Yes, she "saw nothing wrong with it." How virtuous. She did resist the idea that there was such a notion as a "moral duty," however, particularly when it conflicted with one's self interest.
Yes, she "saw nothing wrong with it." How virtuous. She did resist the idea that there was such a notion as a "moral duty," however, particularly when it conflicted with one's self interest.
Well, she didn't belive in God, so she couldn't prove the necessity/value of a moral duty.
This is a huge gap in her philosophical system.
I think of as being kind of like calculus.
In calculus, you learn how to calculate the load on a parabolic dam, for example. No real dam is a perfect parabola, though... because no real dam site will accomodate a perfect parabola.
That doesn't mean calculus is useless for calculating the load on an actual dam. It simply means that finite-element means must be used to account for all the detailed forces on a real dam, and calculus is used on each element separately. Computer power is used to come up with an actual value for the force, but the computer is just acting as an accounting device.
My personal theory is that Ayn Rand eliminated God from her thinking for the same reason that a calculus textbooks analyze only highly simplified cases, like parabolic dams. They oversimplify the real world, but they do so to introduce the student to a very useful way of thinking, useful in its own right.
Obviously, we can't know how God felt about this. I'm glad I wasn't in Ms. Rand's place when I had to face Him on 6 March 1982.
And Rand was quite correct on that point.
>>>She did resist the idea that there was such a notion as a “moral duty,”
Only when the notion of “moral duty” involved self-sacrifice. That’s rather different.