Life and Value in
Ayn Rand's Ethics
 

Is this relevant to Tony? Hank Rearden isn't his child (symbolically, Rand suggests the reverse). The appeal to biology may show that survival isn't the ultimate value of an organism's existence; but that doesn't show that whatever Tony gains or keeps either is or serves any ultimate value.

To start with, though, even for an organism that values the coming into being of (partial) copies of itself, this doesn't have to take place through the organism's reproduction. Anthills and beehives are full of sterile workers that care for the queen's other offspring. Since they share the queen's genetic makeup, her offspring are equivalent to theirs. Darwinian natural selection doesn't insist on direct reproductive continuity.

But beyond that, human beings pass on more than their genes to their offspring. Children are also shaped by their parents' ideas. In fact, it's possible to have a sense of inheritance and continuity toward an adopted child who shares only one's ideas. Some biologists refer to heritable ideas as "memes", by analogy to "genes". But ideas are, if anything, more freely transferable than genes; they can pass from person to person by a process comparable to contagion, taking on something like a life of their own, mutating and evolving. But for an idea to succeed it has to induce the person who holds it to pass it on to other people. Since all human beings are shaped by ideas as well as by genes, a human being can have heirs of the mind as well as of the body, and this provides another way to leave a legacy.

Ideas can also be embodied in capital, in the form of a business venture that outlives its founder and continues to operate under new ownership. And an idea can be embodied in the form of a worthy and memorable deed, one that will be remembered and honored after the death of the person who performs it, a form of inheritance highly esteemed by the ancient Greeks and Romans. This last seems to come closest to Tony's case.

What I propose, then, is that the proper ethics for human beings is a legacy ethics. Surviving and flourishing are necessary intermediate values in this ethics, but we are not and cannot be permanent. But we can love something that will outlive us, and live to help it do so. Indeed, this is the only form of ethics that can provide us with guidance, or a sense of meaning, for as long as we live. For ethics operates on the conceptual form of evaluation, and the role of concepts is to integrate past, present, and future, offering us a long time horizon. But the old have less and less personal future ahead of them, and therefore, if personal future is all that matters, less and less need of ethics and less and less sense of meaning; in the end they will find themselves adrift, with no ethics and no need of ethics. To retain a sense of meaning, they have to look forward to their ethical values outliving them, being carried forward by others.

Is this a retreat from Rand's affirmation of selfishness, back to self-sacrifice? Rand herself seemed not to think so. She offers the example of the parent paying for expensive medical care to save a child's life as a form of selfishness, as opposed to paying for medical care for someone else's child at equal expense. And in her fiction, she shows, for example, Henry Cameron looking forward to Howard Roark's career, which Cameron will never see and which, by her strict logic, can have no value to him. Rand's theoretical formulation knows nothing of legacies and has no room for them; but Rand's examples say otherwise.