Ayn Rand Essays Selfishness

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Fundamentally, the means by which people live their lives is by reason.

The capacity for reason is what enables humans to survive and flourish.

In the same way, others as well don’t exist as servants or slaves to a person’s own interests.

Each person's own life and happiness is his/her crucial end.

Each person’s own life and happiness are that person’s ultimate ends.

Self-interest, rightly understood, also entails self-responsibility: One’s life is one’s own, as is the responsibility for sustaining and enhancing it.The book covers ethical issues from the perspective of Rand's Objectivist philosophy.Some of its themes include the identification and validation of egoism as a rational code of ethics, the destructiveness of altruism, and the nature of a proper government.Aristotle also stated that the “good” is what is objectively good for a particular man.matches an equally provocative thesis about ethics.She believed that: “Self-interest, properly understood, is the standard of morality and selflessness is the deepest immorality.”( Ayn Rand 279) This basically emphasizes that you should see oneself, as an end to oneself.A person’s own life and happiness are their highest values, and that they don’t exist as servants or slaves to the interests of others.People are not born knowing what is good for them; that is learned.Nor are they born knowing how to achieve what is good for them; that too is learned.In other words, the moral legitimacy of self-interest implies that individuals have rights to their lives, their liberties, their property, and the pursuit of their own happiness, and that the purpose of government is to protect those rights.Leaving individuals free to pursue their own interests implies in turn that only a capitalist or free market economic system is moral: Free individuals will use their time, money, and other property as they see fit, and they will interact and trade voluntarily with others to mutual advantage.