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 …