In The Virtue of Selfishness Ayn Rand sets out the basis for her Objectivist ethics. “An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, and that which threatens it is the evil.” The problem with this definition, of course, is that it runs headlong into the is/ought fallacy: we can’t go from descriptions of the world to making prescriptions about how things should be done. Simply describing facts about the world does not give us moral guidlines for our behavior.
Rand, however, is aware of this problem, and provides a response to it …
Many people are aware of President George Bush (senior)’s notorious assertion “I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.” It seems that the 41st president isn’t the only one who basic rights and dignities are not entirely universal. In A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), John Locke places an important caveat on the bounds of religious toleration
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According to Immanuel Kant, it is better for a woman to die resisting rape than suffer the ‘dishonour’ of submitting to her attacker:
No matter what torments I have to suffer, I can live morally. I must suffer them all, including the torments of death, rather than commit a disgraceful action. The moment I can no longer live in honour but become unworthy of life by such an action, I can no longer live at all. Thus it is far better to die honoured and respected than to prolong one’s life … by a disgraceful act …
Immanuel Kant was serious about the sanctity of sex within marriage. Deadly serious. An illegitimate child is denied all legal rights, and can be disposed of at will:
Legislation cannot remove the disgrace of an illegitimate birth … A child that comes into the world apart from marriage is born outside the law … and therefore outside the protection of the law. It has, as it were, stolen into the commonwealth (like contraband merchandise), so that the commonwealth can ignore its existence (since it was not right that it should have come to exist this way), and can therefore also ignore its annihilation …
For Jean-Jacques, the onset of involuntary (presumably nocturnal) emissions was an issue of considerable moral distress. Moreover, it was a problem that, in the hands of the susceptible, often led to terrible vice:
I returned from Italy a different person from the one who had gone there … I had preserved my physical but not by moral virginity. The progress of the years had been told upon me, and my restless temperament had at last made itself felt. Its first quite involuntary outbreak indeed had caused me some alarm about my health, a fact which illustrates better than anything else the innocence in which I had lived until then. Soon I was reassured, however, and learnt of that dangerous means of cheating Nature …
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, champion of the Enlightenment, was on a mission to see that young men were protected from their base instincts: “Whatever we may do, a young man’s worst enemy is himself, and this is an enemy we cannot avoid”, he warned …
Therefore, watch carefully over the young man; he can protect himself from all other foes, but it is for you to protect him against himself. Never leave him night or day, or at least share his room; never let him go to bed till he is sleepy, and let him rise as soon as he wakes …
In his 1844 anti-authoritarian critique of Western society, The Ego and His Own, Max Stirner argued that the incest taboo was merely a Christian prejudice that needs to be discarded along with the rest of Christian morality:
Take notice how a “moral man” behaves, who today often thinks he is through with God and throws of Christianity as a bygone thing. If you ask him whether he has ever doubted that the copulation of brother and sister is incest, that monogamy is the truth of marriage, that filial piety is a sacred duty, then a moral shudder will come over him at the conception of one’s being allowed to touch is sister as wife also. An whence this shudder? Because he believes in those moral commandments …