Replies

>>For example, she named "The pursuit of his ... his own happiness" as one of the "highest moral purpose[s] of his life." It's not rational that a highly subjective mental/physical state should be the highest moral goal of a supposedly rational and objective philosophy.<<

You are misunderstanding Objectivism.

It is only by accepting 'man's life' as one's primary and by pursuing the rational values it requires that one can achieve happiness - not by taking 'happiness' as some undefined, irreducible primary and then attempting to live by its guidance. If you achieve that which is the good by a rational standard of value, it will necessarily make you happy; but that which makes you happy, by some undefined emotional standard, is not necessarily the good. To take 'whatever makes one happy' as a guide to action means: to be guided by nothing but one's emotional whims. Emotions are not tools of cognition; to be guided by whims - by desires whose source, nature and meaning one does not know - is to turn oneself into a blind robot [...] This is the fallacy inherent in hedonism - in any variant of ethical hedonism, personal or social, individual or collective. 'Happiness' can properly be the purpose of ethics, but not the standard."

--The "Virtue of Selfishness," Chapter 1: The Objectivist Ethics, by Ayn Rand

Regards,

Rand wasn't much of a dancer, Alexander, but she's doing her damndest to dance in that passage.

Rand is simply asserting that there is an objective definition of "happiness," which somehow differs from mere hedonism. She never bothers to say what it is ... she only says that it's "good" happiness if and only if you got to it "rationally."

How ... useless. And how very, very sterile. It certainly has no connection with how real people experience happiness in the real world: happiness can come in many different forms, many of which are incidental and certainly not of our own rational making.

And what makes us happy today -- however rationally -- is not guaranteed to make us happy every day, which is what would have to happen if it were truly objective.

Rand does a lot of asserting. If you accept her assertions blindly, it all looks great. The problem is when you test her assertions against the real world... and then you realize that she's full of it.