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Letters


Letters


Rand Stand • Editing Corrupts • Transcendental Truth • Death of Caution • Ecology and Mythology • Population Points • Catching Tallis Out • Science and IDology • Bad Thinkers


Rand Stand


DEAR EDITOR: In Issue 66, at the end of his article, a perplexed TiborMachan asks, “Why, we might wonder, is Rand so appealing to millions of ordinary people while she is derided and dismissed by many academic philosophers and other intellectuals?”Machan’s educated guess is that “Rand rejects a very debilitating aspect of intellectually-championed ethics, namely, the call for relentless self-sacrifice.” That wouldn’t be my guess, however, for the version of altruism she challenges is not one championed by many intellectuals.


In The Virtue of Selfishness, Rand takes ‘altruism’ to be the view that “any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil.” She understands the ‘ethics of altruism’ to entail that “any concern with one’s own interests is evil, regardless of what these interests might be.” But this is really only an extreme version of altruism:W.


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