The Virtue of Selfishness

The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism is a 1964 collection of essays by Ayn Rand, with additional essays by Nathaniel Branden, presenting the ethical theory of Objectivism in non-fiction form. It is the primary source for Objectivist egoism: the position that each person's own life is the standard of value, and that his own happiness is the moral purpose of his life.

The book collects material first published in The Objectivist Newsletter, together with the essay Rand considered the systematic statement of her ethics.

The title

Rand opens the introduction by answering the objection the title invites, namely why anyone would use the word "selfishness" to name a virtue. Her answer is that the word's dictionary meaning is simply "concern with one's own interests", and that the additional connotation of brutality toward others is not a definition but a package deal smuggled in by the ethics of altruism. On that ethics, any concern for oneself is suspect, so the language offers no clean word for the person who neither sacrifices himself to others nor others to himself.

“The exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word "selfishness" is: concern with one's own interests.”
~ Ayn Rand, introduction to The Virtue of Selfishness

This is why Objectivism rejects what Rand called the false alternative of the sacrificial animal and the exploiter. See Egoism and Altruism for the doctrine itself.

"The Objectivist Ethics"

The opening essay, "The Objectivist Ethics", is the book's philosophical core and the fullest statement of the ethics Rand gave anywhere outside her novels. It was delivered as a paper at a symposium on "Ethics in Our Time" at the University of Wisconsin in 1961.

Its argument runs roughly as follows:

Values presuppose an alternative. Only a living organism faces the alternative of existence or non-existence, so the concept of "value" is possible only because life is conditional.
Life is therefore the ultimate value, and the standard of value for each organism is its own survival qua that kind of organism.
Man survives by reason. Reason is volitional, so man must choose to think, which is what makes morality necessary for him and not for animals.
From this follow the three cardinal values, reason, purpose and self-esteem, and the virtues corresponding to them: rationality, productiveness and pride.

“Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice — and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal.”
~ Ayn Rand, "The Objectivist Ethics", The Virtue of Selfishness

Other essays

The remaining essays apply the ethics to particular questions rather than restating it. Among them:

"The Ethics of Emergencies" distinguishes the lifeboat cases that dominate conventional ethics from the ordinary conditions under which a code of values must actually be lived, and argues that treating emergencies as the model of morality inverts the subject.
"The 'Conflict' of Men's Interests" argues that the interests of rational people do not in fact clash, and sets out the four conditions under which apparent conflicts dissolve.
"Man's Rights" and "The Nature of Government" carry the ethics into politics, deriving rights from the requirements of man's survival and the government's sole proper function from the need to bar the initiation of force. Both essays also appear in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
"Doesn't Life Require Compromise?" and "How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?" address living by the code among people who reject it.
"Racism" treats racial collectivism as the lowest form of collectivism, judging men by ancestry rather than by their own choices.
"The Argument from Intimidation" names the fallacy of substituting a threat to the opponent's moral character for an argument.

Nathaniel Branden's contributions approach the same ethics from psychology, including "The Psychology of Pleasure" and "Isn't Everyone Selfish?", the latter answering the claim that because all action is motivated, all action is equally selfish. Branden's essays remained in later printings, though he and Rand broke in 1968.

Common misunderstandings

That "selfishness" licenses doing whatever one feels like. It does not. The standard is man's life qua man, which is a factual standard about what human survival requires, not a licence for whim. Acting on unexamined desire is what Rand called whim-worship, and she treated it as the opposite of egoism rather than an instance of it.
That egoism requires indifference to other people. Rand held that other people are among the greatest values available to a person, and that benevolence and trade, not sacrifice in either direction, are the rational relations between them.
That it is a defence of the "predator". The essay "The Objectivist Ethics" argues explicitly that the person who lives by force or fraud is not practising selfishness but failing at it, because he is not living by the means proper to a human being.

Discussion

The Objectivism Online Forum has argued these questions at length:

Benevolence and altruism — whether benevolence is consistent with egoism
Selfish Christians citing Ayn Rand — on the word "selfishness" and its reception
The Alligator River story — a worked example of the ethics-of-emergencies problem

References

Citations are to essays by title rather than to page numbers, because the book has been issued in many printings whose pagination differs.

Rand, Ayn. The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. New American Library, 1964.