Altruism

Altruism is the ethical doctrine that the beneficiary of a person's actions must be someone other than himself, so that service to others is what justifies his existence. Objectivism rejects it, and holds that the alternative to it is not predation but the trader principle.

The word is used here in its technical sense, given to it by Auguste Comte, who coined it: not "kindness", but the doctrine that self-sacrifice is the standard of moral worth. This distinction does most of the work in the argument, and missing it is the source of nearly every objection.

What is actually being rejected

Objectivism does not object to helping people. It objects to the claim that the beneficiary of an action determines its moral status, which has three consequences Rand regarded as fatal:

It makes the recipient's need the source of the claim. If need creates an obligation, then the more helpless a person is, the greater his moral authority over others, and the more productive a person is, the more he owes.
It cannot be practised consistently. A code requiring each person to live for others, applied without exception, would leave nobody living for himself and so nobody producing anything to give. Rand's charge is that altruism is not merely difficult but incoherent as a standard for living.
It severs morality from life. Under an ethics whose standard is sacrifice, the moral and the practical come apart, and one is left choosing between being good and being alive. See Theory-Practice Dichotomy.

“The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.”
~ Ayn Rand, "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World", Philosophy: Who Needs It

Sacrifice, properly defined

A sacrifice in Rand's usage is not any cost or effort. It is the surrender of a greater value for a lesser one, or of a value for a non-value. Paying tuition, working long hours, or running into danger for someone you love are not sacrifices on this definition: in each case the person is acting for what he values most.

This is why the standard counterexamples do not land. A mother caring for her child, a person giving to a cause he believes in, a man risking his life for his wife, are all acting on their own hierarchy of values. What altruism demands is different in kind: that the absence of a personal stake is precisely what makes the act moral.

Benevolence without altruism

Objectivist ethics leaves considerable room for generosity, and treats other people as among the greatest values available to a person. What it denies is that this rests on duty. Helping a friend, or a stranger in an emergency where the cost to oneself is small, is consistent with egoism because a world with other rational people in it is a world one benefits from.

Rand addressed the emergency case directly in "The Ethics of Emergencies", arguing that lifeboat scenarios are a poor model for morality precisely because they are not the conditions under which people actually live.

Altruism in politics

Rand held that altruism supplies the moral sanction for collectivism and statism. Once it is granted that a person exists to serve others, the question becomes only who decides and how much, and the state has an unanswerable moral case for whatever it takes.

This is why she treated the defence of capitalism as an ethical problem rather than an economic one. A system of voluntary trade cannot be defended by people who have accepted that acting for one's own benefit requires an excuse. See Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

Common misunderstandings

That rejecting altruism means being cruel or indifferent. The rejected doctrine is that self-sacrifice is the standard of virtue. Ordinary kindness, generosity and love toward people one values are all consistent with Objectivist ethics.
That "altruism" here means what it means in biology. Evolutionary biology uses the term for behaviour that lowers an organism's own fitness. That is a descriptive claim about behaviour, not an ethical doctrine about what justifies a life.
That the only alternative is exploiting people. This is the false alternative the whole argument is aimed at. See Trader Principle and Exploitation.

Discussion

References

Rand, Ayn. Introduction and "The Ethics of Emergencies", The Virtue of Selfishness. New American Library, 1964.
Rand, Ayn. "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World", Philosophy: Who Needs It. Bobbs-Merrill, 1982.
Peikoff, Leonard. Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, chapter 8.

External links

Altruism at the Ayn Rand Lexicon