I appreciate your summary of Rand’s view, and I agree with her naturalistic assumptions and with some of her humanistic conclusions.
I think her one-sided rationalism, though, is archaic since cognitive science itself has shown we’re not as rational as we often take ourselves to be. We think algorithmically (logically) but also heuristically (with intuitions and emotions). So, reason has undermined itself in that respect, which has made for the upshot of late-modern cultures.
I agree, though, that we should be wary of those who celebrate irrationality or pure subjectivity since that could be exploited by cultists and demagogues. Ironically, Rand may herself have led a cult of “Objectivism,” as some have argued.
The biggest weakness I see is in how she derives her values. When you say, “The good in life is life itself,” that’s the straight-up naturalistic fallacy I was talking about.
Also, if you repudiate altruism as being self-sacrificial, how exactly do you distinguish between non-predatory and predatory selfishness? The liberal’s harm principle says we should respect others’ freedom, and presumably Rand would say that that’s only logical. But what if you can get ahead in life only by beating a rival, such as by exploiting his or her weakness?
Of course, Rand would say that in a free market, everything goes, short of breaking the law. Thus, winners deserve their riches if they beat the losers fair and square, and that would be the result of a fair competition rather than predation. Alas, there’s no such thing as a free market in that sense. The rich bend or break the law almost with impunity. For example, the IRS targets poor folks for tax evasion, letting the wealthy hide vast sums of money because the IRS can’t beat the wealthy elites’ lawyers in court.
Moreover, capitalist society is quite predatory in its “competition” with the other animal species, and in trashing the biosphere. In that context, your statement that “We are taking full advantage of the rare and precious resources this planet has to offer” strikes me as oddly self-contradictory. You don’t trash and subvert (or “take full advantage of”) what you deem “precious.”
I don’t see, then, how the Randian libertarian sustains the distinction between nonpredatory and predatory selfishness.
Where I see values springing from is the recognition of our common existential condition: we all struggle to find meaning in a life that’s fundamentally, naturally absurd. The is-ought gap, though, means it’s lazy to just cherry pick some facts and call them good.
That’s what Aristotle did with his teleological worldview, which seems to have influenced Rand (judging from your summary). He called the model citizens of ancient Athens good because they were functional for the broader population, even though Athens was patriarchal and slaveholding. His humanism was elitist and semi-Nietzschean rather than being rigorously consistent. Presumably, Rand was a more consistent humanist (even though her famous novels hold up wealthy capitalists as heroic elites, or Ubermenschen). But that consistency would make her a virtual existentialist.
The reason all persons have value is because of the tragedy of our common existential predicament. It’s not logic that tells us other people matter, but empathy which reminds us that our basic plight in life is universal. Those who suffer in distant lands are nevertheless like us in that they’re searching for meaning in the same corner of the godless universe.
Just because two things are similar, though, doesn’t mean they share a value. That descriptive comparison has no evaluative implication. Likewise, just because two specks of dust belong to the same type of thing doesn’t mean they have any value at all. What makes people valuable isn’t any logical argument, but a feeling of empathy, based on a cultured, humanistic understanding of our common experience as tragically suffering primates.
These values, then, are at least partly subjective. The notion of a perfectly objective value seems to me oxymoronic. The more objective we are, the more detached we must be from any sense of what’s good or bad.
Moreover, I’ve argued elsewhere that there’s no such thing as perfectly objective knowledge. All our concepts and theories simplify things as models of them, and are therefore to some extent arbitrary, biased, or otherwise misleading as humanizations of inhuman facts (in the case of knowledge of nature). Granted, some representations are more objective than others, but objectivity isn’t neutrality so much as the ambition to be empowered by thoroughly outwitting the subject matter.
