Ayn Rand Essays Selfishness

That is to say that one’s own life and happiness are one’s highest values, and that one does not exist as a servant or slave to the interests of others.Nor do others exist as servants or slaves to one’s own interests.Ayn Rand, Aristotle, and Frederick Nietzsche all had theories behind this, which was that Humans are innately selfish.

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This idea is a voluntary co-operation, which applies to dealings with trade and justice. In developing her theory she criticized the ethics of altruism, which says that people should act out of selfish concern for others.

Ayn Rand says in her book called “The Virtue of Selfishness” that the proper method of judging when one should help another person is by reference to one’s own rational self-interest and one’s own hierarchy of values. However unlike Aristotle she focused on an individual other than a community. only individual men” (Ayn Rand 279) Ayn Rand followed her great acknowledged teacher Aristotle.

In other words, the moral legitimacy of self-interest implies that individuals have rights to their lives, their liberties, their property, and the pursuit of their own happiness, and that the purpose of government is to protect those rights.

Leaving individuals free to pursue their own interests implies in turn that only a capitalist or free market economic system is moral: Free individuals will use their time, money, and other property as they see fit, and they will interact and trade voluntarily with others to mutual advantage.

The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism is a 1964 collection of essays by Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden.

Most of the essays originally appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter.The book covers ethical issues from the perspective of Rand's Objectivist philosophy.Some of its themes include the identification and validation of egoism as a rational code of ethics, the destructiveness of altruism, and the nature of a proper government.Aristotle also stated that the “good” is what is objectively good for a particular man.matches an equally provocative thesis about ethics.Rand’s view is that the exact opposite is true: Self-interest, properly understood, is the standard of morality, and selflessness is the deepest immorality.According to Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, self-interest, rightly understood, is to see oneself as an end in oneself.It is up to each person to determine what values his or her life requires, along with how best to achieve those values, and to act to achieve those values.Rand’s ethic of self-interest is integral to her advocacy of classical liberalism.Classical liberalism, more often called libertarianism in the twentieth century, is the view that individuals should be free to pursue their own interests.This implies, politically, that governments should be limited to protecting each individual’s freedom to do so.