About Objectivism, part IV: Politics

By Massimo Pigliucci

[Part I of this series was on Objectivist metaphysics; Part II on epistemology; and part III on ethics]

Well, here we are, at the end of my mini-series concerning Objectivism, the philosophy originated by Ayn Rand. According to Objectivists themselves, their politics stems directly from their ethics, as it should be if ethics is to be of actual value in the guidance of life, as opposed to a purely academic exercise. Not surprisingly, considering the many problems we have seen when examining Objectivist ethics, I will find plenty to take issue with when it comes to Objectivist politics.

According to The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, by Ayn Rand et al., laissez-faire capitalism is “the only moral social system,” a conclusion that they derive from their conception of rights, to which therefore we need to turn. Objectivists recognize one fundamental right, to life, and a small number of derived rights, including to liberty, to property and to the pursuit of happiness. Objectivists are very clear about the fact that they think of these as rights to action, not to specific outcomes (so, of course, you have a right to pursue happiness, but not to a guarantee of being happy).

There is a large and sophisticated philosophical literature on rights, which is predictably largely ignore by Objectivists, including serious analyses of whole sets of rights that Objectivists simply do not recognize (almost without argument): expansive human rights, group rights, and a fortiori animal rights.

Rights, of course, are a human construct, so technically speaking there is no such thing as “natural” rights. At most there are natural desires (to life, property, happiness, and so on), and which of these — if any — we codify into rights is a matter of human reflection and agreement. It follows that it is hard for the Objectivist to claim a sharp line dividing certain kinds of rights from other kinds, a problem that often affects a philosophy whose main trust is that there are objective ways to precisely carve human reality.

Consider, for instance, the idea of a right to pursue happiness. To begin with, of course, we could easily get embroiled on exactly, or even approximately, what “happiness” might mean. Surely, to a considerable degree, the word means different things to different people. Moreover, are we talking of the emotional status, or of a more intellectual contentment with one’s achievements and quality of life (what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia)? But more importantly, why should we have a right to it, meaning that society at large should be organized as to maximize the likelihood that we can, in fact, pursue happiness?

Don’t get me wrong, I agree that we should have that “right,” but I don’t see a reasonable way to distinguish it from, for instance, a right to education. I’m pretty sure that most people would desire that too, and certainly everyone would benefit from it. And education is not an outcome (the right isn’t to getting a degree, or passing an exam), it is an action that leads — under proper circumstances — to a favorable outcome.

By far, the weakest point of the Objectivist conception of rights is that they limit themselves to what are called negative rights, and dismiss anything that philosophers classify as positive rights. Negative rights are so-called because they are defined by what you have a right to be defended against by other people’s (or the government’s) interference, and they of course include all the rights discussed above: right to life and property, but also freedom of speech, of worship and protection from violent crime. Positive rights are more expansive, and therefore loathed by Objectivists. They include the right to education, health care, retirement benefits, housing and a minimum standard of living.

The problem is that — again as plenty of philosophers have pointed out — negative rights often become meaningless unless they are accompanied by positive rights. The obvious example is the pursuit of happiness: you may have that (negative) right, but without (positive) rights to education, decent wages, healthcare, etc. chances are that you might be unable to pursue happiness in any meaningful way. The negative right becomes hollow, and almost a mockery of the whole concept of rights. (Similar considerations apply to the rights to property and even to life: with negative rights only, you may end up barely alive and possess close to nothing under a wide range of scenarios made possible by laissez-faire capitalism.)

From the Objectivist’s exceedingly narrow view of rights it logically follows that their ideas about the proper role of government are equally narrow: police, armed services, and courts of law, and that’s about it. Even some of my Objectivist friends (oh yes, I do have some!) grudgingly admit that those restrictions simply won’t do. We need regulatory agencies to control, for instance, the quality of our air and water, or of our food, or the functionality of our sources of energy (especially nuclear plants, but also oil drilling operations). If simply left to the “wisdom” of the market, countless people would suffer, become ill, or die before the companies responsible for whatever bad practice were forced out of business, even under the best (and often entirely unrealistic) assumptions about the efficiency of market forces.

[I should note at this point that I am not advocating any more government intervention or regulation than is strictly necessary. I am neither a socialist nor a communist — terms that many Americans confuse despite the stark differences between the two ideologies. But I am most certainly glad that the government, using my tax money, takes care of all sorts of things that I don’t or can’t do, and that I sure as hell wouldn’t trust a private company to do.]

It should also come as no surprise that Objectivists find themselves defending specific political actions that are, in my opinion, bizarre and often unethical. To begin with, Objectivists consider the environmental movement to be hostile to technology and therefore to humanity itself (as stated by Rand in "The Anti-Industrial Revolution," published in Return of the Primitive.) This is a bizarre claim, at best a silly confusion between environmentalists and Luddites, and really deserves very little commentary.

Objectivists are also opposed, naturally, to public education, antitrust laws, and even child labor laws (on the latter, see Ayn Rand as cited by Anne Wortham in The Other Side of Racism. Ohio State University Press). One can see the logic: if laissez-faire capitalism is the only moral social system, then anything that limits in any way the degree of laissez-faire is immoral. Setting aside for a moment the ugliness of a world where children have to work under whatever circumstances “the markets” set for them, even Adam Smith — you know, the guy who gave us the basic theory of capitalism and the idea of an “invisible hand” in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — realized that one cannot trust human nature and do without regulations entirely.

The basic idea of laissez-faire capitalism, of course, is that we let businesses and private interests in general compete with each other. We set in motion a system analogous to natural selection (the invisible hand), and at the end of the process, only the “best” will be left standing. There are three fatal flaws to this approach: first, even if everything works as laissez-faire capitalists say it will, the quantity that ends up being maximized by the invisible hand is economic efficiency, not happiness or justice, or social welfare (in the broad sense of the term). Second, the process is (ironically) exceedingly inefficient, just like natural selection (which, incidentally, is not an optimizing process, only a satisficing one — it results in the minimal outcome that is compatible with the objective). Lots of resources, and more importantly lots of lives, are going to be squandered before “the best” emerges. Thirdly, competition works — as any ecologist would tell you — only when there are many small players of roughly equal strength in the arena. But players in a capitalist game are allowed to buy each other, becoming larger and larger, and fewer and fewer, until we are left with the sort of plutocracy that currently controls the United States of America, the most capitalist country in the world, and the one Western nation with the highest degree of social inequality, crime and poverty. Nicely done.

Perhaps we should remember the words of Adam Smith, when he said that “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” A pretty accurate prediction of what is unfolding before our own eyes.