a review published September 1998
Unrugged Individualism: The Selfish Basis of Benevolence, by David Kelley. Institute for Objectivist Studies, 1996, 65 pages.
Generosity: Virtue in Civil Society, by Tibor R. Machan. Cato Institute, 1998, 107 + xii pages.
Rand certainly got attention by using these two words in a favorable way, and she got some enthusiastic converts, too. But, like previous egoists Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche, she also sowed confusion, and reaped a whirlwind.
The chief problem with doctrines of egoism is all the baggage carried from normal discourse. By definition selfishness is bad; Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines selfish as "concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself: seeking or concentrating on one's own advantage, pleasure, or well-being without regard for others." To recast selfishness as an unconditional virtue entails a denial that a concern with oneself can be excessive and a demonstration that seeking one's own interests without regard for others' interests is in itself a good thing.
Not surprisingly, doctrines of "ethical egoism" rarely do this. Egoists instead attack common notions of "selflessness" and "altruism," often in their most simple-minded forms, and then proceed to redefine "selfishness" in light of their critique of altruism. This quirky dialectic confuses most people — including, from what I can tell, some of the egoists themselves. The confusion wreaks havoc on many levels, from the lofty heights of written rhetoric to the dark depths of divided souls.
This is most clear in Ayn Rand's case, where her advocacy of egoism tended to shunt aside consideration of vast empires of human experience (notably sympathetic understanding and compassion) and was conjoined with an ungracious rhetorical style, a perversity of argument allowing no generosity to her enemies.
Even in setting up her basic terms, egoism and altruism, Rand does not play fair. Egoism, according to Rand, is the philosophy of "rational self-interest"; altruism she characterizes as the obligation to sacrifice oneself to other. Note that egoism is defined in terms of one set of ideas (rationality and interest), altruism by another (obligation and sacrifice). But in common parlance, egoism is generally used to mean the practice of sacrificing others to self. Rand's definition of altruism appropriately opposes this concept of egoism.
But when Rand writes of egoism, she is writing about something else. She explicitly opposed sacrificing others to self, and argued strenuously against sacrifice, period. If she were serious about this, one has to wonder why she didn't abandon the term "egoism" entirely, so not to confuse those tempted by the notion that sacrifices are sometimes necessary, even noble. Rand is, after all, a person very concerned about definition, and in other contexts is very careful to define terms univocally. My own suspicion is that she is enamored with the shocked response she hopes to get from her readers. (Rand had great literary flare, which sometimes can work against careful thought.)
By retaining the word "egoism," she condemned herself to perpetual misunderstanding. Her "new concept" was simply to remarry "rational" to "self-interest" and proclaim the marriage both "selfish" and "virtuous." Where does she ever refer to "irrational self-interest"? That is, to what virtually all other human beings mean by "selfishness"? And where does she explore "rational other- interest," which is what others mean by altruism?
Yes, she dealt with a few of the problems of ego and alter, of self and other. But because her rhetorical strategy stacked the deck against altruism, she robbed herself, her followers, and her opponents of the best terms in which to explore interest, conflict, cooperation, competition, dignity, rationality, flourishing, and peace.
Of course, Rand was too selfish — in the common, pejorative sense — to nurture a project whereby people might work together to solve these problems, to engage in philosophical dialogue for mutual benefit. She had the answers, others did not.
Just as bad, her redefining egoism and altruism had the unfortunate consequence of denying her opponents the honor of rationality. By characterizing all those sympathetic with altruism as proponents of the duty to self-sacrifice she denied that they had any rational interest in others. She thus began by insulting those she disagreed with. Rhetoric that begins in insult rarely ends by convincing one's opponents.
The basic trouble with egoism as an ethical doctrine is that it either a very misleading name for a decent doctrine (the doctrine opposing the sacrificing of some for others ), or a very apt name for a despicable doctrine. Ayn Rand advocated the decent doctrine, but by sticking with a rhetorically loaded term she was led, as if by an invisible hand, to behave despicably.
And so it is that Rand's admirers — as you might guess, I'm not one of them, though I admire some of her admirers — are left with a difficult task: to clean up after her perversities while salvaging something of value in her approach. Of course, her designated "intellectual heir," Leonard Peikoff, and his closest associates, don't see the problem at all, thus proving to be her rhetorical and emotional heirs as well as merely her "intellectual" inheritors. But others, such as David Kelley and Tibor Machan, see that there is at least something wrong with "egoism" as Rand construed it. And so Kelley has written Unrugged Individualism and Machan has written Generosity. Both attempt to put a more human face on the mask of egoism.
The intended audiences for these two short books could hardly be more different. Machan's book is published by the Cato Institute, and seems written with the thoughtful, general-interest reader in mind (albeit one with a well-developed taste for academic philosophy). Kelley's essay, on the other hand, is published by his own think tank, and is addressed explicitly to admirers of Rand. Indeed, Kelley's approach is so geared to his Objectivist audience that it would surely put off most non-Randian readers from the get-go (he begins by quoting Rand's fine novel, The Fountainhead).
Nevertheless, Kelley's book, despite its flaws and limitations, is a better introduction to the problems associated with egoism and benevolence, for Kelley's aim is broader than Machan's; he is concerned with all "the virtues of benevolence," not just generosity.
The nut of David Kelley's argument is cracked open on page 22:
Benevolence is obviously concerned with our relationships with other people. The values we derive from these relationships are obviously enormous; they touch every aspect of our lives. And they are diverse: they range from the products available at the local supermarket to the emotional rewards of intimacy.
These values, Kelley continues, are obtained chiefly by communication and trade. And though the "utilitarian benefits of knowledge and wealth" are pretty easy to see, Kelley also calls our attention to the "more personal values" we derive "from certain people in our lives."
Each of us has an identity consisting in his goals, his principles and convictions, his character traits, his personality, his interests, his likes and dislikes. As self-conscious beings with a need for self-esteem, one needs to experience one's identity as something real and efficacious in the world. Other people can allow one to experience that identity in a way that is not possible by purely introspective means. In doing so, they provide the value of visibility... (23)
Kelley expands on this notion of visibility. "A friend, as Aristotle said, is another self, and I see myself in him." Kelley offers the example of the music lover who, in the presence of other music lovers finds enjoyment because the interest in music is "objectified." "I see in others, in their visible excitement and eagerness to discuss the subject, the same feeling that I can otherwise experience only in the privacy of my own mind." Kelley is on the trail of a subtle psychological event here. Simply by interacting with others, my values, when shared with another, are revealed, thus providing "a concrete experience of those traits I value abstractly in myself."
Kelley also notes that the admiration of success in another will likely inspire us simply because that success can be seen as the flowering of one's own values. The values have borne fruit.
Kelley is onto something here. But he doesn't go far enough. Most of us, I hope, have friends who are something more than mirrors to ourselves. At least, I hope we value our friends as something more than convenient mirrors. The company of a person with "foreign" values can be pleasurable, and indeed important to us. By experiencing another as truly other, the ego becomes something more — but, even when it cannot follow, cannot emulate that other, the delight and knowledge of the other need not be seen as a danger, or rendered valueless. Friendship can be something more than narcissism carried on by other means.
Kelley relates the benefits of dealing with others to trade, broadly conceived, and shows that not only is trade just, as Rand argued, but that it rests upon benevolence: "The function of benevolence in the pursuit of our rational self-interest . . . is to create opportunities for trade by treating other people as potential trading partners" (26). He refigures benevolence as "a kind of respect for others, . . . the generalized respect we should have for others as beings capable of virtue and achievement" (30). And he gives a cogent explanation of how benevolence differs from justice:
Objectivism regards two kinds of mental facts as virtues. One is the identification of what exists, the recognition of facts as facts, the commitment to understanding things as they are, objectively. This is the essence of rationality. The other is the imaginative projection of new ways to exploit the potential of what exists and thus to create things that will serve our purposes. This is the essence of productiveness. The principle of rationality is: "It is." The principle of productiveness is: "What if?" (32)
Kelley argues against the idea that benevolence should temper justice, that mercy should moderate the chief social virtue. He takes pains to ally benevolence with Rand's virtue of "productiveness." And, in service to this cause he says much of value.
The fundamental requirement of productiveness is to support oneself in some form of productive achievement. But productiveness obviously does not cease to be an issue once one has found a job. It is an ongoing commitment to create value in the world, to build, to grow, to expand one's skills and the scale of one's endeavors. In the same way, benevolence does not cease to be an issue once one has formed a trading relationship; it is an ongoing commitment to realize the potential of that relationship. . . . It is an exercise of benevolence to give one's spouse the benefit of the doubt in the midst of an emotional conflict, attributing the better motive rather than the worse. And virtually any relationship has potential beyond the values that we have already derived from it, a potential to which we ought to remain alert. (36)
This is wise counsel, and counsel that has been too long missing from the discourse of Rand's admirers. Tibor Machan offers a similar perspective:
Generosity, as the Greeks saw, is not tantamount to altruism, which means putting others first. To be generous means to extend goodwill toward others because one's own happiness is thereby enhanced, because one lives a fully human life if, among other things, one lives generously. (p. x)
The bugaboo of altruism is still there — to those touched by Rand it may never leave — but the most significant element in this passage is the idea that benevolent actions flow out of a self-regulated life, out of strength. And this notion is latent in much of Machan's book, as it was in Rand's writings. Generosity is natural to successful man, and those who succeed in life naturally help others, and help others generously.
We live in a time when charity has been sapped by the state, and when the responsibility for choosing to marshall one's resources has been severely curtailed. And it is against the prejudices of this age regarding helping others — the prejudices that buttress the chains placed on those who would be generous — that Machan writes. He states his case against the modern redistributive ideology very strongly: "Those who demand that 'generosity,' 'charity,' 'compassion,' or 'kindness' be legally secured by coercive governments . . . actually destroy the foundation of those moral virtues, by changing them from virtues into enforceable duties" (53). Coercion has consequences, most importantly of perverting and diminishing the idea of responsibility. Against this onslaught of paternalism Machan pits a reasonable individualism:
[H]uman beings are by nature the sort of living beings whose flourishing requires self-directed, creative rational thought and conduct. They possess the fundamental attributes of the capacity and need for autonomy and moral responsibility. They are indeed social animals, yet their sociality is to be understood as involving critical selections from among alternative social arrangements (at least once they reach adulthood). . . .
[I]ndividualism stresses the fundamentality of human moral agency in the life of every human being. (60)
But just how important is benevolence?
Kelley is at pains to explicate benevolence as a major virtue partly because Rand and her Objectivists have so often been tarred with the brush of egoism as commonly defined, as the selfish sacrifice of others. Because Objectivists have not answered questions like "is benevolence a major or minor virtue?" Kelley believes that
benevolence remains a kind of afterthought, a neglected virtue, in the Objectivist ethics. Such neglect has consequences. It contributes to the perception of Objectivism as a cold and even a cruel doctrine of "rugged" individualism. The critics who accuse Rand of advocating the greedy pursuit of one's own gain at the expense of others are grossly misrepresenting her views. But the misrepresentation sticks because the Objectivist critique of altruism has been much more prominent than the Objectivist defense of benevolence. (3)
This is at once too hard and too easy on both Rand and her followers.
It is too hard in that it offers no context for the Objectivist "critiques" and "defenses": the intellectual climate of the age surely has warranted many critiques of sacrificial ideologies, since sacrifice has indeed such a major part in so many moral and political agendas — but how many defenses of benevolence really seem necessary? Doesn't everyone talk about benevolence these days? Why a special defense?
It is too easy in that the misrepresentation of which Kelley speaks is credible because the characterization of predatory egoism, though untrue to Rand's doctrine, was largely true of her argumentative method — the characterization may be wrong but it "feels" right. Further, mightn't the fact that Objectivists have spent little effort to rescue the idea of benevolence from the "taint" of altruism indicate that they aren't very interested in benevolence, and thus "really" selfish in the commonly understood sense?
Be that as it may, the question remains: is benevolence a major, "cardinal" virtue, like Aristotle's justice, or merely a minor one, like Epicurus's cheerfulness?
Kelley defines benevolence as "good will towards others."
It is a positive attitude towards people in general, a desire for their well-being and for peaceful, cooperative relationships with them. It is contrasted with hostility, malice, envy, or other forms of malevolence. It includes such traits as kindness, generosity, sympathy, charity, and tolerance as elements. (1-2)
This is a good working definition, though the addition of the phrase "people in general" narrows the meaning too much, and sweeps under the rug the most obvious thing about benevolence and malevolence: that most of us tend to direct our benevolence to some people and skew our malevolence to others. Indeed, this is one of the major indicators of in-group/out-group orientation, the propensity of people to form groups and engage in conflict. One of individualist liberalism's chief projects is the regulation of this very human dynamic. Egoists have little to say on this important subject; they focus on self/other, not us/them. (I suggest that the chief reason to focus on self/other is to break down the perversities associated with us/them.)
Furthermore, Kelley's definition pictures our relevant intentions towards others like this:
Benevolence = Good
Malevolence = Bad
He pays scant attention to the requirements of justice to treat enemies harshly. Also missing — missing totally — is the acknowledgement of another attitude towards others: indifference. Indeed, the diagram should go something more like this:
Benevolence
Indifference
Malevolence
with no across-the-board judgments leveled at any of them. There are bad forms of "treating others positively," as anyone who has suffered a sycophant knows.
Indifference is our usual attitude toward the vast hordes of humanity that we pass on the street — even working up a benevolent little smile to every person we pass would become too much of a burden. (Indeed, to be mostly indifferent to most people is one of the blessings of civilization. There is not only a division of labor in an open society, there is a division of caring, too.) And it is appropriate to behave with malice towards some: those who, by their actions, put themselves at war with peaceful humanity deserve our wrath.
Whether being benevolent is virtuous or not depends a great deal on the mostly self-regarding judgments of the virtue of prudence, and the partially other-regarding judgments of the virtue of justice. In short, it depends on the circumstances.
Perhaps Kelley's case for benevolence should be viewed as one views Epicurus's case for cheerfulness: you simply discover that life is so much better when lived as a mostly cheerful, mostly benevolent person; cheerfulness and benevolence are good, default habits.
But to make the case for benevolence as a cardinal virtue requires a pretty sophisticated understanding of what a virtue is. Kelley, not surprisingly, consults Ayn Rand.
Value, as every Objectivist has quoted umpteen million times, "is that which one acts to gain and/or keep" while "virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it" (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 19). While Rand's definition of value may be a bit sloppy, her definition of virtue is just plain wrong. Virtue is not an act. It is a studied propensity to act in appropriate ways. Aristotle said it was a good habit, a habit likely to yield good effects (happiness, mainly). Aristotle's understanding of habit adds the important element of learned behavior, and the idea that once learned the sense of proportion and balance that virtue entails becomes much easier. (Virtue is like riding a bicycle: once you've mastered it, a lot of complex judgments become second nature and seemingly spontaneous.)
Machan's notion of virtue is closer to Aristotle's than is Rand's, and this is mostly to the good. Whereas Rand emphasized rationality and deliberation, Machan emphasizes the habitual element: "What makes [generosity] an authentic moral virtue is that the decision to give, the sense that giving is the right thing to do, is itself produced not by deliberation but by a cultivated inclination or habit" (46). More interestingly, Machan, much more clearly than Kelley, sees that generosity is, at its core, about "going beyond the call of duty" (11), about giving more than can be required and, in a sense, is deserved.
Kelley approaches the whole subject from a different direction:
In order to achieve our values, we have to take account of certain basic facts about the human condition. That is why we need virtues in the first place: we cannot achieve our ends by magic, whim, or random action; we must take account of facts about human nature, the world in which we act, and the causal relationships between actions and results. A virtue involves recognition of such facts and the commitment to acting in accordance with them. (20)
On the face of it, there is nothing wrong with this. But Kelley, following Rand, descends into the realm of metaphysics to find a foundation for ethics. For instance, from the obvious truth that humans can learn and adapt, Rand distills the notion of a "benevolent universe," where man is suited to the task of living, and where human suffering is "metaphysically unimportant." I feel the need to repeat this: suffering — which is built into the warp and woof of life, and provides one of the most important spurs for human action, and indeed provides the background for the evolution of life — is, for Rand, "metaphysically unimportant"! Kelley's discussion of this wacky notion (his third chapter) is interesting from a pathologist's perspective, but hardly convincing.
The problem with Rand's discussion of "importance" is that it has little to do with how people actually make decisions — that is, it has little to do with how people actually determine what things are important and what are not. Rand consistently ignores the marginalist idea that the key to understanding value is the small choices. But Rand was after BIG choices and BIG ideas, and preferred to conceive and bear these BIG ideas in the rarefied airs of metaphysics, not build them out of the raw material of everyday life, that is, upon the actual decisions and problems that people face and solve every day.
Though Rand and her admirers talk about how "life" makes "values" possible, they quickly switch away from any careful examination of values as exhibited in an economy or an ecosystem, and lurch into definitional matters that swallow the subject whole, in big Platonic gulps.
Little of this metaphysical baggage encumbers Machan, who saves himself a world of hurt by refusing to attempt to make generosity (or any other "virtue of benevolence") a major virtue.
The Objectivist fixation on "ultimate" matters, rather than on "marginal" or incremental matters, yields the most confusion in the refutation of "altruism."
Rand and Kelley deny that benevolence involves altruism, though this denial is less interesting when one realizes that they are defining altruism as the duty to sacrifice self to others. Kelley argues that "under any plausible understanding of the term, altruism does involve self-sacrifice and is thus incompatible with egoism" (6). He is well aware that most philosophers treat altruism as "any act that is 'other-regarding,' directed to the good of another" (6). And he admits that many of these "altruists" believe that "we may properly act in our own benefit on other occasions."
So, why does this common-sensical balancing act between self and other strike Kelley as wrong? Answer: "Insofar as the things we do for others are assumed to be in conflict with our own interest, then they cannot be justified by an ultimate standard that is egoistic" (7). Kelley does not for a moment consider abandoning this notion of "egoism."
Instead, he brings up the issue of conflicts of interest, following Rand's lead. Rand has famously argued "that there are no conflicts of interest among rational men." Less famously, she argued that without "an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means. . . . It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible" (The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 17).
Many interests harmonize through cooperation. When cooperation succeeds repeatedly (as it does so often in an open society) the evolved interests of the would-be antagonists dramatically increase, not infrequently beyond their wildest dreams. The trick is to get people to try peace and cooperation, and the antagonistic interests (implied in common scenarios like "I steal from you, you bully me") vanish as harmonized interests coincide ("I gain by helping you provided you help me").
There are no conflicts of interests between rational men only in the sense that rational men can can almost always (usually? sometimes?) find some interests that coincide. But the costs of conceiving of different, alternative interests, of accommodating others' wishes, talents, indeed, very presences, are strangely swept under the rug in Objectivist analyses of this problem. (They'd save themselves a world of confusion if they'd bother to distinguish among the many meanings of "interest.")
Though Kelley later explains (inadequately) Rand's contention that "the interests of rational people" do not "conflict in any fundamental sense" (8), in the adjacent passage to the above quoted one, he adds a problematic assertion:
A commitment to one's own life and happiness, Rand observed, is a full-time job. Any action not serving that end is at least a mild form of self-sacrifice, a use of our time and effort for things that do not benefit us, or that provide a lesser benefit than we might obtain by other uses of our resources. (7)
This all suggests that each of our "self-interests" is a unitary, closed thing, and that we can calculate the bottom line for every action in terms of an ideal distribution of time and resources.
But this is simply not the case, as anyone who thinks about it for a few minutes quickly realizes. We live our lives with immense amounts of ignorance. We cannot be certain whether this investment in knowledge, or that investment in skill, or some savoring of pleasure, will lead down the road to more happiness or stability or what-have-you. Though we often have good indications of the benefits and costs of our acts, much of our lives proceed on hunch. And with this much apparent indeterminacy, we have no a priori grounds to throw out of court any kind of act, "selfless" or otherwise.
Does an act of kindness to a stranger, one that might take up some of our precious time, necessarily lead to the sacrifice of our purity of essence, our self-interest? Despite Rand's "full-time" job assertion, the answer is: apparently not. Kelley lists the many ways it "pays" to be kind to others, and the many good habits that are involved with being benevolent. He even provides a rather lengthy list of benevolent acts in Rand's own novels, benevolent acts that seem to be chiefly other-regarding. He tells us that they make sense "egoistically."
So what's the upshot? A benevolent act — which might distract one from the unavoidable "job" of life — is fine, and makes sense if it feels right as part of a person's partially self-constructed, partially socially-influenced idea of self-interest, and if that "feel" is not betrayed by future setbacks, information, or re-evaluations.
But what Kelley does not acknowledge is the fact that the same goes for chiefly self-regarding acts. Should you go to law school? Go into debt? Spend a weekend at the beach? Well, if it feels right when weighed against other opportunities, and the costs aren't too high . . . but Objectivism isn't going to give you the answers, and you may live your whole life without ever getting certainty on the matter.
So what's the point of egoism? It can't tell you which of the obviously self-regarding and other-regarding acts make sense "in an ultimate sense," and seems nothing more than a rhetorical flourish with no more philosophical interest than Polonius's "to thine own self be true."
Say you can choose between going to a movie or giving twenty bucks to an acquaintance hard on his luck. You have a choice between a self-regarding act and an other-regarding act. If you are moved to give the twenty bucks, simply because it pleases you (you like the smile on your friend's face, your worries about his prospects are somewhat eased, etc.), one could say that self-interest and other-interest has coincided. Kelley finds this a bit problematic, for some reason. He puts the question again: "which end is ultimate? Is the ultimate intended beneficiary of my action myself or the other person?"
Objectivism holds that the agent should be the ultimate intended beneficiary of his own actions, helping others only when their good is a means to his own, or an ingredient in it. . . . Genuine altruism, by contrast, presumably requires that the other person be the ultimate intended beneficiary of at least some actions — that we act for his sake, as an end in itself. And this implies a willingness to act for his sake even if it did not serve our interests. (7)
>But how does one determine that one is the ultimate beneficiary of an act? Kelley gives me no satisfactory answer to this. It seems to be apparent to him, but it is not apparent to me. Indeed, how can we be anything but the ultimate beneficiaries (or victims) of our acts?
That is, is the "ultimate" beneficiary of an act, according to Rand and Kelley, anything other than the valuer herself? When isn't it? Play the game of altruist moralist (A) and egoist moral agent (B):
A tells B that she should place the bulk of her funds in an interest-bearing account, and B responded with a "why?" A's answers would be pretty straight-forward, likely put in the form of a prophecy: B would really appreciate her financial freedom in the future, and would have even more goods available to her, more happiness. Though she might not now be thinking of the future, in the future she will regret it if she hadn't prepared for that future.
The argument here does not merely involve thinking of long-term effects, but imagining future changes in values, and imagining the future person that she will become. It is a very imaginative egoism that, in the imagining, helps create the future ego.
But when A goes beyond concerned advice to push altruistic activity, entreating B to "give all to the poor," this argument for expanded egoism cannot be used. But something like it may be used.
"Think of how they feel, miserable, hungry, bleak . . . you can help them feel better! There is nothing quite like helping people find hope . . ." Here our altruist engages in eliciting sympathy from our egoist, enticing her empathically to imagine the perspectives of others, and in so doing making their values hers, simply out of fellow-feeling. In addition, the reward to our egoist is the pleasure in being a part of a process that makes others feel good.
This is a basic part of human nature. The capacity to empathize is used by moralists to persuade people to act in various ways (many, of course, not all to my liking). By empathy and enticement "altruists" daily convince "egoists" to engage in benevolence.
True, sometimes the benevolence is argued for by bluster, too: "It's your duty!" they scream. The subtext here is that you aren't a good person if you don't do as altruists say. The threat is the withdrawal of their approval.
But the fact that altruistic hectoring is offensive has little bearing on the whether B should help C, D, and E. Everybody helps somebody sometimes. Should our level of benevolence be increased? Should our attention to our benevolences be more tightly focused? Should we treat our kindnesses more consciously and less symbolically?
These questions can be answered without recourse to talk of "ultimate standards." Each of us cannot help but be the ultimate bearer of the responsibility to choose. If B decides to devote herself to aiding the poor, and in so doing finds happiness, who would naysay her? If C decides to spend his whole life painting landscapes on eggshells, and in so doing makes a tolerable living and finds much joy, who will complain? The standard of choosing is a question of balance, not a matter of who benefits; one well-balanced life can benefit more than just that single self.
People's moral constitutions differ, and balance is possible with differing levels of involvement with others, from near zero (in the case of some geniuses), to a near total dedication to others. The extremes are rare, and rarely balanced, but we shouldn't prejudge these possibilities.
Kelley offers a provocative argument about the problem of "free riders" (those who gain benefits without paying for them), and explores the motives for behaving generously. The most interesting of these motives, to me, is the idea of generosity as flowing from a fullness of soul. "Sometimes we act generously as an expression of our own happiness" (44). This aspect of individualism is not very well understood these days.
Machan also understands this. And, like Kelley, he argues that all virtues must work in tandem: "Generosity, like other virtues, is not by itself a reliable guide to action. It requires other virtues, as well as a kind of moral monitoring . . ." (26). Machan's discussion of the idea of a cardinal virtue is a good contrast to Kelley's explication of Rand's short list:
The best candidate for some general, overriding virtue is what has been called right reason, rationality, or, perhaps, wisdom.
In traditional Christian moral philosophy, the four cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude. In some ways this seems quite right — first one needs to take care of one's life in general, then one needs to be respectful of others' dignity, then one must live in measured ways, and finally one must have the backbone to stick by all these virtues. "Right reason," or "rationality" or "good sense" — prudence in the sense of practical rationality, thinking things through before one acts, whether a long or short time before one takes the action in question — appears to be the most vital of the virtues, since it is the first thing one must have to guide oneself through life with reasonable chances for success as far as one's overall conduct is concerned. Right reason is nothing less than the act of keeping in conceptual mental focus. . . .
Machan also takes greater pains than Kelley to distinguish generosity from charity. Alas, I see no evidence that he understands the Christian concept of love. I am not convinced that charity is, as Machan claims, inextricably bound to duty. It is quite possible to stretch empathy beyond its normal bounds, and care sincerely, without any shackles of obligation or spurs of threat. Indeed, this may be practiced by anyone willing to learn the discipline. Anthony Burgess called it the "game of love," and it need not be tied to the darker elements of the soul. But then, since this concept of concerned love is honored by Christians themselves mostly in the breach, perhaps we can forgive Machan for this.*
The main thrust of Generosity is, of course, social. Machan argues that generosity can only flourish in a free society, by which he means a society with a rule of law and no coerced "charity"; that is, no welfare state.
This is a tall order. Machan's starting point is easy to grasp: "Those who want to prohibit all vices — say, by transforming law enforcement agencies into a kind of massive vice squad — fail to appreciate that if vice is banned, unambiguous virtue becomes impossible: there will be no possibility of crediting people for making right choices" (3). Adding the element of coercion to the distribution of goods from the well off to the less well off robs the honor in the choice to be generous, in the process "demoralizing" society. (53)
But does Machan respond adequately to the common charge that generosity was not enough to help the poor in the past, and would certainly not be enough tomorrow, were the welfare state somehow to whither away? The closest he comes to handling this is his answer to an objection by the author of the classic essay, "Libertarianism Without Foundations":
Contrary to Thomas Nagel . . . it is not "unreasonable to ask" that individuals "be generous, when asked to give voluntarily." Nagel says that leaving generosity to individual initiative "is an excessively demanding moral position because it requires voluntary decisions that are quite difficult to make. Most people will tolerate a universal system of compulsory taxation without feeling entitled to complain, whereas they would feel justified in refusing an appeal that they contribute the same amount voluntarily."
Actually, it is a mistake to think that something is excessively morally demanding "because it requires decisions that are quite difficult to make." Consider that it is quite difficult to make the decision to abstain from hitting someone who has insulted or offended, yet we do require that persons restrain themselves in the heat of anger, however difficult that may be. It is surely no excuse under the law that one's passions were inflamed, at least in most modern systems. . . . [T]here is ample evidence of moral resolve, as when folks keep promises they find a nuisance to honor, or remain faithful when tempted to betray, or embark upon difficult tasks that they would rather avoid. All the vices are tempting, but often enough people resist them. (64)
Curiously, though I find more to agree with in Machan's book than Kelley's, and find it much less irksome, it feels less substantial. And the fault may be in the very manner of presentation that offered me respite from Kelley's in-groupy tone. Machan concentrates much of his attention on arguments raised by philosophers most skeptical of the individualist vision of a society with limited government. This makes for an oddly constructed book — Machan first takes on one author, then another — and though the arguments do add up to something, the positive case is not sustained at the requisite level of intensity. Machan comes off as being defensive.
This manner is least successful in his chapter on the ways the modern welfare state seeks to "channel" and "encourage" generosity. Here a more straightforward, issues-oriented approach would have worked better. The one policy proposal that Machan addresses in this section (entitled "Blocked Exchanges") is the proposal to ban the selling of blood. Machan can't concentrate on this, however, and gets distracted by numerous philosophical points. If Machan had stuck to the issues themselves, and forgotten Michael Walzer, John Rawls, Kurt Baier and other contemporary philosophers, he might've been able to present a coherent argument about the trade-offs between generously and mercenarily giving blood.
Of course, Machan is not writing policy analysis — though one might've expected him to give it a shot, seeing as the book is published by Cato Institute, the premier libertarian policy factory. Perhaps if he had covered more important issues, such as those concerning scientific research, Medicare, the Food and Drug Administration, this section of his book would have been more persuasive. And some of those persuaded may have been philosophers themselves.
Aside from the basic sweep of his argument, however, Machan provides quite a few interesting observations. For instance, can government be generous? No; not in the way people usually think. Though perhaps there is one way: "The manner in which a government can be generous is by being . . . frugal and setting aside funds for emergencies without having to raise additional or special funds from citizens" (63).
Both Kelley and Machan leave important things out. Kelley's book would profit from a wider literary perspective and consideration of other ways of living and thinking about life. One suspects this results from Kelley's choice to direct it almost exclusively to the struggling Objectivist movement. But what Machan left out is worth pondering. I can think of at least two things that would have helped his book immensely.
One is an appreciation of the degrees of self-deception involved in the way most people handle questions of virtue and vice. Though Machan recognizes that there are bad forms of generosity, he makes little of how hollow many forms of it are. The Pharisaic posture of so much of the "giving" we see today — and have seen throughout the ages — is a disheartening spectacle that no book on benevolence should ignore. Furthermore, this egotism finds its fullest expression in the political realm, bolstering the case Machan has set out to make. Truly, the "whitened sepulchers" of this age appear most prominently on our TV sets, mouthing words such as "I feel your pain."
The other thing regrettably missing is a feel for the modes of rhetoric. This becomes noticeable early on, in the brief section in the first chapter on "Generosity as a Pseudovirtue." Here Machan argues against Hume's account of benevolence as borne from sympathy. Machan twists this into an argument about free will, completely missing the most promising avenue opened up by Hume: the notion that morality is a tool that we use to influence our own behavior and that of others. (Reason may be a slave of the passions, as Hume observed, but this does not mean that we do not reasonably use all the tools at our disposal to balance conflicting passions.)
We are daily bombarded by the slings and arrows of contemporary casuistry. Any full assay of the benevolence should give some accounting of how people use language and behavior to maintain all the decencies and pieties of our age. The philosophical status of each method of persuasion would be useful, to say the least.
The clash of the methods of moralizing cuts to the heart of the problem of egoism and altruism. What is key is not that egos must regard their lives as a "standard for action," or as somehow "ultimate," but the extent and the manner to which they (we) can apply "rationality" to deciding how to act. Which offered reasons for action should move us when? And which threats and which enticements should be added to our own moral arsenals? The moral philosopher must don the mantle of master of rhetoric.
In any case, the rhetoric of "egoism" remains unpersuasive to most people. I see no evidence that its stock is rising. Its origin as rhetorical trick in an age-old debate has not fit it to thrive, though it will no doubt survive for quite a while.
Unfortunately, this egoism will continue to scuttle many a reader of Ayn Rand away from a proper balancing of ego and alter. And, though used by them to shore up the idea of liberty as a balance among competing persons in society, the worship at the altar of ego is a vain one, and will likely remain an impediment to establishing the justice of personal freedom and individual responsibility.
Opening quotation from George Santayana, "The Unknowable," Herbert Spencer Lecture, Oxford, 1923.
September 1998, © Copyright 1998, Liberty Foundation
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