Life and Value in
Ayn Rand's Ethics
 

Rand's most basic statement on ethics is that "It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible" (John Galt's speech; quoted in The Virtue of Selfishness). She views valuing as a function of a living organism; and she asserts that "the functions of all living organisms ... are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the maintenance of the organism's life" ("The Objectivist Ethics," in The Virtue of Selfishness; quoted further below). Based on this, she identifies the organism's life as its standard of value, and she amplifies the organism's life as meaning "that which is required for the organism's survival."

Earlier in the same essay, Rand says that value is "that which one acts to gain and/or keep." In her view, then, organisms act to gain and/or keep their own existence. In fact, it's not just the case that in Rand's ethics organisms naturally value life; it's that living is valuing. All the functions of a living organism are modes in which it acts to gain and/or keep its own life and the things on which its life depends. If it stops valuing, it's dead.

But a living organism can only preserve its own life by acquiring the things its survival depends on. So it values its life by valuing the things that nourish and support it. Those things are values too. But they're values in the sense in which a check or a promissory note or a bank balance is money. Most people don't go to the bank and convert their entire balance into cash at once; but it's the possibility of getting the cash that makes the bank balance valuable. And a healthy, flourishing organism may have goods whose value goes beyond its immediate survival, such as a bear's body fat at the end of autumn; but the payoff in survival is what makes them count as values. Rand describes this by saying that an organism's life is the ultimate goal or end in itself in relation to which every other value is a means. And conversely, if something does not have a potential payoff in survival, it can't have value.

This explanation makes ethical values one example of the broader category of values generally. A plant attains values such as sunlight and water by tropistic movements and directional growth, without any consciousness of its biological functions. An animal has some consciousness of benefit or harm, which Rand calls "the pleasure-pain mechanism." A human being chooses values through a cognitive process. Values chosen in this way are the ones Rand considers to be the concern of ethics. But she situates ethics in the larger context of life in general being the pursuit of value.

This is a powerful and suggestive analysis; it invites us to look at the living world and see a constant striving for benefits, and it says that ethics is a natural function of a healthy human being. But it also places certain limits on what actions can be said to be ethical. Does Rand actually believe in those limits?