I could indicate as proof of the relationship between the two the significant thought, emotion, and energy people put in to defending their particular codes of values. The very subject is intellectually and psychologically provoking. However, this does not explain why ethics is such an important issue psychologically. This post will attempt to shed further light on the subject by more clearly defining the terms and issues.

There are two underlying issues to ethics: what are values and why does man need them? Discussions of egoism or altruism are pointless if these fundamental questions are left unanswered. I indicated Ayn Rand’s answer to the first in my original post (a value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep). Here is her answer to the second question is:

“The concept ‘value’ is not a primary; it presupposes an answer to the question: of value to whom and for what? It presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.”[1]

Man, as a living being, faces a profound and fundamental alternative: life or death.

You have no doubt heard negative and emotional types cry “we could all die tomorrow!” Typically, there’s a “who knows?” thrown in at the end, which indicates a malevolent universe premise—the idea that some tragedy is lurking around the corner, ready to strike when least expected. It’s a belief that chaos reigns supreme. However, the hysteria of those kinds of statements does not remove the truth of how irrevocable, how undeniable and unchangeable death is.

Dead men have no values. It is only life that makes values possible, and a value is that which furthers one’s life. That which threatens or obstructs one’s life is not a value. Food is a value; poison is not. Mental clarity is a value; confusion is not. A state of happiness is valuable; a state of depression is not.

Life is the source of values, and one’s own life is the source of one’s personal values. To have no personal values is to see life as worthless. To sacrifice one’s personal values for others is to surrender one’s life, first, psychologically, and second, literally.

But values are not isolated phenomena that float around one’s consciousness. Values exist in relation to the evaluator and, through his judgment, each other. A good job, a spouse, a car, a meal, and a football will have different levels of value to a given person (especially in particular contexts or at particular ages). Most adults would consider a spouse and a good job to be top values, whereas things like the car, meal, and football fall increasingly lower on the value scale.

The totality of one’s values and their value-relationships to oneself is a hierarchy of values. As Nathaniel Branden[2] writes:

“Remember further that all of a man’s values exist in a hierarchy; he values some things more than others; and, to the extent that he is rational, the hierarchical order of his values is rational: that is, he values things in proportion to their importance in serving his life and well-being. That which is inimical to his life and well-being, that which is inimical to his nature and needs as a living being, he disvalues.”[3]

A hierarchy of values defines one’s relationships in terms of importance. Importance to whom and for what? To oneself and one’s life. If a man loves his wife, then she is more important than his second cousin twice removed whom he never sees.

Egoism and altruism differ both in their standards of value and their effect on one’s hierarchy of values. Egoism holds that one’s own life is the standard of judging and choosing values, whereas altruism holds others’ lives as the standard.[4]

Egoism arranges one’s hierarchy of values by order of importance to himself—the more important something is to him, the higher the value. Altruism seeks to reverse this. That is, the things least important to a man are supposed to be valued most highly, while the things most important to him should be disvalued (and sacrificed). In fact, it is precisely because something is considered important that it must be given up. More disturbingly, it is actually an attempt to rid a person of all values, including the value of his own life.

In the event that readers think I’m making this up, or that I am presenting a distorted definition of altruism and its consequences out of some irrational vendetta against an otherwise noble ideal, consider the following. These are the words of the man judged most responsible for defining and promoting altruism in modern centuries: Immanuel Kant.

“To be beneficent where one can is a duty; and beside this, there are many persons who are so sympathetically constituted that, without any further motive of vanity or self-interest, they find an inner pleasure in spreading joy around them and can rejoice in the satisfaction of others as their own work. But I maintain that in such a case an action of this kind, however dutiful and amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth. It is on a level with such actions as arise from other inclinations, e.g., the inclination for honor, which if fortunately directed to what is in fact beneficial and accords with duty and is thus honorable, deserves praise and encouragement, but not esteem; for its maxim lacks the moral content of an action done not from inclination but from duty…”[5] [italics mine].

In other words, even if you have no selfish or “vain” motive, but inadvertently experience pleasure from helping others, you are not moral. You are not altruistic.

Kant goes on to describe a situation where the “sympathetically constituted” man himself becomes depressed to the point that his own pain disallows him from feeling anything toward himself or others, even the pleasure of seeing them helped. That is, he has no possible personal benefit or pleasure, no “inclination” to help others, but retains the ability to help them. Kant writes:

“..and now suppose that, even though no inclination moves him any longer, he nevertheless tears himself from this deadly insensibility and performs the action without any inclination at all, but solely from duty—then for the first time his action has genuine moral worth.”

In other words, only when one is at the point of having no desire for himself or even for others can his beneficial actions toward others be considered moral. In short, Kant, the arch-altruist, is saying that any action based on an “inclination”—a self-interested motive or benefit (even inadvertent)—is immoral, whereas actions based on “duty,” meaning, without any personal interest (or even desire), are moral.

It is no accident that to illustrate his point Kant presents the image of an utterly depressed wretch; someone in the blankly staring, non-feeling state of a zombie. That image of man is his moral ideal and it is in fact what a true altruist becomes in reality.

As I indicated in a response to a comment on the original post, it does not matter that most people don’t define altruism this way. This is what altruism means and what it seeks. I’m glad if people view this as “too extreme” and go on to mostly pursue their rational self-interests.

However, implicit in that view is the notion that there’s a “not too extreme” version of altruism they can practice. Such people say to themselves, in effect, “Hey, I’m no mother Theresa and don’t have to prove my virtue by living with lepers. That’s crazy! But I don’t see what’s wrong with helping others, and so what if I get pleasure from it?”

My answers to those questions are that there’s nothing wrong with helping others if you have the means to do it and you want to. Help whoever you want, whenever you want, as long as you can and truly want to. And feel good about it, too!

Kant’s (and a lot of other altruists’) answers would be that the last of your considerations should be any pleasure you experience. In fact, when it comes down to it, it’s not even about helping others. It’s about sacrificing yourself.

According to Kant, you have a duty to sacrifice yourself. A duty is something that must be performed without choice, allegedly for its own sake, and without any personal gain. “Yours is not to reason why; yours is but to do and die.” Or, to quote myself from the original post, “Therefore, give up and give in. Give yourself over. Submit. Obey.”

A policy of constant submission and obedience does not lead to psychological health. A policy of periodic submission and obedience leads to mixed psychological health. But merely helping others is not necessarily to be acting on such a policy. There are many good, benevolent, mentally healthy reasons to help others. Egoism does not indicate that the only beneficiary of one’s actions is oneself, as altruists would have you believe. In fact, it is precisely when one pursues his own interests that others benefit most (although secondarily). This is a policy of psychological health.

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[1] Ayn Rand. The Virtue of Selfishness; “The Objectivist Ethics;” p. 14.

[2] Nathaniel Branden was a part of Objectivism at the time The Virtue of Selfishness was released. He was ultimately disassociated with Objectivism by Ayn Rand, who indicated in a public statement that she had proof he had been engaging in personal and professional deceptions. However, she endorsed his writings that appeared in various non-fiction publications or periodicals at the time and they rightly continue to be published in new printings. I cannot comment much on any of his work since then, as I’ve read virtually none of it.

[3] Nathaniel Branden in The Virtue of Selfishness; “Mental Health vs. Mysticism;” p. 45.

[4] I note that the etymology of altruism is the French word altrusime, from autrui, which means “others,” and the acronym given to it in my dictionary is: egoism. Leave it to the french to invent the word for self-sacrifice.

[5] Immanuel Kant. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by James W. Ellington.