The great economist Bryan Caplan is notable for showing the plausibility, sometimes even the truth, of counterintuitive ideas. But occasionally his arguments recoil on themselves. So it is with his article “‘Sanction’: The Triumph of Ayn Rand’s Worst Idea,” recently sent out to his Substack subscribers.1
Therein he argues that long-dead philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand is responsible for much of the nastiness of today’s public discourse. Sort of. He acknowledges that the problem, as it exists today, couldn’t have come from Rand, at least not directly: “Is Rand really causally responsible for modernity’s moral intolerance? Probably not; the lines of intellectual communication don’t fit.”
They don’t fit, says Caplan, because—despite the fact that Rand’s novels have topped readers’ polls of the best and most influential American literature of the 20th century, despite the fact that Rand’s ideas helped birth the modern liberty movement of which Caplan is a part—so many people “love to hate” her, which has meant (again, in Caplan’s estimate) “that she has not been broadly influential.” Yet, counterintuitively, “One of Rand’s most peculiar positions has spread like wildfire.”
Caplan’s concern here is not to explain but bemoan this aberration, the “triumph” of the idea that justice requires morally evaluating those one deals with and never sitting by silently while one’s values are being attacked. He quotes from Rand’s response to a reader’s question, “How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?” . . .
One must never fail to pronounce a _ moral judgment.2
Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man’s character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil.
It is obvious who profits and who loses by such a precept. It is not justice or equal treatment that you grant to men when you abstain equally from praising men’s virtues and from condemning men’s vices. When your impartial attitude declares, in effect, that neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you—whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?3
Try as you might, you will not find any examples in Caplan’s piece of what Rand’s idea calls for in practice. Instead, he assures us, based on his firsthand experience with “a subculture that embraced Rand’s virtue of moral intolerance,” that it means never talking to those you disagree with—or those who talk to those you disagree with. It means, he says, hermetically sealing yourself off from anyone and everyone with opposing views. As he puts it,
What does this mean in practice? Don’t talk to your intellectual enemies—and don’t talk to people who talk to your intellectual enemies. Because they’re your enemies too. Sure, you can denounce them; but you can’t have a civilized conversation. Indeed, engaging in such a conversation practically makes you as bad as they are.4
Anyone in his right mind must agree with Caplan; that does sound like a terrible idea, one that perhaps Caplan and some calling themselves Objectivists practiced, no doubt with disastrous results.5 It might even be an idea that moderately famous, self-described Objectivists have practiced. I don’t know; I wasn’t there, and Caplan, for a time, apparently was. In my experience, he seems like a great guy, and I have no reason to doubt his testimony.
But what I do know is that the idea he outlines is not one that Rand espoused in print—not in the essay Caplan cites, nor, to my knowledge, anywhere else. What she did write is not that we shouldn’t talk to those with views we oppose, but that we shouldn’t sit idly by when such people attack our values. Doing so implies, at best, that we can mount no rational disagreement; at worst, that we agree with them.
Suppose, for instance, that you’re at lunch with a potential business partner, and he makes a racist or sexist comment to the waitress. What should you do? According to Rand, you morally ought to condemn his bigotry.
No doubt, many people would agree, but it’s worth asking why Rand upheld this as a matter of principle, to be acted on in all such cases. What many who “love to hate” Rand overlook (or willfully ignore) is that the central purpose of her philosophy, the end toward which all her key ideas were offered as means, is a life of happiness. The purpose of philosophy, she held, “is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.”6
The reason it’s wrong to suffer immoral fools silently is not “because it feels right,” or “because Rand said so.” The reason is that judging people rationally and treating them accordingly—that is, practicing the virtue of justice—is a vital part of the pursuit of happiness, whereas failing to do so signals approval of or indifference to immoral behavior and invites and encourages more irrationality and injustice—all to one’s own detriment, to the destruction of one’s values, and ultimately, if widely adopted, to the demise of civil society. That’s why it’s wrong for the high-school football player to sit on his hands while a bully beats up a youngster and takes his lunch money. That’s why it’s wrong not to investigate and, if need be, reprimand or fire an employee you catch lying, stealing, or insulting your customers. That’s why it’s wrong to appease terrorists.
Turning the other cheek is not a virtue; it’s the vice of laying a red carpet over your life and values and inviting others to walk all over them. Rand’s admonition against morally sanctioning evil might seem “peculiar” when taken out of context. But when we hold that context and consider how properly to act in concrete situations, never sanctioning evil appears to be a virtually obvious requirement of justice and, thereby, of a flourishing life.
Indeed, even Caplan accedes to the core of Rand’s idea when he says that we shouldn’t “listen respectfully to everyone. Personally, I draw the line at avowed Communists and Nazis. They really are unworthy of a response; therefore, I don’t respond to them.” Amen. That’s precisely the kind of line drawing that Rand considered rationally and morally necessary.
But Communists, Nazis, and (other) racists aside, applying the principle of justice is often—nay, almost always—difficult. “To pronounce moral judgment is an enormous responsibility,” wrote Rand.
Just as a judge in a court of law may err, when the evidence is inconclusive, but may not evade the evidence available, nor accept bribes, nor allow any personal feeling, emotion, desire or fear to obstruct his mind’s judgment of the facts of reality—so every rational person must maintain an equally strict and solemn integrity in the courtroom within his own mind.7
Further, she added:
To judge means: to evaluate a given concrete by reference to an abstract principle or standard. It is not an easy task; it is not a task that can be performed automatically by one’s feelings, “instincts” or hunches. It is a task that requires the most precise, the most exacting, the most ruthlessly objective and rational process of thought.8
Nor did Rand condone the sort of “shoot first, listen never” mudslinging that Caplan laments.
The policy of always pronouncing moral judgment does not mean that one must regard oneself as a missionary charged with the responsibility of “saving everyone’s soul”—nor that one must give unsolicited moral appraisals to all those one meets. It means: (a) that one must know clearly, in full, verbally identified form, one’s own moral evaluation of every person, issue and event with which one deals, and act accordingly; (b) that one must make one’s moral evaluation known to others, when it is rationally appropriate to do so.
This last means that one need not launch into unprovoked moral denunciations or debates, but that one must speak up in situations where silence can objectively be taken to mean agreement with or sanction of evil. When one deals with irrational persons, where argument is futile, a mere “I don’t agree with you” is sufficient to negate any implication of moral sanction. When one deals with better people, a full statement of one’s views may be morally required.9
Undoubtedly, many Objectivists have failed to properly apply these ideas. But neither they nor anyone else are safe in error. As Rand said, reality is the court of final appeal. To the extent that a person is wrong, he suffers consequences, be it by wasting his life “building a Tower of Error,” as Caplan says, alienating would-be allies, and/or otherwise. Nonetheless, their failures to understand and properly apply the idea are irrelevant to the truth or falsity of the idea itself.
Nor does fidelity to this idea—that is, that we should scrupulously follow the truth wherever it leads and evaluate those we deal with based not on feelings or wishes but on facts—explain today’s uncivil discourse. Actually, that problem long predates Rand. In fact, it was one of her key targets in the very piece Caplan quotes: “It is only in today’s reign of amoral cynicism, subjectivism and hooliganism that men may imagine themselves free to utter any sort of irrational judgment and to suffer no consequences.” What’s more, Americans have been dealing with this problem for centuries. Anyone familiar with the early history of this country can attest that such “hooliganism” goes back at least as far as the presidential runoffs between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.10 The power of social media to amplify contentious messages might have something to do with an apparent increase in social discord. But Rand’s ideas on justice and moral sanction are neither the cause of nor a contributor to the problem.
They are part of the solution.
Actually practicing what Rand advocated (not what has been falsely ascribed to her) requires not only having (and, when appropriate, providing) valid reasons for one’s views and values, but also raising one’s standards of evaluation—throwing out all considerations of “team affiliation” or supposed “group identity,” assessing people and positions on their merits—refraining from “unprovoked moral denunciations or debates,” and following the truth wherever it leads. That, of course, requires listening to and grappling with opposing views—not lobbing criticisms and retreating to one’s “intellectual ghetto”—even when those views come from people one “loves to hate.” To borrow Julia Galef’s terms, it means being scouts, not soldiers—prioritizing seeing things clearly over defending one’s current position. It means, as Adam Grant points out, being willing to think again when the evidence contradicts our views.
These are new formulations of old ideas. They name basic requirements of a value that undergirds Rand’s views on justice and moral sanction: objectivity. And that’s something we need more of, not less.