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Author’s Note: I told you I was going to be posting chapters much more frequently, and I meant it. Below is Chapter 7 of my book, where I explore what Ayn Rand’s unique concept of virtue and explain how the virtue of selfishness naturally implies the selfishness of virtue, and vice versa.
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Here’s the chapter.
Chapter 7: The Discipline of Causation
Ayn Rand based her morality on a biological foundation. Life is a process of goal-directed action, and the requirements of survival imply a set of goals that a living being must achieve. Morality, in this view, is a body of factual knowledge about the causal connections between our choices and their effect on human survival—looked at from the perspective of our need to make those choices.
That is the foundation—but ethics itself, in its actual substance, is about filling in that factual knowledge and establishing general rules for guiding our action.
Philosophy necessarily deals with these questions on a broad level. Philosophy is not an advice column that tells you specifically what to do; you and Dear Abby are going to have to figure that out by yourselves. Philosophy establishes general principles that apply to everyone, which you can then use as a guide in the complex and specific circumstances of your own life.
Let’s return to the passage where Rand sets out the basic attitude for approaching these questions.
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