If I am going to talk about Steve Ditko, I suppose am going to have to try and talk about Ayn Rand.
I know that this is a bad idea. My left wing friends are already telling me that even thinking about Rand gives her a spurious credibility. My Objectivist friends, of whom I have none, will soon be telling me that this is exactly the kind of thing you’d expect liberals to say, which proves their point...
This is not a response to the whole of Ayn Rand’s, or indeed Steve Ditko’s world view: it couldn’t possibly be. It’s really just an attempt to show how the first few chapters of The Virtue of Selfishness — particularly the essay entitled The Ethics of Emergencies — strike me. Think of it as an atheist reading through St Mark’s Gospel or a Tory reading The Communist Manifesto.
*
“I’m thru getting pushed around — by anyone. From now on I just look out for number one — that means — me!”
Amazing Fantasy #15
I swear by swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine
Atlas Shrugged
Rand claims to have devised or discovered a rational system of ethics. Since it is an objective fact that all human beings are alive, their first moral obligation is to stay alive. Since it is an objective fact that all human beings are conscious, their second moral obligation is to be happy. But they should only be concerned with their own life and their own happiness. I have no duty to help anyone else; no-one else has a duty to help me.
“Just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others — and therefore the man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.”
I grok that, if I don’t believe in conventional morality, or religion, or mysticism, or some great big idea like Communism or the Singularity, then all I have left to believe in is me. And I think I can also see the romantic appeal of the great objectivist man, whether it's Rorschach never compromising, even in the face of Armageddon, or Del-Boy Trotter taking nothing from the government and giving nothing to the government. I owe no man anything and no man owes anything to me. Hurrah!
What I don’t know is how you get logically or rationally from “human beings are alive” to “human beings ought to try to stay alive.” I agree that human beings do on the whole mostly try to stay alive, but I don't know how you get logically or rationally from that to "Human beings should always try to stay alive." And if, by some alchemy, “I am alive” implies “I ought to try to stay alive” I still do not understand why “You are alive” does not equally imply “I ought to try to keep you alive” — why "We are all alive" doesn't imply "We all ought to try to keep each other alive."
Even if me being alive and you being alive were mutually exclusive alternatives — say, if Titanic had just struck an iceberg and there were only one spare seat on the lifeboat — I don’t know why I ought to prefer my life to yours. I don't know why Rand's morality (I ought to preserve my own life at the cost of yours) is more rational than everyone else's morality (I ought to preserve your life at the cost of my own).
I would certainly prefer it if you decided to stop being alive and allowed me to carry on, but I don’t know how I can rationally infer, from the fact that we are both alive, that pushing you out of the lifeboat is the moral thing to do. It’s equally true that I can’t rationally demonstrate that I ought to give my place on the lifeboat to you. Without some premises to work from, I can't rationally or logically demonstrate why I ought to do anything at all. I don't know how to get from any kind of "is" to any kind of "ought".
I understand that David Hume didn't, either.
I would certainly prefer it if you decided to stop being alive and allowed me to carry on, but I don’t know how I can rationally infer, from the fact that we are both alive, that pushing you out of the lifeboat is the moral thing to do. It’s equally true that I can’t rationally demonstrate that I ought to give my place on the lifeboat to you. Without some premises to work from, I can't rationally or logically demonstrate why I ought to do anything at all. I don't know how to get from any kind of "is" to any kind of "ought".
I understand that David Hume didn't, either.
I might decide to let you have the spare place on the lifeboat for all sorts of reasons — because you have dependent kids and I don’t; or because I want history to remember me as a good guy and not a bad guy; or because it wouldn’t be British to push to the front of a queue. But that's because I have a totally irrational belief that not depriving kids of their father, achieving posthumous honour and displaying good manners are more important that mere longevity.
I doubt that such a things as rational ethics exists, in the same way that I doubt that such a thing as vegan beef casserole exists. Why should you give the other guy your place on the life boat? Because it is the right thing to do. Why should we refuse to drop bombs on civilians in wars? Because it is the right thing to do. Why did Valjean admit that he was the escaped convict and Champmathieu was innocent? Because it was the right thing to do. Why should you stop a burglar who runs past you in a TV studio, even if no-one is paying you? Because it is the right thing to do.
As you are presumably aware, Prof. C.S. Lewis (who Rand, rather pleasingly, abominated) thought that "doing the right thing" meant acting in accordance with the tao. By the tao he simply meant everything which human beings have always thought are the right things to do. He wasn't interested in Chinese philosophy: he just wanted to avoid specifically Christian terms. Christians don't have the monopoly on doing the right thing.
To say that something is the right thing to do because it is part of the tao is to admit that I can't say why it is the right thing to do: it just is. Rand will only convince me that she has come up with a rational basis for ethics if she can teach me how I ought to behave without ever appealing to the tao. And that includes explaining what she means by what that pesky little word ought.
To say that something is the right thing to do because it is part of the tao is to admit that I can't say why it is the right thing to do: it just is. Rand will only convince me that she has come up with a rational basis for ethics if she can teach me how I ought to behave without ever appealing to the tao. And that includes explaining what she means by what that pesky little word ought.
*
All I can tell you is that when it came to the point whether I would take my own neck out of the noose and put another man's into it, I could not do it.
Shaw, "The Devils Disciple"
It is a fact that, in an extreme situation like a shipwreck, some people act unselfishly. They allow someone else to take their place in the lifeboat or swim into dangerous waters to prevent someone else from drowning. And some people act selfishly — save their own lives without a thought for who else perishes. And some people make a dash for the lifeboat but feel guilty about it afterwards: lots of us know what the right thing to do would be, but don't actually do it. How do we decide which group are doing the right thing and doing the wrong thing? If we ought to do unto others as we would like other to do unto us, then the group who allowed others to live did the right thing. ("Do unto others" is the whole basis of the tao.) But if morality is the same as self-interest we have to say that the person who forced his way into the boat did the right thing. Indeed, we have to say that those who sacrificed or risked their own lives acted wickedly. Billy Zane is the hero and Leo DiCapprio is the bad guy.
Rand appears to agree that this would be absurd. She argues:
1: That the question is illegitimate, and the very fact that we are asking it proves the superiority of objectivists to altruists.
2: That the rational way of behaving in a shipwreck is in any case very much like that dictated by the tao: the rational man will rescue his friends, loved-ones, and possibly even strangers.
3: But this doesn’t make any difference because emergencies are special cases where special rules apply.
Turning the argument round and attacking the moral character of the people making it is not necessarily the hallmark of a serious philosophical essay. It smacks of "Weak case: insult opposing lawyer." What bad people these altruists must be to test a new theory by examining edge-cases! Lack of self-esteem, lack of respect for others, nightmare view of existence…
“A lethargic indifference to ethics, a hopelessly cynical amorality—since his questions involve situations which he is not likely ever to encounter, which bear no relation to the actual problems of his own life and thus leave him to live without any moral principles whatever.”
On no possible view could it be true to say that altruists have no moral principals. Even by Rand’s own arguments, they have lots of moral principals — just the wrong ones. But that aside: how do you get from “altruists point to extreme cases" to “altruists have no moral principals whatsoever.”
I suppose you would have to construct an argument along these lines:
1: Altruists point to extreme cases like fires and shipwrecks to refute the idea that we have no duty to help anyone else.
2: Therefore, extreme cases like fires and shipwrecks must be the only exceptions to the general rule that we have no duty to help anyone else.
3: It is intrinsically unlikely that any individual will ever experience a shipwreck or earthquake.
4: Principals drawn from improbable circumstances have no application to probable ones.
5: Therefore any attempt to infer the correct behavior in probably circumstance from the correct behavior in an improbably one is necessarily false.
6: Therefore people who argue from extreme cases have no basis for their conclusions.
7: Since people who believe in altruism argue from extreme cases, altruists have no basis for their belief in altruism.
8: Since people who believe in altruism have no basis for their belief in altruism, they have no basis for any of their other beliefs either.
But this doesn’t work at all. Point 1 is not necessarily true. Because I raise one example, it doesn't mean there aren't any others I could have raised. You can believe something for more than one reason. Point 4 begs the question: it might be that the same rules apply in the exceptional case as in the normal one, or it might not. And point 8 is obviously nonsense: it doesn't follow at all that if I have one false belief, all my other beliefs are false as well.
If we accepted Rand's position, we would have to say that any argument involving a hypothetical or a thought experiment is automatically invalid: that you can only make moral judgement about specific, concrete events. (I believe that some anarchists are reluctant to state general principals for this reason: because there are no general cases, only an infinite number of unique ones.) But extreme and unlikely cases are frequently useful because they help us to visualize a question. Conscientious objectors were always asked “What would you do if a German officer were raping your grandmother?”— not because there was much chance of the German army molesting that particular pacifist’s elderly relative, but because the proposition “I will not join the army because killing is wrong under all possible circumstances” is refuted if you can come up with even one circumstance where it might be right. When asked what he understood courage to mean, Socrates asked “Well, suppose you were a passenger at sea in a terrible storm….?” Would a rational man have replied “But I am not in a terrible storm, so obviously you have to live your life without any understand of courage whatsoever. See where this 'philosophy' stuff gets you!”
But this is a distraction, because it turns out that if a group of Randian objectivists really were on a sinking ship they would be just as likely to pull each other out of the water, give up their places in lifeboats, and generally act in accordance with the tao as anybody else.
In the first place, says Rand, this rule that you should look out for yourself and not for others doesn’t apply to friends and lovers. But this isn't really an exception: when you do a good turn for someone you love, you are acting selfishly, because:
“It is one’s own personal selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.”
Ah, so: objectivists are cynical people, choosing their friends and wives in anticipation of some tangible return — money, social status, career advancement, someone to look after the kids, invitations to the best parties, sex etc? Not a bit of it. What you get out of a loved one is “a profoundly personal, private joy” and “personal, selfish happiness”. So when you help someone else, you are really acting to preserve that “private joy” and “personal happiness”. If a rich man spends a fortune to save his wife’s life, he is not acting altruistically, but selfishly. He wants her to live because he derives happiness from her; he doesn’t want her to die because he would then be less happy than he would be if she were still alive:
"In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice."
But all this does is re-frame altruistic actions as selfish ones: instead of saying “I will save your life because I don’t want you to die” we have to say “I will save your life because I don’t want to be sad". It might be possible, and it might also be interesting, to re-frame all moral choices in that way. You say "I donate money to feed a starving child because it is the right thing to do": I say "You donate money to feed a starving child because you selfishly dislike the sensations of guilt you experience when imagining the child starving to death." But that hasn't told us anything new about how we ought to behave. Either way, the wife gets the surgery and the child gets a bowl of rice.
We assume that the man who pays for his wife’s operation honestly loves his wife, and will truly have less happiness and less joy if she dies than if she stays alive. But supposing he does not have those feelings? Supposing he he actually sick to death of the crabby old ratbag, is quite sure he'd be happier as a widower, but stomps up the money because it’s the right thing to do. Do we have to say that he's acted immorally? Or suppose he’s with us on that sinking ship and says “I will save my baby rather than my wife, because I honestly think that the baby is more important to my personal happiness than the woman”? Does his wife get a say? Supposing he says “I will save my mistress rather than my wife” or even “I will save my puppy rather than my baby”? Assuming that his dog really was important to his personal private joy and happiness and the baby wasn't, do we have to say that he acted in rational self-interest and therefore morally?
Or are we allowed to say “Maybe you did love your dog more than your child, but you ought not to have done”?
If we take the first line, then what set out to be rational theory of ethics turns out to mean “be guided by your emotions: do whatever will make you happy”. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, without even the qualification about harming none. This is exactly what Prof. Lewis warned us would happen. There is a certain irony about how much of our rational ethic comes down to emotions like love, joy and happiness.
Or are we allowed to say “Maybe you did love your dog more than your child, but you ought not to have done”?
If we take the first line, then what set out to be rational theory of ethics turns out to mean “be guided by your emotions: do whatever will make you happy”. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, without even the qualification about harming none. This is exactly what Prof. Lewis warned us would happen. There is a certain irony about how much of our rational ethic comes down to emotions like love, joy and happiness.
But if you take the second line — that the sensible, rational, selfish thing to do is indeed to save the lives of the people who you love but if, and only if, you love the people you ought to love and do not love the people you ought not to love — then Rand hasn’t said anything very new. Ethics is about arranging your values in the correct order — loving the most important things most; the second most important things second most; the least important things least; and the unimportant things not at all. Isn't this exactly what Aristotle told us all those months ago?
[to be continued]
A Close Reading of the First Great Graphic Novel in American Literature
by
Andrew Rilstone
.jpeg)
If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider supporting Andrew on Patreon.
if you do not want to commit to paying on a monthly basis, please consider leaving a tip via Ko-Fi.
Amazing Spider-Man was written and drawn by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and is copyright Marvel Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copywriter holder.
Please do not feed the troll.