from Aristotle and from other canonical thinkers. Rand is always focused on the individual human being, who has distinctive ideas and personal values that set him apart from others in his community and that may put him in conflict with them. She presents her moral philosophy in explicit contrast with moral codes that call for the individual to sacrifice his ideas and values to the demands of others. And, likewise, her political philosophy is formulated in explicit opposition to political philosophies that justify the sacrifice of individuals by the state. In this respect Rand has more in common with 19th Century individualists like Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche than she does with Aristotle. This individualism is also characteristic of the Romantic movement in literature, which Rand saw herself as a part of. All of these individualistic thinkers extol emotions (and/or will) as the seat of individuality, whereas Rand identifies a person first and foremost with his reason. In this she agrees with Aristotle, but her view of reason includes elements that were absent or under-emphasized in Aristotle.

Whereas Aristotle’s discussions of reason’s role in life are impersonal in character, Rand held that an individual’s reasoning is the source of the personal values (e.g. his love of his job or romantic partner) that make his life meaningful to him. This is because, in her view, reason is an attribute of the individual and it does not function automatically. Each individual must initiate and sustain reasoning by choice, and must learn how to discover knowledge and to choose values that are based on facts and integrate into a self-sustaining life. To function in this manner by choice is to be objective in Rand’s sense of this term. I elaborated on this point in Chapter 6 of A Companion to Ayn Rand:

Only insofar as an individual chooses values in this way does he have a self‐interest at all. Values chosen subjectively, without regard for the requirements of human survival, will not form into a self‐sustaining whole; so rather than a coherent self‐interest that he can act to advance, the individual will have a motley assortment of conflicting desires. But neither can self-interest be intrinsic: there is an inexhaustible variety of possible combinations of values and activities that could cohere into a self‐sustaining human life, and there is nothing other than an individual’s choosing and pursuing one of these possibilities for himself that can make this particular life constitute his self‐interest and ultimate goal.

Rand’s view of objectivity (and of self-interest as objective) reflects her libertarian view of free will and her identification of the choice to think or not as the locus of freedom. This differentiates her from thinkers like Neitzsche, who was a determinist, and who wrote before the tensions between free will and determinism came sharply into focus. (Aristotle did stress the role of choice in the development of moral character, and the later Aristotelian, Alexander of Aphrodisias, did develop a libertarian account of freedom that is strikingly like Rand’s, but he did not develop, as she did, the view’s implications in epistemology, ethics, and politics, nor did he write much about the self or self-interest.)

I could go on, but I think I’ve said enough to indicate that there is much distinctive in Rand’s view of self-interest. Hicks was tasked with treating a complex issue in a very short article, so he had difficult decisions to make about what to include and omit. The article he came up with is thought-provoking, but given its title, I wish he had found a way to say something about Rand’s position per se rather than about a wider philosophical tradition to which she belongs.

Vilifying Rand without reading the detail, or demonising her without taking the trouble to refute her, is clearly the wrong approach.

I couldn’t agree more. In my introduction to A Companion to Ayn Rand, I wrote that

The scholarly study of Rand’s works was postponed by two generations of academics who found her vision appalling and thought or hoped that she was a passing fad, and that their students’ attraction to her was a youthful indiscretion. These hopes have been dashed.

As a philosopher who thinks that many of the most influential philosophers of the past and present have been deeply wrong and have had pernicious effects, I know something about the difficulties one faces when studying figures for whom one feels as Cleary and her audience do about Rand. I tried to communicate some of that perspective to both fans and critics of Rand in my introduction.

To take an author seriously means to read her, not with an eye toward confirming one’s prejudices (whether favorable or unfavorable), but simply with an eye to understanding what she thinks and why. If one finds her approach unfamiliar and difficult, it means working to overcome that. If one finds what she says implausible or unmotivated, it means taking the time to consider why it seems otherwise to her and to the readers who find her convincing – and it means giving thought to the question of whether it is you or she who is mistaken. By the same token, if she strikes you as obviously correct with respect to an issue where you know many people find her views counter-intuitive, it means working to identify the premises that you share with her and not with them, and then figuring out how to determine whether those premises are true.

Such an approach helps one learn from the thinkers one disagrees with most. There’s always the possibility that reading such thinkers will lead you to change your mind, but in the overwhelming majority of cases in which that doesn’t happen, pursuing the approach described above will at least help you to identify more deeply the nature of your disagreement, and it will push you to probe your reasons for your own positions.

I was sorry to see Cleary approach Rand differently in her Aeon piece. She takes for granted both that Rand’s philosophy comes from a place of cruelty and that it “should be easy to show what is wrong with her thinking.” And though she alludes to John Stuart Mill’s point that we can find elements of truth even in mistaken positions, I see little effort to find points of truth in Rand. She does urge her readers to look to the details of Rand’s work, but her own criticisms consist mostly of general assertions about Rand’s positions, and some of the few statements she quotes from Rand are taken out of context and given implausible construals.

Cleary’s first criticism is that “Rand victim-blames: if someone doesn’t have money or power, it’s her own fault.” But Cleary gives no examples of Rand blaming anyone for being poor or powerless. Nor does she acknowledge any of Rand’s portrayals of people who are poor or powerless through no fault of their own, any of her compassion for ambitious people trying to work their way out of such situations, or any of the anger she shows at injustices against such people. Think, for example, of Cherryl Brooks in Atlas Shrugged or of the protagonists of We The Living. Think of the many (often anonymous) characters in Atlas Shrugged whose unjust suffering under laws like Directive 10-289 is described. And think of her discussion of the plight of Soviet dissidents in pieces like “The Inexplicable Personal Alchemy.” There are some people (e.g. Cherryl Brooks’ parents) with little money or power whom Rand thinks are at fault for their circumstances—or for not struggling to improve them. But unless we conclude that none of us have any control at all over how our lives go, we will have to acknowledge that some people in some bad circumstances share some of the responsibility for their fate. Philosophers who disagree with Rand about whether some particular person is a victim, or about how just or unjust various societies are, would do well to discuss these issues directly, and we can hope that Cleary’s article will motivate some to look into this subject.

The one concrete Cleary points to that may be intended to be an example of victim-blaming in Rand is the controversial rape scene in The Fountainhead. But it’s an odd example both because the purported victim is a sympathetic character (rather than someone Rand blames for anything), and because she doesn’t see herself as a victim at all. Indeed, she exalts in the experience. This is part of what makes the scene so controversial. Here’s what Cleary has to say about the episode:

Howard Roark, the ‘hero’ of The Fountainhead, rapes the heroine Dominique Francon. A couple of awkward conversations about repairing a fireplace is, according to Rand, tantamount to Francon issuing Roark ‘an engraved invitation’ to rape her. The encounter is clearly nonconsensual – Francon genuinely resists and Roark unmistakably forces himself upon her – and yet Rand implies that rape survivors, not the rapists, are responsible. Might makes right and, as Roark states earlier in the novel, the point isn’t who is going to let him do whatever he wants: ‘The point is, who will stop me?’

A sympathetic portrayal of anything resembling a rape raises obvious concerns—ones that the intellectual and literary community is more sensitive to in 2018 than it was in 1943. So this scene deserves to be discussed and debated, and in my view, existing discussions of it by authors sympathetic to Rand are pat and too defensive. However, too often the scene is used as an attempt to dismiss Rand or to attribute views to her that she did not hold, which is what I think Cleary does in the passage I just quoted.

What happens in the relevant sequence from The Fountainhead? Dominique is a frustrated idealist with a Stoic-like determination to maintain her independence from the world by never allowing herself to desire anything in it. While in seclusion at her father’s estate, she notices Roark laboring at her father’s nearby granite quarry. Roark is an architect who has turned to grueling manual labor rather than work for clients who demand that he compromise his artistic integrity, and he is biding his time until he earns enough money to reestablish his practice or is sought out by the kind of client who appreciates his work. But Dominique doesn’t know any of this. She is taken with him at first sight, as he is with her. This begins an erotically charged adversarial relationship in which she struggles against her desire for him. She fetishizes his lowly station, and flaunts her position and its privileges. Roark, who doesn’t disguise his desire for her, makes it clear that he knows what she is doing and why. Her days become about resisting her desire to see him, and she realizes that she has lost her cherished freedom. For a time, she holes up in her house, but the house is “too safe” and she feels “a desire to underscore the safety by challenging it,” so she damages the marble fireplace in her bedroom and hires Roark to fix it. The job requires two visits. During the first, she makes a point to stand imperiously in the entrance way and then to stretch out on her bed. He ignores both poses, as he works. He makes clear (without saying explicitly) that he knows that the damage was intentional, and his comments on the stresses involved in the formation of marble are a metaphor for their relationship. When the time comes for the second visit, Roark sends another worker in his place. Dominique is furious; after days of struggle, she speeds to the quarry on horseback and, finding Roark nearby, asks why he didn’t come. He responds: “I didn’t think it would make any difference to you who came. Or did it, Miss Francon?” She whips him across the face with the branch she’s been using as a makeshift riding crop. It is after this that he comes to her house and takes her forcefully. She struggles against him, but doesn’t call for the help she knows is within earshot.

Is this rape, or consensual rough sex, or is it a case where the line is blurred? The novel makes clear that the encounter is a profound experience to both parties, that both want it, and that both know this. On the other hand, Roark could certainly have been prosecuted for rape had Dominique called for help and had he been stopped in the act. (This too is surely part of the power dynamic understood between them.) Dominique describes the act as rape to herself, but she cherishes the thought. The two characters carry on a clearly consensual but adversarial relationship throughout much of the rest of the novel, and they marry at the end, after Dominique has resolved the issues that made her despise the world. Every indication is given that this is a highly unusual encounter between unique personalities. So, even if Roark’s act is a rape, the scene is clearly not intended to imply that victims of rape are responsible for what happens to them. It is, rather, meant to be a startling dramatization of Dominique’s internal conflict and Roark’s role in it.

Nonetheless, rape is a heinous crime, which is horrifyingly common, and too often rapists or their apologists justify themselves by claiming that the victim was non-verbally asking for it. So it can be argued that the scene in The Fountainhead is insensitive, inappropriate, or irresponsible. On the other hand, many women report having rape fantasies, and rape scenes are common in romance novels, which are consumed by a predominantly female audience. There are good questions about how we should understand and evaluate such occurrences of rape in fantasy and fiction, and about whether such fantasy is a healthy expression of human sexuality or a self-perpetuating effect of a culture that victimizes women. However one answers these questions, and however one judges Rand’s artistic choices, it is clear that the point of The Fountainhead‘s rape scene was not (as Cleary claims) that “might makes right.” First of all, the plot arc of Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead amounts to a criticism of the approach to life embodied by that saying. Moreover, in later essays, Rand explicitly rejected the idea that might makes right, and she praised the “the American concept of ‘a government of laws and not of men,'” which, she wrote “is the means of subordinating ‘might’ to ‘right.'”

This brings us to the subject of Rand’s political philosophy. Here’s what Cleary has to say about it:

Rand champions self-sufficiency, attacks altruism, demonises public servants, and vilifies government regulations because they hinder individual freedom. Yet, she conveniently ignores the fact that many laws and government regulations promote freedom and flourishing.

This begs the question. When philosophers disagree about the propriety of a law, its proponents generally claim that it has such benefits as promoting freedom and flourishing, and its opponents deny this. So, even if one were debating an anarchist (which Rand certainly was not), it would not be sufficient to simply say that laws and government are needed for freedom and flourishing. One would need to show that they are and address any reasons the anarchist had for denying this. But, of course, Rand maintained that a certain sort of government with certain sorts of laws is needed to protect the rights each human being needs to live and prosper. Other sorts of laws, she argues, are wrong because they violate these rights.

Of course, Rand’s views on all of these points are controversial, and objections have been raised to some of these points and to the ethical foundations Rand provides for them. But instead of raising or linking to such objections, Cleary writes as though Rand had nothing to say on these issues. And she quotes her out of context to create this impression. For example, when she quotes a character from Atlas Shrugged saying that he owes no obligation to his fellow men, she ignores the rest of his sentence:

—except the obligation I owe to myself, to material objects and to all of existence: rationality. I deal with men as my nature and their demands: by means of reason. I seek or desire nothing from them except such relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice.

Rand’s theory of rights, mentioned earlier, is meant to demarcate the boundaries of individual lives in a social context, so as to make clear what sort of actions with respect to an individual would constitute an imposition on him, if taken without his consent. And this theory has the resources to deal with another of Cleary’s objections:

[Rand] assumes that we live in a world with unlimited resources and property that can be insulated from others. She ignores the fact that we share the Earth – we breathe the same air, swim in the same ocean, and drink from shared water sources.

But 19th Century American jurists and legislators used a conception of rights much like Rand’s to define rights to fluid resources like water and oil, which are not easily “insulated.” Rand references this tradition in an article about how to define property rights in the broadcast spectrum, where she notes that new technologies frequently give rise to the need to define new property rights. Perhaps some technologies that cause pollution may require the identification of new rights to atmospheric bandwidth. In any case, some anti-pollution laws could be more directly justified by reference to the damage the pollution does to people’s lives or property. And, though Rand was very critical of the early environmentalist movement, she allowed for the propriety of laws that “required industry to install anti-smog devices or burn a cleaner fuel” (Objectively Speaking, 213).

Cleary notes that some philosophers with political convictions in the vicinity of Rand’s support “some state control to protect people and their property from harm, force, fraud and theft,” but she thinks Rand cannot allow for this because she wrote that “There can be no compromise between freedom and government controls.” Taken out of context Rand’s sentence might be taken to mean that freedom and government are incompatible. But Rand argued that government is indispensable to freedom, so this cannot be what she meant here. What, then, does she mean by “government controls”? If one surveys the pieces where she uses such language, it is clear that she means mechanisms by which a government controls people’s lives (or, what amounts to the same thing, controls the economy), rather than freeing people from one another’s interference by properly defining and securing rights under a system of objective law. The government secures rights when it prosecutes people for force, fraud, and theft. By contrast, the FCC controls people when it issues broadcast licenses and dictates broadcast standards in ways that are not determined by reference to rights and that give officials in the executive branch wide discretion to determine the course of industries and of lives. I alluded earlier to the alternative form of governance Rand advocated for the broadcast spectrum: frequencies would be recognized as the property of the broadcasters who had pioneered their use, and the role of the executive branch of government would be to protect this property by prosecuting trespassers. The alternative between freedom and controls isn’t one between anarchy and government, but between two forms of governance.

Of course, there is much one might take issue with here. Can the distinction between these two types of governance be coherently maintained? Is it as absolute as Rand thought? Are all controls wrong, or are there spheres of human activity (perhaps those that pollute the environment) that must be governed by means of controls? All of these would be fruitful questions for critics of Rand to pursue.

Finally, Cleary accuses Rand of hypocrisy because she opposed social welfare programs but received social security and Medicare in her old age. We might add to this list of charges that, as a starving youth in Saint Petersburg, Rand ate the food rations allotted to her by the Soviet state. Unlike some others who have harped on Rand’s acceptance of these payments, Cleary acknowledges Rand’s argument that opponents of welfare state programs are entitled to claim the benefits due to them under these programs as partial recompense for the money seized from them to fund such programs. Here’s Cleary’s response:

The problem is not only the complexity of calculating how much government support one could rightly collect back from taxes paid – since, presumably, she also used roads, tap water, police protection, and a myriad of other things that the government provides. But it’s also in contradiction with her point that there can be no compromise between freedom and government. Moreover, it’s disingenuous to actively participate in, and benefit from, the very same system that she complained about under the guise of mooching back what was mooched from her. It might be selfish, but it’s not, as she claimed, moral.

This misses the force of Rand’s argument. The injustice she thinks is involved in a welfare system is not that recipients are paid, but that money is seized from opponents of the system against their will. These opponents are the victims, and the perpetrators are the advocates of the system (not the recipients, except those of them who are also advocates). The perpetrators have no moral right to anything they may receive under the system, but the victims do; for they would be compounding their own victimization if they refused to take what was due them under the system and thereby let all of the seized assets go to their victimizers. Thus they should take what they are due under the system, and regard it not as a benefit but as a partial recovery of what has been taken from them unjustly.

But suppose that Rand’s argument does not hold up. Why would this make Rand a hypocrite, rather than someone with a mistaken answer to the difficult question of how to function in the context of a social system that one judges to be unjust? And if we are considering Rand as a philosopher, shouldn’t we be more concerned with this sort of issue than with her personal character?

So much, then, for Cleary’s refutation of Rand. But presumably the point of her short article wasn’t so much to refute Rand as to motivate other philosophers to take up the project. I join her in encouraging them to do so. More generally, I encourage them to engage with her work. Philosophers interested in the task might consider making use of the Companion and the Ayn Rand Society‘s two books. All three books aim to facilitate intellectual engagement by bridging some of the gap between Rand’s work and the literature that is more familiar to most English-speaking philosophers.

The piece takes its title, “The Courage to Face a Lifetime,” from the famous boy-on-a-bicycle scene that begins Part IV of The Fountainhead. Rand later remarked that the scene expressed “my own desperate longing for the sight of human achievement” and that she was surprised that so many readers understood and responded to it (RM 164). Here is Professor Biondi’s apt summary of the scene:

A young man recently graduated from college rides his bicycle through the hills of Pennsylvania, wondering whether life is worth living and whether he should pursue his dream of being a composer. He longs to see others’ achievements as tangible products of their quest for happiness, if only to see that it’s possible. Suddenly, he is confronted with a newly finished summer home community that seems to spring organically from the sides of the hills. He notices a man perched on a boulder who serenely gazes over the beautiful homes in the valley below. After finding out that the man—Howard Roark—is the architect responsible for the scene before them, he thanks Roark and confidently rides off into his future armed with “the courage to face a lifetime.”

It is Roark’s architecture that has this powerful impact on the boy, and many readers have a similar experience with Rand’s novels; for as Biondi remarks, it is “unusual to encounter literature that embodies such benevolent, life-affirming values.” Rand’s commitment to such values and her ability to express them stems from her philosophy, Objectivism, which Biondi summarizes as follows:

Reality exists, we can know reality objectively through our senses and the use of reason, one’s own happiness is one’s highest moral purpose (egoism), limited government is justified only for the protection of individual rights, people should be free to trade the fruits of their work (capitalism), and the purpose of art is to project and experience in concrete form one’s vision of life.

Objectivism is an inextricable part of the the aesthetic power of Rand’s novels, and it is inspiring and empowering in its own right, as expounded by Rand and others in non-fiction essays. Biondi goes on to discusses several aspects of Objectivism in greater depth in the course of debunking four “oft-repeated myths about Rand’s views.” Her piece is worth reading and worth recommending—especially to young people curious about Rand’s ideas and the hostility with which they are often met.