This article has been reprinted in several places, including The Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law.
Even today, amid the subjectivism of our culture, it is generally recognized that civilized existence requires law. But subjectivism is a fundamental inversion, and respect for law has not escaped its corrosive effect.
The predominant influence of subjectivism has been not to popularize anarchy, but, more insidiously, to turn the concept of law inside out, obliterating the difference between law and whim.
Thus, today, the status of “law” is granted to the endless stream of edicts and opinions issuing daily from such autocratic agencies as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission. And our Supreme Court defines its role as the ongoing search for an (indefinable) “balance” between conflicting claims, as if the Court’s function were social juggling rather than principled judgment.
The nation that had once demanded “a government of laws, not of men,” can no longer see the difference.
The difference is objectivity. It’s either/or: laws or men, principles or fashion, reason or whim, objectivity or subjectivity.
A “law” is a rule of social conduct enforced by the government. And a “rule” is something settled, codified, principled — not some Board’s momentary consensus, to be swept away by the next wave of public opinion.
What distinguishes laws from all other social rules is enforcement by the coercive powers of the state: laws are backed up by the government’s monopoly on the use of physical force.
Breaking the rules of etiquette may meet with disapproval; breaking the rules of a school, club, or other voluntary association may result in loss of privileges or expulsion; only breaking the laws of a government results in coercively imposed penalties: only the government may physically seize a man’s property, or throw him in prison, or put him to death.
In order to define the proper use of governmental force, one must refer to the purpose of government. In “The Nature of Government,” Ayn Rand observes:
Since the protection of individual rights is the only proper purpose of a government, it is the only proper subject of legislation: all laws must be based on individual rights and aimed at their protection.
Rights can be violated only by the initiation of physical force. A proper, moral government limits its use of physical force to retaliating against those who initiate its use, in violation of rights.
By its monopoly on the use of physical force, a government is potentially the greatest danger to the members of a society. The threat to citizens posed by private criminals is small compared to that posed by governments, as demonstrated by the mass slaughters perpetrated by statist governments throughout history.
This is the basis of the crucial need for objective law. Laws mean force; but “the rule of law” — objective law — means force limited, checked, supervised, tamed, so that it becomes the honest citizen’s protector, not his nemesis.
To achieve this goal, laws must be objective in both their derivation and their form.
[Added 5/5/2026: Requiring laws to be derived objectively marks a radical departure from the merely procedural view. The entrenched subjectivism stemming from Hume and Kant assumes that an objective derivation of what the law ought to be is logically impossible. It isn’t.]
In regard to derivation, “objective” refers to that which is tied to reality by man’s only method of knowing reality: reason. In regard to form, “objective” means that which has the character of an object in reality: a firm, stable, knowable identity.
In both respects, legal objectivity stands opposed to the subjective, the arbitrary, the whim-based.
An objectively derived law is one stemming not from the whim of legislators or bureaucrats, not from undefined “social goals,” not from fantasized commandments of a supernatural being, but from a rational application of the principle of individual rights.
Rights anchor the law to reality because rights proceed from the recognition of certain basic facts:
the fact that man is a specific kind of living being,
that his basic means of survival is reason,
that reason is a capacity exercised volitionally by each individual as an individual,
that man is an end in himself.
[That last is a normative conclusion derived from tracing the concept of “end” back to the alternative of life vs. death—see Rand’s “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness and my “Life-Based Teleology and the Foundations of Ethics,” The Monist, Jan. 1992.]
As Ayn Rand identified, rights are neither mystical endowments nor social conventions, but rational principles declaring “the conditions required by man’s nature for his proper survival” (“The Nature of Government”).
To be objective, a law must be rights-based.
For instance, a law against murder is objectively derived from one’s right to his life, whereas a law compelling military service is not derived from any right, but from the alleged needs of “society,” in defiance of the individual’s right to his life.
A law against theft is objectively derived from one’s right to his property; a law supplying “free” medical benefits is not derived from any right, but from a wish, in disdain of the rights of those whose property is to be expropriated in taxes to pay for such benefits.
The fact that a given law has been objectively derived does not guarantee that it constitutes a correct application of the principle of individual rights. Errors in application are possible. But it does mean that the law’s validity is defended by a rational attempt to apply the principle of individual rights, rather than by appeal to such non-objective notions as the “public interest,” the “general welfare,” or “community standards.”
Contemporary legal philosophers, politicians and judges believe that the purpose of law is to strike an ever-shifting balance among the arbitrary demands of various groups. In this chaos, no principles are invoked, only such undefined and undefinable notions as “the public interest” or, worse, “the needs of the environment.”
No stable, principled legal code can be derived from notions detached from reality. Such notions require law that is as “flexible” and “evolving” as the dizzying swirl of intellectual fashion that generates them.
Ultimately, only the principle of individual rights, which is grounded in the factual requirements of man’s survival, can provide the basis for law that is objectively defined and objectively applied. (And only individual rights can sustain laws that are objective in the sense of being impartially universal, applying to all individuals as individuals rather than as members of a race, creed, class, or other “collective.”)
—To be continued
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