I. Introduction
Why does the claim of objectivity in morality spook us so—more so than in other realms? Claims of objectivity hardly enjoy unanimous confidence in other spheres, yet in many areas, people are much more ready to accept that knowable facts govern and we can definitively answer our questions (in chemistry, computers, baking, biking, and so on). With ethics, however, more people are hesitant to say, “These views are right.” Obviously, not everyone is reticent. Many people, sometimes fueled by religious ardor, are unequivocally devoted to the certainty of their moral views. Nonetheless, we do find more people who are hospitable to claims of objectivity in other realms to be decidedly less sure-footed when it comes to ethics. Why is this?
Numerous factors, no doubt, contribute.
1. People disagree a great deal about moral issues. Standards and practices across cultures and within the same culture often diverge dramatically. Many people resign themselves to such disagreement as a permanent, unalterable fact of life and conclude that it testifies to the absence of objective moral truths.
2. It is difficult, in ethics, to prove that you are right. From the fact that it is difficult to prove that a moral position is correct, some conclude that it is impossible to prove a position correct and that there are no right answers.
3. People are uncertain of how to measure moral judgments; they are not sure what yardsticks are properly used to assess competing claims. This, in turn, results from widespread uncertainty about the purpose of ethics and exactly what ethics is. The prevailing view is that morality governs social relations and is a means of getting along with other people. Its goal (at least, among those who think that it has one) is to facilitate a certain ease in social relations, to promote the smooth functioning of society. Such ease and smooth functioning are themselves liable to be taken to mean different things, however. And this haziness in understanding what ethics is leaves us without a clear standard for evaluating differing codes of ethics or more specific moral claims.Footnote 1
4. Ethics is emotional. It occupies touchy territory. Those who disagree often care fervently about the issues in dispute. People are wary of challenging views that are so deeply felt, since doing so can seem like an attack on the person who advocates those views. The overlay of ethics with emotion, moreover, often leads people to regard differing thoughts about moral issues as merely expressions of emotions.
5. Ethics is abstract. The claim that something is good or bad or right or wrong stands atop layers of reasoning.Footnote 2 Yet the basic subject matter of ethics—how each of us ought to lead his life—leads people to expect knowledge of moral truths, if such exists, to be more readily available than knowledge in other abstract areas where the need for specialized and advanced study is plain, such as medicine or engineering. How to lead one's life, people presume, shouldn't be rocket science. If it is difficult to understand moral truths, that must be because no such truths exist.
6. Finally, skepticism about the credentials that qualify those who profess to know moral truths fuels doubts about objectivity. Who's to say what's right or wrong?
This is far from an exhaustive catalog, and it ignores the interplay of various factors that explain people's reluctance to embrace moral objectivity. What I wish to focus on are the philosophical roots of this attitude. Philosophically, I think that the issue primarily comes down to two factors: misunderstanding of the function of ethics, and misunderstanding of the nature of moral objectivity. In this essay, I shall address the latter. I will elaborate on Ayn Rand's conception of moral objectivity because I believe that it offers an illuminating perspective on the traditional debate between subjectivism and objectivism that can help to move that debate forward.
The opposing camps in this debate are long entrenched. The more that is written in defense of each side, it sometimes seems, the more deeply entrenched advocates' commitments to their respective positions become. And the alternative between the two sides seems clear as day. Essentially, moral objectivists affirm moral truths that are independent of any human beliefs or attitudes concerning the content of those truths; subjectivists deny this, maintaining that moral truth is always dependent on the views of a particular person or persons. (I will speak of “subjectivism” throughout to encompass all forms of subjectivism and relativism.) Yet in fact, Rand maintains, the defense of objective value has been dominated by advocates of intrinsic value, which is not the same thing. Confusing these two conceptions of value bolsters the credibility of subjectivism and distorts the entire debate. Genuine objectivity is rarely on the table. Rand distinguishes between three central alternatives: subjectivism, intrinsicism, and objectivism. In what follows, I shall focus on the distinction between objectivism and intrinsicism so as to clarify the distinctive nature of the moral objectivity that she espouses. Doing so will reveal a crucial element that is usually overlooked: the importance of the subject in objective morality.
My presentation of Rand's view is sympathetic, but it is not a full defense of her moral theory. While I will naturally need to present certain points of argument to convey the plausibility of relevant portions of her theory, my mission here is to present a perspective that can enhance our understanding of the traditional debate. Regardless of whether one accepts Rand's larger moral theory, if she is right about the frequent confusion of objective with intrinsic value, her trichotomy offers a more accurate picture of the alternatives and thereby places us in a better position to assess the relative merits of moral objectivism and subjectivism.Footnote 3
The essay is divided into three main parts. I shall first present Rand's view of moral intrinsicism; next, elaborate on her own view of the nature of moral objectivity; and lastly, underscore certain features marking the distinctiveness of her view. Throughout, I will speak primarily of the objectivity of value because value serves as the foundation for all other moral judgments, in Rand's view. I shall also use “ethics” and “morality” interchangeably.
II. The Intrinsicist Model of Moral Objectivity
When people contemplate the objectivity of ethics, very often what they have in mind is the notion that value or propriety resides in certain things. They conceive of objective value as roughly some sort of substance or property that exists “out there in the world,” independently of human attitudes. Value is considered a type of external existent, and the question for objectivists and subjectivists to settle is whether any of this hypothesized stuff actually exists.
Rand maintains that many accounts of objective ethics actually thus reflect intrinsicism, the view that “the good resides in some sort of reality, independent of man's consciousness….”Footnote 4 Intrinsicist theories hold that “the good is inherent in certain things or actions as such, regardless of their context and consequences, regardless of any benefit or injury they may cause to the actors and subjects involved. It is a theory that divorces the concept of ‘good’ from beneficiaries, and the concept of ‘value’ from valuer and purpose—claiming that the good is good in, by, and of itself.”Footnote 5
What—or who—is Rand talking about?
Plato represents the paradigm of the intrinsicist view. A champion of objective morality, Plato holds that all moral goodness reflects the Form of the Good. Every Form, on his account, is an essence or universal that exists on its own—in a realm apart from the realm of particulars. All of the individual things that people encounter in everyday experience are what they are insofar as they partake of the relevant Form. (The relationship of partaking is notoriously elusive.) What is important for our purposes is that it is only due to the freestanding existence of something that is goodness, on Plato's view, that anything else can be good or possess any of the derivative moral properties (such as being right, wrong, permissible, virtuous, vicious, etc.).Footnote 6
This intrinsicist outlook, in various permutations, continues to the present day. Consider several more-recent presentations of the objectivity of morality.
Michael Huemer, an intuitionist advocate of moral objectivity, sounds thoroughly Platonic in writing that “[m]oral claims are assertions about a class of irreducible, objective properties, which cannot be known on the basis of observation.”Footnote 7 Geoffrey Sayre-McCord describes moral objectivists as holding that the truth conditions of moral claims “make no reference to anyone's subjective states or to the capacities, conventions, or practices of any group of people. Underlying objectivism is the sense, well articulated by [W. D.] Ross, that ‘it is surely a strange reversal of the natural order of thought to say that our admiring an action either is, or is what necessitates, its being good. We think of its goodness as what we admire in it, and as something it would have even if no one admired it, something that it has in itself.’ ”Footnote 8
Ross eloquently articulates the intrinsicist model again when he affirms that “the moral order” expressed in propositions claiming that something is prima facie right “is just as much a part of the fundamental nature of the universe … as is the spatial or numerical structure expressed in the axioms of geometry or arithmetic.”Footnote 9 G. E. Moore's contention that a beautiful world has more value than an ugly one, regardless of whether anyone occupies or observes these worlds, is another example of objective value conceived as residing in select things.Footnote 10 More recently, Thomas Nagel echoes Moore by claiming that when a culture dies out, “something valuable has gone out of existence. This cannot be explained by the harm to existing individuals, all of whom will have other things to do and other ways to flourish…. [I]ts disappearance would be a loss nonetheless, though a loss to no one… .”Footnote 11
Yet another statement of the self-sufficiency of objective morality comes from Russell Shafer-Landau, who contends that moral facts exist “independently of what any human being, no matter his or her perspective, thinks of them.” “Moral obligations constitute reasons for everyone to act as they direct, regardless of whether such reasons bear any relations to one's existing commitments.”Footnote 12
According to Rand, these depictions of moral objectivity suggest that the alternative to subjectivism—to value's existing “in people's heads”—is value's existing “out there,” lodged within particular things. This is a mistake, however. In fact, objective value relies on contributions of both consciousness and external reality. Moral objectivity is a function of the relationship between subject and object. It is neither located in nor a product of either, to the exclusion of the other. While one might be able to find elements of the intrinsicist and subjectivist schools with which Rand would agree, it is crucial to understand that such elements represent only partial truths, in her view, that need to be supplemented by the full explanation of the dynamic that gives rise to values.Footnote 13
Let us turn, then, to Rand's account of what this third alternative to subjectivism and intrinsicism is.
III. Objectivity Without Intrinsicism: Rand's View
To understand Rand's account of the objectivity of morality, we need to understand some of the framework within which it is set. Thus, I will first sketch Rand's broader view of morality and then zero in on the features that distinguish its objectivity.
A. The nature and origin of value
As I have explained in greater depth elsewhere, the function of ethics, in Rand's view, is to enable human beings to flourish.Footnote 14 Ethics is “a code of values to guide man's choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the course and the purpose of his life,” she writes.Footnote 15 A value, in turn, is “that which one acts to gain and/or keep.”Footnote 16 Values range from material objects to relationships, conditions, positions, qualities of character, psychological dispositions—things such as coats, cars, friendship, freedom, a career, knowledge, perseverance, initiative. Ethics' concern is to identify the most basic, abstract values necessary to steer a person to the achievement of more concrete values. The reason for having ethics is that its guidance is a necessity of survival.Footnote 17
Each living organism's life depends on goal-directed action that satisfies the organism's needs. However simple or sophisticated the life-form in question—be it a sycamore, a silkworm, a hawk, or a human being—it must engage in certain activities in order to obtain and process the fuel that its sustenance depends on. Life is a process that consists of self-generated, self-sustaining action. Every organism must do certain things in order to maintain that process.
For human beings, unlike lower life-forms, much of the requisite action must be deliberately chosen. Consequently, we must know how to choose and what to choose. This creates our need for morality. A moral code identifies the kinds of ends that a person should seek (values) and the kinds of actions that he should take to secure values (virtues).Footnote 18 (It does so, again, at a fairly abstract level, with concretes to be filled in as objectively validated by a particular individual's context.)
The phenomenon of value in the normative sense—of things' being good or bad, of certain ends as worthwhile and others not—is intelligible only against this background.Footnote 19 Nothing can be valuable to inanimate objects. All sorts of things can happen to them, of course, many of which may be good or bad for particular people who have reason to care about the objects in question. (It is bad for me when my car's front tire goes flat.) But it is only relative to goals and purposes—which are the exclusive province of living organisms—that events can be good or bad. Nothing can be good or bad for an entity unless something is at stake for it; it must stand to lose or gain something. While numerous layers of goals or purposes may be needed to understand how something is a net gain or loss in a given case, the fundamental alternative that gives rise to any “gaining” or “losing” is the alternative between life and death. Impact on an organism's living provides the basis by which we can objectively distinguish good from bad.Footnote 20 On Rand's view, accordingly, for any human being who seeks to live, those things that enhance his life are good; those things that jeopardize or detract from his life are bad. “Good” means good for the person in question, and “bad” means bad for the person.Footnote 21
As this quick introduction indicates, Rand's moral theory is naturalistic. It is facts of man's nature that give rise to value and set the terms of morality because it is these facts that create our need to treat certain things as valuable and certain things as threats or impediments to values. Just as researchers in medicine seek to learn the sorts of substances and actions that are most conducive to peak physical flourishing for human beings, Rand maintains that the role of ethicists is to identify the sorts of ends and actions (albeit, at an abstract level) that are most conducive to all-encompassing human flourishing, material and spiritual.Footnote 22 A value is an end that contributes to a person's flourishing. The basic normative guidance that emerges from this foundation is egoistic: a person should act in the ways conducive to his well-being. (In this respect, Rand's view is unlike the views of most naturalists, but egoism is not my focus in this essay.)Footnote 23
It is important to emphasize that a person should act in this way if he seeks to live. Unlike many advocates of the objectivity of morality, Rand does not regard the commands of morality as a given; we do not bear any unchosen duties. “Reality confronts a man with a great many ‘musts,’” she writes, “but all of them are conditional. The formula of realistic necessity is: ‘you must, if … if you want to achieve a certain goal.’” This applies to morality as much as to anything else. If a person wishes to live, he should follow the prescriptions of a rational moral code that tells him how.Footnote 24
Values, then, are conditional—as is all of the derivative moral instruction that rests on the identification of values. Values are based on facts that are not of man's making—his nature and the needs of his survival—as well as on a fact that is of his making: his embrace of his life, his commitment to living.
All of this indicates the basic manner in which value is objective, in Rand's view. Ethics serves a practical mission; things are good or bad according to whether they help to accomplish that mission. Life is the standard of value.Footnote 25 To appreciate the difference between objective value and intrinsic value, however, we need to turn to her more exact account of what the objectivity of values consists in.
B. The relational character of objective value
Rand writes:
The objective theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of “things in themselves” nor of man's emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man's consciousness according to a rational standard of value. (Rational, in this context, means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.) The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man—and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man. Fundamental to an objective theory of values is the question: Of value to whom and for what? An objective theory … does not permit the separation of “value” from “purpose,” of the good from beneficiaries, and of man's actions from reason.Footnote 26
Notice that Rand characterizes the good as both “an evaluation” (by a rational standard) and “an aspect of reality.” In his elaboration of Rand's view, Leonard Peikoff makes value's two-dimensional nature equally plain: “The good designates facts—the requirements of survival—as identified conceptually, and then evaluated by human consciousness in accordance with a rational standard of value (life).”Footnote 27
One might well wonder: how can it be both? But there is no great puzzle here. A distinction from Christine Korsgaard may be helpful. Korsgaard has observed that the term “values” can refer to at least three different things: valuable objects themselves (such as operas, flowers, friendships); the properties in virtue of which we deem certain things valuable (in flowers, for example, their appealing colors and scents); and the valuableness that we attribute to the objects in virtue of those properties.Footnote 28 In Rand's usage, a value is a thing (such as a flower or an opera—Korsgaard's first sense), insofar as it possesses the properties (Korsgaard's second sense) that render it rationally to be pursued by a particular person (Korsgaard's third sense). (There is actually a little more to Rand's view, but we'll get to that shortly.) In their statements presenting the nature of objective value, Rand and Peikoff are simply indicating the different aspects of a value that can be important to stress in different contexts.
The main substantive message is that objective value is relational, in Rand's view. Value neither exists nor is created entirely in our heads nor entirely in external reality. Values are not reducible to psychological states, as in subjectivism; nor are they independent of them, as in intrinsicism. Both external and internal conditions are necessary for values. To be a value, the thing in question must, in fact, serve a person's life, and that person must seek his life. It is important to understand each of these.Footnote 29
First, a value must in fact be beneficial to a person; it must bring him some net gain. Given Rand's argument that the phenomenon of value is intelligible only in the context of impact on a life, no freestanding value “in” various external things could exist. Nothing is valuable apart from its bearing on a life. What a particular thing's impact is, of course, can sometimes be difficult to judge. Moreover, the magnitude of impact can range from the life-changing to the quickly forgotten. Winning a ten-dollar bet is not typically as valuable as gaining a job promotion; discovering a restaurant you like is not typically as valuable as discovering a passion for a particular field of work. Nonetheless, any objective value, be it modest or momentous, must offer some positive contribution to the person's flourishing. And, contrary to subjectivism, whether a given thing does so is a matter of fact rather than of anyone's beliefs or wishes. People can be as mistaken about what is good or bad for them—about the effects that various things carry on their well-being—as about anything else.
I should caution, however, against reading this feature of objective value in an unrealistically rigid way. Rand's contention is not that the designation of something as an objective value for a particular person requires infallible advance knowledge of things' ultimate impact on our lives. If it is truly, objectively rational for Blake, in his context of knowledge, to believe that item x or activity y would be a net benefit for him but he turns out to have been mistaken about this, it remains the case that it was objectively valuable from his perspective. When discussing the objectivity of value, it is important to always bear in mind the different perspectives of the relevant individual himself at the time of choice or action and that of a more fully informed or hindsighted observer. This is not a concession to relativism, but a simple recognition of the fact that any assessment of something as objectively valuable is necessarily someone's assessment and that humans are fallible, non-omniscient beings. Consonant with this, we can legitimately evaluate the same object or event (Blake's having that house, taking that medicine, accepting that job) in opposing ways from the two perspectives, so long as we are clear about which perspective is being employed. There is no contradiction in simultaneously holding that a particular job was not objectively valuable for Blake insofar as it did not deliver the expected net benefit and that the job was objectively valuable for Blake insofar as it was objectively rational for him, at the time he accepted it, to expect that it would deliver this benefit. Error is not proof of a failure to be objective.Footnote 30
Another way of viewing this might seem more natural. We should distinguish between assessments of whether a person is being objective in reaching a conclusion about a thing's value and assessments of whether the thing in question is in fact beneficial to him. Judgment of the latter requires the more fully informed perspective that is not always available. Accordingly, when I say that an objective value must be beneficial to the relevant person, on Rand's view, I mean that it must be beneficial as far as he has objective reason to expect.Footnote 31 The objective character of this belief should become clearer as we proceed.
It is not enough that something stands to benefit a person, however, for it to be an objective value to him. Further, he must seek his life. (This is the second critical element of the value relation that I noted above.) Moreover and closely related, he must identify the thing's beneficial impact on that end.
Unless a person chooses to embrace his life—to maintain it, by seeking to achieve his well-being—all the facts in the world about various things' effects on his life will not matter. They will carry no value significance. Those causal relationships themselves will remain, of course (protein will still be nutritious, certain activities will still be dangerous while many others will still be life-enhancing), but it is only in the context of the quest for life that values arise. It is a person's desire to live that converts clinical, impersonal facts about things' effects into values: things that he should act to gain or keep (because he seeks his life and because of the nature of the things in question and their impact on that end). In an essay, Rand observes that “material objects as such have neither value nor disvalue; they acquire value-significance only in regard to a living being—particularly, in regard to serving or hindering man's goals.”Footnote 32 Goals, however, are things that human beings deliberately adopt.Footnote 33
I noted above that a thing's being an objective value for a person also requires his recognition of the thing's potential benefit to him. This recognition is important because a value is a thing to go after; it is the object of action (“that which one acts to gain and/or keep,” quoted in Footnote Section III.A above). Human beings must act in order to acquire many of the things necessary for our existence. We need to engage in life-sustaining activities; we need to secure life-sustaining ends. While some of the requisite actions occur automatically thanks to our genetic coding (digestion, circulation, etc.), many other requisite actions are volitional and must be chosen from among alternatives. Consequently, a person must know which things to choose. A person will not act for the sake of x unless he thinks x worth acting for, among the things that he has reason to seek. What this means is that no beneficial thing can function as a value for a person without his having identified it as beneficial. Nothing can function in the way that some things must function, in other words (namely, as prods to life-sustaining action), unless they are seen as worth the effort.Footnote 34 That will only be the case if the person wants to live and sees a particular end as a means of furthering that larger end. When a person does recognize something's potential benefit for him, his attitude, in effect, is: “Yes, okay, this is likely to get me some of the sort of thing I am seeking.” If he fails to recognize a thing's potential benefit, however, while the object in question may continue to carry some of its effects on his existence (the antibiotic will still heal a wound; milk will still nourish), it will not be a value to him.
One might object that I am begging the question here by assuming Rand's definition of value as something that a person acts to acquire. If that is what a value is, then of course the recognition of a benefit will be necessary for the existence of a value. But isn't hers an odd definition of value?
The validity of Rand's definition rests in the fact that a value is more than a benefit. While it is useful to know which things stand to benefit human beings, it is useful to know this because human beings must take action in order to acquire many of the goods that our lives depend upon. While, again, certain of the necessary actions occur automatically, it is because numerous equally vital activities do not so conveniently transpire that we need to identify the further types of actions that will enable us to achieve life-furthering ends and flourish. For this reason, we must identify not simply benefits, but values—that is, ends whose attainment would be beneficial but whose attainment is possible only if we take appropriate action. The rewards of a particular friendship or career, for instance, are benefits that depend in part on a person's taking certain actions. The rewards of a desired commodity, for that matter, such as a coat or a car or a house, also typically depend on a person's actions enabling him to acquire and maintain the item.
I should thus refine my claim above that a value is “more than a benefit.” More exactly, a value is a particular type of benefit. Many things benefit human beings without any deliberate cooperation on our parts (sunlight, rainfall, episodes of fortunate coincidence that help a person to be hired for a job when he is one of several who are equally qualified, for instance). Identifying benefits is not sufficient to sustain us, however. Among all potential benefits, we further need to identify those whose benefit depends on or can be enhanced by our action, so that we can subsequently take the relevant action. We need, in other words, to distinguish benefits from the subset that constitute values, things we must act to acquire. Rand's definition, I think, is thus vindicated.Footnote 35
The larger point vis-à-vis the relational character of objective value, again, is that because flourishing requires deliberate action of certain sorts, a value is not simply something that stands to benefit the person who embraces his life. It is also something that he recognizes as such.Footnote 36
We now, I hope, have a fuller grasp of the relationship that constitutes objective value, in Rand's view. For something to be a value is for it to be a benefit to a particular person who wishes to live and who identifies its benefit. The relationship involved is to a person's consciousness as well as to his existential condition. As Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri have summarized it, for Rand, values “are formed by a consciousness in accordance with the facts of reality. To be a value something must be identified by an agent as furthering his life. The identification is, in Rand's terminology, man-made, as is the choice to live that gives it meaning. But the relationship between the value and the agent's life is metaphysically given, as is the need to identify this relationship conceptually.”Footnote 37 The objectivity of values thus reflects both facts that are independent of a person's mental states and facts that are not.
C. The broader character of objective morality
We can now step back from the details of this relationship to appreciate Rand's broader image of the objectivity of morality. One significant implication of the relationship I have described is that objectivity pertains primarily to people, rather than to things “out there” in the world. Objectivity, at bottom, is a normative rather than a descriptive concept. The two are intimately connected, in Rand's view; any valid normative claim must be grounded in an accurate description of the relevant facts. Indeed, the practical purpose of morality makes facts all-important to the determination of what a person should and shouldn't do. The immediate point, however, is that objectivity refers primarily to a manner of using one's mind. In any sphere of knowledge, objectivity concerns the method that guides a person's thinking about an issue and the basis on which he reaches conclusions. Whatever the subject matter—biology, economics, history, cooking, snorkeling, brick-laying—an objective truth is one that has been reached and can be validated by adherence to all and only the relevant evidence, governed strictly by logical inferences therefrom. What Rand stresses is that the same holds in the realm of morality. A moral claim is objective when it can be validated by objective methods.
Rand allows that objectivity is not entirely methodological. She distinguishes two senses of “objective”:
Objectivity is both a metaphysical and an epistemological concept. It pertains to the relationship of consciousness to existence. Metaphysically, it is the recognition of the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver's consciousness. Epistemologically, it is the recognition of the fact that a perceiver's (man's) consciousness must acquire knowledge of reality by certain means (reason) in accordance with certain rules (logic). This means that although reality is immutable and, in any given context, only one answer is true, the truth is not automatically available to a human consciousness and can be obtained only by a certain mental process which is required of every man who seeks knowledge…. Metaphysically, the only authority is reality; epistemologically—one's own mind. The first is the ultimate arbiter of the second.Footnote 38
What Rand finds undeniable in the metaphysical sense of moral objectivity is that some things are such that a person should seek them. Doing so would advance his life. Moreover, human beings are capable of knowing of these things. When we do know of them, however, it is because we have identified them as values on objective grounds. To say that morality is objective is thus largely a comment on how we attain knowledge of what is good. Strictly, facts are not objective. They are not the sort of thing that could be. It is only human beings who can be objective or non-objective in how we think about facts and in the claims that we make about them. Statements asserting facts can become objective when they result from the objective method.Footnote 39
Given my claim that a moral claim is objective when it can be validated by objective methods, one might wonder about the order of dependence here. Rand's distinction between metaphysical objectivity and epistemological objectivity is widely accepted, but which, in her view, is primary?Footnote 40 Am I saying that, for Rand, epistemological objectivity determines metaphysical objectivity?Footnote 41
No. Recall her claim that reality is “the ultimate arbiter” of epistemology. This certainly means that epistemological objectivity does not determine reality. The relationships involved are somewhat intricate, however, in part because the question itself can be taken to refer to either epistemological or metaphysical primacy.
The answer is best understood, I think, by considering: What is it that leads human beings to devise the concept of “objectivity” in the first place? What leads us to differentiate valid from invalid means of gaining knowledge? Answer: the recognition of certain facts about human consciousness—in particular, its fallibility and its means of gaining knowledge. What we are responding to, in conceiving of the objective and the non-objective, is the independent character of reality (external reality as well as the pertinent features of the nature of the human mind). Yet the reason that we need the concept “objective” stems most directly from the fact that we control our consciousnesses—what we think, whether we think, how we think. Human beings make choices that determine the course of our thought; we do not automatically make rational choices or think in ways that reach accurate conclusions about reality. For this reason, we find it necessary to distinguish reality-tracking methods of using our minds (objective) from non–reality-tracking methods (non-objective).
On the question of which type of objectivity is primary, then: What qualifies as epistemologically objective is grounded in and must be faithful to the nature of reality. In that respect, one might say that metaphysical objectivity is primary. Yet given that the concept of objectivity arises in order to govern human beings' thinking about reality, in an equally important sense, one might say that epistemological objectivity is primary. While reality “comes first” insofar as it dictates the need for the concept of objectivity as well as what constitutes (epistemological) objectivity, it is significant that we coin the concept of “metaphysical objectivity” only after realizing the need for objectivity in our method of thinking (that is, after recognizing the value of distinguishing the epistemologically objective from the epistemologically non-objective). Indeed, speaking very strictly, the claim represented by a thing's purported “metaphysical objectivity” (namely, that a given thing's nature is as it is independently of us) is not properly characterized as a “metaphysically objective” fact or existent.Footnote 42 Facts are simply facts. The concept of objectivity arises because we come to realize the need to discipline our thinking about reality, but reality is what it is—facts are what they are—quite independently of that thinking.
To put this last thought in a slightly different way: Strictly, the question of objectivity does not arise for reality. Reality cannot be either objective or non-objective. (Any purportedly “non-objective reality” is not truly reality.) The question of objectivity and the alternatives of being objective or non-objective arise for us, rather, in distinguishing ways of thinking about reality. Then, once we have developed that epistemological concept of objectivity, we can ascribe the concept in an indirect way to reality itself, calling certain things “objectively” so or “metaphysically objective.” But the concept of metaphysical objectivity is derivative from the prior concept (epistemologically prior) of epistemological objectivity.
Thus, on reflection, even the statement that in one sense, metaphysical objectivity is prior seems not quite right. For it is not that “metaphysical objectivity” is prior to epistemological objectivity. Rather, reality is prior. Reality is what sets the terms of objectivity, what determines what counts as objective—epistemologically objective as well as metaphysically objective. Our fallible means of gaining knowledge of reality leads us to distinguish between objective and non-objective methods of thought (epistemological objectivity), and we subsequently apply that distinction indirectly to reality itself, via the concept of metaphysical objectivity.
The upshot, for our purposes in differentiating Rand's understanding of objective value from intrinsicism, is this. In Rand's view, the assertion of objective values is not a report on the ontological status of certain preexisting good things woven into the fabric of the universe. The search for objective values is not akin to a treasure hunt, driven by the question: Where is the stuff? References to objectivity in the moral realm are, to a considerable extent, prescriptive. They instruct a person not so much in what to think, as in how to think—how to use his mind in order to answer moral questions and to evaluate competing answers.Footnote 43 The essence of the objective method, again, is deliberate, logical adherence to reality, to relevant facts.Footnote 44 Thus, the moral objectivity that Rand affirms consists in the fact that moral truths—whether assertions of moral goodness, badness, or derivative moral claims—can be validated by employment of this method. And, to tie this back to her view of the overall function of morality, the reason that a person should be objective in thinking about moral matters is that objectivity offers his only means of identifying the facts that he needs to identify, in order to chart a course of action that can result in his flourishing. Reality—or a person's successful navigation of reality—demands objectivity.
A second noteworthy implication of Rand's conception of moral objectivity is her denial of a thesis often associated with moral objectivism, the belief that objective values form a single set, identical for everyone. In her view, not all values are universal or equally applicable to everyone. Many things, to be sure, will be valuable to all human beings in virtue of our common human nature. Protein, exercise, and hygiene, for instance, as well as certain spiritual values such as friendship, art, education, and purpose, will be values to everyone who seeks to live.Footnote 45 At the same time, the exact means by which a person achieves such universal values can vary, within limits. It is morally optional whether a person satisfies his needs for art and relaxation through jazz and crossword puzzles or through theater and pinochle. It is morally optional whether he obtains his exercise through running or walking or playing basketball. The boundaries of optional values must be respected, in order for the more specific “values” to be genuine. Not any form of recreation will pass muster, since some are antithetical to human flourishing (binge drinking or Russian roulette are obvious examples). The parameters defining the permissible range are themselves objective insofar as they are grounded in the natural requirements of human life.
Rand is not saying, then, that honesty may legitimately mean one thing for Ben and another for Jerry. The basic principles by which a person can achieve the values that serve his objective well-being are uniform for all human beings. She is acknowledging, however, that many particular things can play objectively life-enhancing roles in some individuals' lives without doing so in others'. Correlatively, moral objectivity does not entail a single, exhaustive set of values that are identical for all persons.Footnote 46
IV. The Distinctive Character of Rand's Moral Objectivism
All of this presents the core of Rand's understanding of moral objectivity. My suggestion at the outset was that this perspective could facilitate progress in the long-standing debate over moral objectivity. Let me underscore, therefore, how hers is a distinctive view.
Like the subjectivists, Rand maintains that value is relational. Unlike in the subjectivist view, however, it is not relational simply to individuals' beliefs or attitudes. Rather, value is a function of a thing's relationship to a person's life, which encompasses his existential status as well as his consciousness. Matters of independent fact are indispensable to objective value. In order to advance our lives, human beings must respect certain facts that are not of our choosing. (Human beings need sleep, for example; therefore, I should value sleep. Unprotected intercourse is risky; therefore, to avoid pregnancy and disease, I should value contraception. That colleague is unreliable; I should not depend on him. That sister-in-law tends to be insightful; I should speak with her more often.) The person aware of objective value is recognizing that the object in question has certain qualities, rather than creating that fact.
In this, obviously, Rand sides with the traditional defenders of moral objectivity. She differs from these intrinsicist “objectivists,” however, insofar as they treat moral values as metaphysical existents. They conceive of objective values as givens of the universe, akin to rocks and minerals, prefabricated and contained in nature. The intrinsicists, in Rand's view, reify an abstraction. They treat the product of objective thought—the identification of a particular thing as standing in a life-furthering relationship to an individual—as if it were a freestanding entity.
It is important, in this vein, not to mistake Rand for a “relational intrinsicist.” Her contention is not that life is inherently valuable and that whatever bolsters life is thereby a value,Footnote 47 nor that certain things are inherently valuable but must be linked with a particular beneficiary in order to constitute “working” or full-fledged values. On her view, more distinctively, value does not exist for a person until and unless he seeks to live and appreciates the positive role that the would-be value can play in his life. Prior to that, all that exists are potential values. Because value is not free-floating within certain specially endowed things, on her view, the relevant relationship is not one of simply finding some of this gold dust and directing it to the benefit of a particular individual. What is necessary is not awareness of preexisting value, but identification of the positive relationship in which a given thing stands to one's life.Footnote 48
Rand holds that moral objectivity, like all objectivity, is essentially a matter of method. The intrinsicist, by contrast, believes that no particular method for discerning value is to be followed. Instead, you “just know” which things are good and right. According to Ross, “We have no more direct way of access to the facts about rightness and goodness and about what things are right or good, than by thinking about them; the moral convictions of thoughtful and well-educated people are the data of ethics, just as sense perceptions are the data of a natural science.”Footnote 49
This, however, is mysticism. It is utterly arbitrary. To the rational question of how one knows that a particular thing is valuable, the response “It just is” or “Some of us can tell” is a reassertion rather than an answer. And it is every bit as subjective as subjectivism.
Ross provides an especially stark disavowal of method. Many intrinsicists are not intuitionists, as he is, of course, and many are not nearly as forthright or as self-aware about their underlying methodology. What is significant to all intrinsicism, however, is the fact that, because no intrinsic value can be found or shown “in” things (as intrinsicists themselves often admit), assertions of intrinsicist moral truths inevitably reduce to projections of the non-objective opinions of the speaker. These are non-objective insofar as we have no means of objectively validating assertions of value that are put forward as, at bottom, independent of rational foundations. The discipline imposed by evidence and logic is precisely what the intrinsicists set aside. Whether one posits a Form of the Good in a realm apart from sensible experience from which all other goodness and rightness derive (as in Plato), or one proclaims a less grandly titled “goodness” that inheres in all good things (as in Ross, Moore, et al.), or one asserts moral obligations that bear no necessary relation to the obligated person's beliefs or commitments (as in Shafer-Landau and a train of others), the known absence of rational demonstration of the professed moral qualities means that they are professed as independent of the standards of rationality. The intrinsicist version of objectivity, in other words, shorn of its misleading labeling, collapses into subjectivism.
A recent defense of an intrinsicist form of intuitionism against charges of subjectivism offers a telling example.Footnote 50 Michael Huemer contends that an intuitionist does, contrary to critics, have a means of confirming an intuition's truth: by asking other people whether they share that intuition as well as by “seeing whether it coheres with other intuitive beliefs” of one's own.Footnote 51 What apparently escapes Huemer is that these tests are themselves subjective. Whether one checks one's intuitions against the beliefs of many subjects or of one subject (oneself), subjects remain determinative of moral truth. Subjectivism is again in command when Huemer responds to alleged caricatures of intuitionism in part by employing the test of whether disputed examples are controversial.Footnote 52 Degree of controversy, he fails to notice, is simply an index of popularity; it reflects the views of a large quantity of subjects. Thus, this intrinsicist attempt to avoid subjectivism also fails. To regard what most people think of any given case as the arbiter of objective truth is, at bottom, merely another form of subjectivism.Footnote 53
Certainly, Huemer does not mean to be a subjectivist; he is explicitly resisting it. Huemer's view collapses into a subjectivist one, however, insofar as it renders the subjective contents of individuals' minds determinative of objective value. Its effect, in other words, is the equivalent of subjectivism. If I understand his position correctly, Huemer would not maintain that people's intuitions create moral reality. Rather, our intuitions are our only means of access to such reality. For this reason, my charge of subjectivism may initially appear off-target. Huemer's account nonetheless cedes intuitions too much power to forestall subjectivism. For on his view, the alleged objectivity of a moral truth depends entirely on people's beliefs, rather than on the nature of the object. Because his account of objectivity includes no requirement that people's intuitions be grounded in the actual nature of the object in question, the account ends up, in practical application, being no different from subjectivism. What is objectively so, in morality? What a consensus of thinkers agrees is so.
This is but one example of a wider phenomenon. Rand's contention, in short, is that the dominant traditional image of moral objectivity, intrinsicism, is false to both the metaphysics and the epistemology of value. It assigns values an ontological status they do not actually possess and breeds a mental passivity (“open your eyes and see value”) that is directly contrary to the thoughtful, rational evaluation of relationships that human life requires. Intrinsicism invents value where none exists and fails to provide the type of guidance that a person needs in order to identify values (namely, a rational, evidence-anchored assessment of whether a given thing will in fact further his life and thus should be pursued).
While the subjectivists are right to preserve a role for the subject in their explanation of moral truth, then, and the intrinsicists are right to insist on the significance of the object, neither camp accurately captures the role of its favored feature, and both miss the crucial interaction between the two. Rand argues for recognition of the role of both subject and object. Objectivity in ethics is attained neither through revelation of the intrinsic property of goodness nor through the subject's creation of goodness, but through a rational procedure of evaluation that is strictly governed by the method of objectivity. Rand's theory identifies the process by which a subject can rationally identify objects as genuine values.
Rand's conception of moral objectivity does not, accordingly, purport to reflect a “view from nowhere.” Any view originates somewhere. The question that a person faces, in aspiring to moral objectivity, is not how to escape his vantage point, either literally or figuratively, but how to make his view conform with reality. What is the nature of this thing that I am considering? And what sort of impact is it most likely to exert on my life? These are the principal questions that a person must address.
The basis for evaluating answers to these questions is rooted in the object, although the evaluation, as well as the person's embrace of his life, are also necessary for the facts in question and the benefits they stand to offer to be objectively valuable to him. Thus, to the perennial challenge to assertions of objective truth in ethics—“Who decides?”—Rand's response is: it is not a matter of decision. She explains: “Nature does not decide—it merely is; man does not decide, in issues of knowledge, he merely observes that which is.”Footnote 54 On her theory, again, objective value reflects recognition of mind-independent facts coupled with a person's seeking his life and correlatively seeking the specific values that propel his life.
V. Conclusion
The long-standing debate over the objectivity of morality has been hampered, in Rand's view and in mine, by a skewed portrait of the alternatives. The dominant understanding of objective value is actually intrinsicist, reflecting the belief that certain things are good or right “in, by, and of” themselves. While the appeal of firm moral answers that are not contingent on people's ever-shifting opinions is understandable, what is missing from most assertions of objective moral truth is appreciation of the significant role of the subject, the person to whom and for whom anything can be valuable. Moreover, because assertions of intrinsic value ultimately collapse into subjectivism, the prevalent conception of objectivism in ethics does not offer a genuine alternative to subjectivism.
Rand's view, I think, helps to refine our understanding of what objectivity in ethics actually is. To claim objectivity for any particular assertion of value is to make a claim about the nature of the mental processes that led to that conclusion. It is not the assertion of some sort of particles of reality that exist as values, independently of us, but a statement of our ability to learn of the positive or negative impact that different things have on our existence. Claims about the value of specific things are claims about factual matters and, as such, are true or false. The positing of the objective value of particular things thus tells a person not where to look to find values, but how to use his mind in order to determine whether various things are values. One of the significant strengths of this theory is that its account of morality's objectivity is entirely of a piece with the basic nature of objective knowledge in any field. Morality's objectivity is no different in kind, qua objective, from medicine's objectivity.
I suggested at the outset that the philosophical roots of popular trepidation about morality's objectivity were essentially twofold: misunderstandings of the nature of moral objectivity, which I have examined here, and misguided views of the function of morality. Ultimately, the two cannot be severed. Rand's commitment to objectivity in ethics rests on her belief that the function of ethics is a practical one that can only be served by adherence to an objective course. This obviously raises even larger questions about the nature and function of morality. Examination of these questions is vital, however, not simply for reaching a verdict on Rand's view, but for progress in the objectivism-subjectivism standoff. For however deficient some of people's more superficial reasons for resistance to moral objectivity may be, people are right to be spooked by assertions of objective value that are, in essence, arbitrary. And this is what intrinsicist versions of moral objectivity offer. To escape the arbitrariness in subjectivism as well as in intrinsicist “objectivism,” we need to recognize that what answers to moral questions depend on (which is the central bone of contention between objectivists and subjectivists) itself depends on what answers to moral questions are for. It is only by also confronting this, I think, that real progress can be made.
