Life and Value in
Ayn Rand's Ethics
 

In fact, Rand is wrong in one of her basic statements. She says that every function of a living organism is directed toward a single goal: the organism's survival. But this isn't, in general, true. Living organisms have reproductive organs, and the functioning of those organs is not directed to the organism's survival. In fact, most living organisms spend a significant part of their lives doing what Tony does: living for the sake of something that will happen when they are no longer there to care about it, that something being the survival and reproduction of their descendants.

It's possible to disregard this in relation to human beings. For one thing, human beings can and do engage in nonprocreative sexual activity, whose payoff is physical pleasure or emotional bonding. For another, human reproduction does not directly cost the lives of the parents; in fact, since human beings are mammals, successful reproduction requires the prolonged survival of the parents after procreation. But neither statement is true of living organisms generally, and Rand claims that her ethics is founded on a logical relation of life and value that applies to every organism.

Consider, for example, a drone bee on its nuptial flight. During that flight it will inseminate the queen, and then she will emasculate it and it will die. In terms of pleasure and pain, the tradeoff looks quite dubious; in terms of survival, mating has no payoffs, and in fact it ends the drone's life. Yet the drone certainly acts to gain the chance to mate, which is therefore a value, and it has reproductive organs and behaviors that enable it to mate. So there is a value for the drone that is separate from its own survival. And in fact, since drones don't collect their own food, or maintain the hive, or do anything else that maintains the survival of bee qua bee, their entire lives amount simply to a means to reproduction and are stripped of everything that might serve any other purpose. Survival, for the drone, isn't an ultimate end at all, but only a means.

Obvious examples could be found in many other species. But more basically, current investigations in evolutionary biology point more and more to the idea that how long an organism lives, and how fast it matures, form part of a reproductive strategy and are shaped by evolution to optimize its reproductive success. In other words, while it's obvious that survival is a means to reproduction for drone bees, it's just as true for living organisms in general; it's just not as obvious.

A key principle of Rand's epistemology, and a useful one, is that the proper definition of a concept is in terms of fundamentals. That is, out of all the characteristics of entities subsumed under a concept, the defining characteristics are the ones that best explain the entity's other characteristics. (This is why Rand considers it legitimate for definitions to change as knowledge advances.) But the characteristics of living organisms are best explained by reproduction, not by survival.

To make this clearer, let's engage in a brief metaphysical fantasy. Suppose that, in some distant solar system, there are two planets similar to Earth. On one planet, entities come into existence that act to prolong their own existence; on the other, entities come into existence that act to make copies of themselves. What happens?

The entities that prolong their own existence will do things that keep them going. But, over time, accidents will happen; survival is never guaranteed, as Rand points out. So, one by one, these entities that seek survival will fail, and cease to exist, until their planet is empty again. If we call them "living," then their world is a dying one.

The entities that make copies of themselves will not, individually, last as long. But so long as they make enough copies, their numbers will increase. (Mathematically, if they live N days, then 1/N will die each day; if more than 1/N make copies each day, then their numbers will increase.) And if, by sheer random chance, one of them develops a trait that makes it more likely to continue existing, and passes that trait on to its copies, more of those copies will survive long enough to make further copies, and so the trait will become more common. This could mean purely passive traits such as mechanical, thermal, and chemical durability; but it could also mean active traits such as moving to more favorable locations, collecting and storing materials or energy sources, or the like. Differential reproduction will ultimately cause the reproducers to become survivors as well. In addition to acting to gain copies of themselves, they will act to keep their own existence. But their own existence will not be an ultimate end, but a means to the existence of entities of their kind. At this point they will be living, and as their planet will increasingly fill with entities like them, it will be a living one, like Earth, and not a dying one.

Rand's own definition, in fact, gives this away, looked at closely. A value, she says, is that which one acts to gain and/or keep. It's clear that an organism acts, much of the time, to keep its own existence. But when and how does it act to gain its own existence? Obviously, if it exists, then it doesn't need to gain its own existence; and if it doesn't exist, then it can't act to gain its own existence. The entities that act to gain an organism's existence are its parents, and thus its existence must be a value to its parents. Rand's focus on survival obscures this; to paraphrase John Galt's speech, "The organisms are here. How did they get here? Blank-out."

Rand's statements about the nature of living organisms may well reflect her training in Aristotelian philosophy and Aristotelian metabiology. For Aristotle, the telos of an oak tree, the that-for-the-sake-of-which the oak tree exists, is the full grown tree. But Aristotle's biology has been replaced by Darwin's, in which an oak tree is an acorn's way of making more acorns. And Darwin's theory has more explanatory power than Aristotle's. If Rand is claiming to base her ethics on the actual facts of biology, she's picked the wrong statement of those facts.