The Ayn Rand Archives has set ambitious goals for making more of Ayn Rand’s archival material available, and we are pleased to announce the achievement of important milestones this year.

Volunteers in our transcription project have now provided rough draft transcripts for more than 7,000 pages. This ongoing volunteer support has dramatically increased the amount of material that we can make available online, and the first releases are accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Our biggest announcement is that the first batch of transcribed Ayn Rand material is now available online:

• Users can explore the entirety of Ayn Rand’s planning material for her debut novel, We the Living.

• In addition, an archival supplement of material related to Rand’s “Screen Guide for Americans” is available, including drafts of short film reviews by Rand never published during her lifetime.

Thanks to the efforts of our volunteers, these materials are full-text searchable. We encourage users to explore the contents, and to share these links with anyone else who might be interested in this Rand material.

More material will be online later this year. We plan to release the complete planning material for The Fountainhead (including many pages beyond what is currently available online), as well as the archival materials from Russian Writings on Hollywood by the end of 2026.

Two new publications based on or drawn from archival material are also available:

• Ayn Rand’s Immigration Story: I Chose to Be an American by Agustina Vergara Cid and Brandon Lisi

• “Screen Guide for Americans” by Ayn Rand, with a new afterword by Michael Berliner, and archival documents (also available in the online archival supplement)

In addition to these current releases, the second edition eBook of Letters of Ayn Rand has been available since December 2025, and a definitive Archives edition of Anthem, curated by Robert Mayhew, is forthcoming.

Our final announcement is that additional Ayn Rand audio, not previously available online, will be coming soon:

• Available now, exclusively in the new Ayn Rand Institute app, are approximately 14 minutes of audio from Ayn Rand’s appearance on the CBS show The Great Challenge in 1962. Rand, along with several other participants, responded to questions such as: “Do you believe that individual freedoms in this country are eroding?”

• Ayn Rand participated in the radio show Night Call with Del Shields on March 12, 1969, answering questions from Shields and from various listeners calling in. The full hour of this radio show will be available online in 2026.

Making a growing amount of Ayn Rand material available online is a vital, strategic goal for the Archives. It provides evidence of Rand’s development as a novelist-philosopher to individuals around the world, allowing them to explore more of her thought and to make objective judgments about her work. We will continue to share updates as we achieve the milestones we’ve set to reach this goal, and we hope that you will continue to find both enjoyment and edification as you explore these materials.

_{Photo credit: J. Paul Getty Trust / Getty Research Institute}

Many Ayn Rand fans wonder what it will take for Objectivism to have a significant cultural and political impact. Tal Tsfany, ARI’s president and CEO, offered an answer in his 2026 Objectivist Summer Conference address, “Spreading Objectivism: A Vision for ARI’s Future.”

Tsfany argued that, in Rand’s own view, developing the Objectivist community into an organized movement with significant cultural and political impact “requires trained — self-trained — teachers” who will lead “an educational campaign” in “a battle for men’s minds.” That’s why, Tsfany explained, ARI focuses its efforts on attracting and training new intellectuals.

To that end, Tsfany announced the launch of the Atlas Prize, a multi-stage competition based on Atlas Shrugged for 16- to 22-year-olds that carries a $100,000 prize. He also announced the launch of a redesigned library of Objectivist content, which includes a new high-production-value course by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, and a new Objectivist AI librarian, Aria. Tsfany also unveiled the newly structured curriculum of the ARU educational program.

These exciting initiatives are only a portion of ARI’s work, vision, and new initiatives. To learn more about them, including the Ayn Rand Center in Austin, the forthcoming master’s degree in Objectivism, and ARI’s Intellectual Incubator, watch Tal Tsfany’s 2026 OCON address.

In this episode of the Ayn Rand Institute podcast, Ben Bayer and Onkar Ghate discuss whether heritage or creed is what defines American national identity.

• The American way and sense of life

• Un-American “Heritage Americanism”

• Irrelevant Anglo-Protestant “ethnicity”

• Superior “Creedal Americanism”

• History of “Creedal Americanism”

• The eroding American sense of life

Resources: 

• Ayn Rand, Don’t Let It Go, in Philosophy: Who Needs It

• Ayn Rand, “A Nation’s Unity”

• Onkar Ghate, “Atlas Shrugged: America’s Second Declaration of Independence” 

• Ben Bayer, “Our Iran Appeasement Reveals the Need to Declare Moral Independence,” New Ideal, July 1, 2026.

• Ben Bayer, “The Revolutionary, Secular Concept of Individual Rights” OCON 2024

This episode was recorded on July 10, 2026.  

Image credit:  Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

The founding of America was the greatest political achievement of the Enlightenment. Knowing that their experiment would be difficult to preserve, the Founding Fathers designed a unique system of checks and balances to prevent the United States from collapsing into tyranny. An essential element of that design, however, has been forgotten.

In his talk at the 2026 Objectivist Summer Conference (OCON), Dr. Onkar Ghate explains the role of the moral character of the people as a check on the government. Ghate explains why the Founding Fathers appreciated this pivotal role in preventing America from straying away from its ideal of protecting the individual’s rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Q&A session includes the discussion of:

1. Why are American people susceptible to pragmatism?

2. Why are the branches of government ceding their power to other branches?

3. When is it proper to organize politically?

4. Are there differences between the legitimacy of the Iraq war and that of the Iran war?

This talk was recorded live on June 27 in New Orleans as part of the Objectivist summer conference, and is available on The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast stream. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Watch archived podcasts here.

This essay by Ben Bayer was originally published in New Ideal on January 4, 2023. New Ideal is the online journal of the Ayn Rand Institute. Free subscribers gain access to more content than is published on our Substack. Subscribe here.

Why does the “antiracist” movement mobilize to deplatform or fire anyone who slights or asks the wrong questions about the dominant views of “social justice”? What explains the irrational fervor of the “woke”?

John McWhorter, noteworthy Columbia linguistics professor and New York Times columnist, grapples with this question in his recent book, Woke Racism. The book’s subtitle reveals his provocative answer: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. To understand the “woke” movement, he shows, we must take seriously its religious character.

How are we to deal with a social movement guided by blind faith? McWhorter is under no illusion that we can somehow rationally persuade the leaders of the movement to change their ways. Instead, he counsels that we must find “a way to live graciously among them” while insulating “people with good ideas from the influence of their liturgical concerns” (xii-xiii).

But if McWhorter is right about the religious character of the movement, then multitudes of unsuspecting students who otherwise lean secular have accepted an unscientific, religious doctrine. Those of us who want to insulate ourselves and our children from its influence, will wonder whether it’s enough to ignore its advocates and live “graciously” among them. To know what is required to insulate ourselves fully from “the influence of their liturgical concerns,” we will need to know what makes woke doctrine so seductive even to secular, educated people.

While McWhorter’s explanation is good as far as it goes, it doesn’t go quite far enough. In particular, McWhorter’s account doesn’t make explicit what it is about the religious character of the movement that motivates such irrational fervor. Arguably his own evidence points to the fuller explanation we need, but he doesn’t dwell on it. I’d like to bring it to the forefront.

How does religion motivate fervor?

The evidence McWhorter presents of the religious character of the woke movement is compelling. The movement has articles of faith: no one is to question that racism is to blame for most social problems. It has its sacred texts (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo), which are to be read and recited almost ritualistically. It has its own conception of original sin: white people cannot escape their “privilege” and must acknowledge it. It has a gospel that must be spread to all “sinners” and who must repent. The parallels are so striking that McWhorter dubs the members of the movement “The Elect,” a reference to Puritan Calvinism’s class of those predestined for salvation.

How does a religious doctrine encourage nominally secular people to engage in such irrational behavior?

The problem is not that woke activists suffer from some form of mass psychosis. McWhorter stresses that he thinks they don’t, even though they embrace their dogmas in defiance of the evidence and hold others to impossible, contradictory standards (e.g., to be inclusive and multicultural one can’t avoid “cultural appropriation”). Why, if they are neither crazy nor uneducated do they so openly defy intellectual standards?

McWhorter thinks that the new woke religion fulfills the same basic need that traditional religions have fulfilled for countless people for millennia.¹ The need is a “basic sense of succor” (70). Elsewhere he is more specific: it provides a sense of “sheer purpose . . . the basic sense of feeling like you matter and that your life has a meaningful agenda” (40).

This is headed in the right direction, but it’s important that not all religious believers behave like zealots. Consider a “New Age” religion that has also supplanted traditional belief systems in the West, neo-pagan Wicca. This sometimes polytheistic, sometimes pantheist set of beliefs and practices would strike most secularists as a genuine form of religious mysticism. And surely many Wiccans find “comfort” in their magical rituals, including through some sense of purpose from being “interconnected with the cosmos.” Yet even though Wiccans probably embrace their beliefs in animistic spirits and magic irrationally, few are motivated to join a mob marching for a new Inquisition against non-witches or a crusade against monotheists.

Numerous other religious believers go in for a faith but don’t march for its cause. Consider sundry modern Episcopalians or Western Buddhists who formally accept their theologies and practice their rituals, but who would never persecute heretics and apostates. We can say they simply don’t take their religion very seriously, that they don’t see their beliefs as relating to the rest of their lives. But which element of their religion are they ignoring when they don’t see it as relating to the rest of their lives?

The milquetoast modern faithful ignore the same element of their religions that a religion like Wicca simply lacks: a systematic code of morality. The major monotheistic religions come packaged with strict codes of morality because the God they worship is seen as the creator of the universe and the author of its order, and with that its moral laws. A code of morality relates an ideology’s view of the universe to the guidance its adherents need to live.

If the woke crusade while the Wiccans do not, it is likely because the woke share the potent code of morality they probably inherited from the influence of the monotheistic religions. It’s their quest to adhere to this moral code that gives them not merely the sense of a comforting ritual but that of joining a holy quest. No wonder the acts of the woke invite such natural comparisons to a crusade or an Inquisition, two hallmarks in the history of Christian religion.

The motive power behind religious crusaders

The evidence for the central motivating power of moral doctrine in the woke religion is scattered throughout McWhorter’s book, though it is not emphasized enough.

McWhorter notes that “Elect ideology stipulates that one’s central moral duty is to battle racism and the racist” (48, my emphasis). He notes how the woke see the sheer act of bearing witness to the sins of racism (including, notably, their own) as garnering moral credit (49, 66–67). And he notes how this even includes embracing a “self-flagellational guilt for things you did not do,” a reference to apologies for the sins of one’s race.

The reference to “self-flagellational guilt” helps bring out the distinctively religious moral idea that’s at play in the woke crusade. Christianity is perhaps best known for making it a major virtue, but McWhorter compares antiracism’s take on the virtue to that of another post-pagan monotheistic religion:

This is all very Abrahamic, as religion goes. Muslim, Islam — the core of such words in Arabic is the consonants s-l-m, which constitute the concept of submission. One submits not only to a God. To suspend disbelief is a kind of submission. It is no accident that many of the white Elect spontaneously put their hands above their heads as an indication that they understand that they bear “white privilege.” Think of this type, asserting “Oh, I know I’m privileged!” while holding their hand up, palm out, like a Pentecostal. . . . They are so comfortable with that gesture in attesting to their privilege because of an overriding impulse: to indicate submission to a power up there looking down on them.

Or even this: When Elect white people at protests started taking a knee for extended periods to indicate general wokeness after George Floyd’s murder, it was a submission to Elect imperatives. (27–28)

To idealize the morality of submission is to enjoin the virtue of humility. It’s the burning commitment to the duty to avoid, expurgate, and punish the sin of pride that explains the crusade to banish heretics against the woke creed.

The affirmation of the virtue of humility is distinctively religious. In ancient Greece, Aristotle regarded pride not as a sin but as a crowning virtue (“To be the one who thinks himself worthy of great things and [to be] really worthy of them . . . [is] an adornment of the virtues; for it makes them greater, and it does not arise without them.”2) But contrast this with St. Augustine, who formalized the Christian view: “Deign to be lowly, to be humble, because God has deigned to be lowly and humble on the same account, yours not his own.”3 Augustine emphasized the virtue of humility because he was the original champion of the Christian doctrine of original sin: we should not aim for perfection because we are inherently sinful.

It’s the Christian view of pride vs. humility that animates the zealots of the woke religion.

For example: suppose that you are a professor or an employer who thinks that some member of a minority group hasn’t lived up to the relevant educational or professional standards of a task and doesn’t deserve the corresponding rewards. How dare you, say the woke, to think you have the right to judge a member of a historically oppressed group by your standards? You don’t have the right to judge their performance by what you deem to be “objective” standards. Humble yourself and repent, prideful sinner.

Or: suppose that you refuse to admit you’re guilty of the “original sin” of racism, because you judge people on the basis of their character and other achievements, not on the basis of racial prejudice. Here again, the woke object that racism is systemic enough to make you subject to biases and an unavoidable beneficiary of oppression. How dare you think you have the special power to escape from the clutches of your history and the system it created? Humble yourself and repent, prideful sinner.

Or even this: perhaps you’re a black person whose ancestors certainly were oppressed, and while you acknowledge that racial prejudice still exists, you might still claim that you yourself have never been seriously handicapped by it. Even here, the woke will intone, as they seem to have intoned against McWhorter himself: how dare you think you have the personal virtue needed to escape the same systemic oppression? And how dare you disagree with the leaders of your people who know they are victims to whom all the other sinners must submit? You especially should humble yourself and repent, most prideful sinner. Tua maxima culpa.

Earlier I asked: “Why, if they are neither crazy nor uneducated do they so openly defy intellectual standards?” In a way, McWhorter has provided material that helps answer that question: “To suspend disbelief is a kind of submission.” But this helps us see how (as Augustine himself maintained) blind faith is the ultimate form of humility.4 One takes no pride in what one uncritically accepts from others. By contrast, it is an act of intellectual pride to demand evidence and consistency and assert the right to believe only what others can prove.

This is what permits sane and educated people to engage in absurd inquisitorial crusades against heretics. They have knowledge of intellectual standards, but they suppress this knowledge when they think their moral duty demands something more important than a dedication to truth.

The underappreciated challenge of avoiding the influence of religious morality

Judeo-Christian morality has had a powerful influence on Western culture. Two thousand years of cultural dominance will leave a mark on anyone raised or educated by others influenced by the tradition, even on those who ostensibly reject this tradition.5

We can see this especially in the deference to the religious morality of humility in ostensibly secular, left-wing activist movements today. In addition to finding it among woke activists, we see it in the green activists like the members of Extinction Rebellion who demand our faith in an imminent environmental apocalypse and reject even carbon-free nuclear power.6 (The environmental movement generally has deeply Christian historical roots.7) We see it in the transgender activists who try to make heretics of anyone like J. K. Rowling or Kathleen Stock, who raise questions about the merits of transgender ideology and its critique of the biology of sex.

This suggests that we cannot easily insulate ourselves from the influence of the woke crusade simply by “finding a way to live graciously” among its agents. That’s especially true if some of the most thoughtful and upstanding critics of woke religion are still under the spell of the Christian moralism that empowers it. This may seem hard to believe because some of them are adamant critics not only of the woke but of religion, generally. Yet the virtue of humility really is a distinctively religious idea, and it is at work in even their thinking.

For instance, even secular thinkers like Steven Pinker and others in the “rationality community” regularly call for “epistemic humility,” the idea that “perfect rationality and objective truth are aspirations that no mortal can ever claim to have attained.”8 There’s indisputable value in intellectual honesty: in refusing to draw conclusions stronger than one’s evidence permits. But to infer that even the best and most rational science can never attain some kind of truth is to affirm a kind of epistemic original sin and so, not surprisingly, a virtue of epistemic humility.

In rare moments, even McWhorter himself seems to call out the woke for their own alleged intellectual pride: “Since about 2015, a peculiar contingent is slowly headlocking us into . . . supposing that this particular new religion is so incontestably correct, so gorgeously surpassing millennia of brilliant philosophers’ attempts to identify the ultimate morality, that we can only bow down in humble acquiescence” (58–9). Yes, he’s explicitly criticizing their demand that we be humble, but he does it by implying that they are being sinfully prideful in thinking they’ve gotten morality right.9

The real reason woke ideology doesn’t surpass millennia of philosophers’ moral inquiries is that it’s just borrowing from them (albeit without giving credit). The problem here isn’t that it pridefully claims to have identified the ultimate morality. The problem is: “To suspend disbelief is a kind of submission.” The problem is that the religious claim to ultimate morality is advanced without scientific basis. Scientists who can prove a well-integrated case for their position on the basis of the evidence have earned pride in their findings. The woke have not, especially if their morality is itself derived from religion.

Generally, the work of secular thinkers like Pinker and McWhorter is rational and courageous. They deserve to take pride in their intellectual accomplishments. But the fact that even these avowedly anti-religious thinkers seem to have absorbed a religious moral idea suggests that its influence is truly pervasive. It promises comfort against some insecurity that even the most rational of the secular can feel. So, we need to guard against it to fully insulate ourselves against the effects of wokeism.

We need to guard against this insecurity because its consequences weaken the secular defense against wokeism. Consider McWhorter’s recurrent question about the irrationality of the woke movement: “What kind of people do these things? Why do they get away with it? And are we going to let them continue to?” They are people who call us out for being prideful sinners. They get away with it because we ourselves often feel guilty for our pride. And we will let them continue to do so as long as even we the secular cater to that feeling by venerating such things as “epistemic humility.”

McWhorter himself answers his last question, about why we let them get away with it. He notes that precisely because of the moral progress we’ve made against racism, people disapprove of it and are horrified when charges of it are leveled against them. So many would rather “tolerate some cognitive dissonance” and kneel with woke activists in repentance than be considered an unrepentant bigot. But this willingness to tolerate “cognitive dissonance” is precisely the consequence of a belief in epistemic humility. It’s the idea: Who am I to take my cognitive dissonance as a sign that something is wrong here?

Someone who takes pride in his commitment to the truth, by contrast, wouldn’t tolerate that dissonance: he’d try to understand why he’s been accused of an evil he himself disavows. He’d accept his fallibility and acknowledge that he can make mistakes. He’d even be willing to apologize when presented with evidence of his error. But he’d not kneel before his accusers without that evidence just because his peers were kneeling. And someone long convinced of the evil of racism would likely never accept that self-effacing submission is proper penance for a real mistake.

McWhorter thinks that because the woke movement is based on a kind of faith, we can’t respond to it by arguing with its most devoted practitioners, any more than we could expect to convert many fundamentalist Christians to atheism. Instead, he urges that we “just say no,” and stand up against the woke. “The coping strategy, therefore, must be not to try to avoid letting them call you a racist, but to get used to their doing so and walk on despite it.”

I agree with McWhorter that rational people must proudly walk on despite unfounded charges of racism. But if the woke faith is empowered by a religious belief in the virtue of humility, we will need to do more than simply disassociate ourselves from its practitioners. We can’t live “graciously” among them if that means accepting their ideas and practices as normal. Indeed, McWhorter’s characterization of the movement as religious dogma implicitly classifies it as unscientific and irrational, which is already a harsh but warranted judgment. We need to share this judgment with others, especially the young people we care about, as McWhorter has done in his book.

But we’ll need to do even more than McWhorter has done. To fully quarantine ourselves and others against wokeism, we need to come to grips with the fact that many of us are also already infected with the ideas that empower its followers. This means we will need a new philosophical antiviral. We will need to fully sterilize ourselves from the idea that submission is a virtue, and in another act of intellectual pride, be willing to rethink a secular, scientific morality afresh.10

The 2026 Objectivist Summer Conference was a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. To conclude the conference, Yaron Brook, ARI board chairman, spoke about what makes America uniquely worth celebrating — the fact that it is “the Nation of the Producer.”

Brook begins by surveying the state of the world prior to the American Revolution — the backbreaking labor, the incurable diseases, and the unbearably cold winters. He then explains how the Declaration of Independence unleashed the people responsible for today’s magnificent world of abundance.

Who is responsible for electricity, smartphones, and worldwide travel? Brook answers: “The responsibility lies with the amazing, unbelievably productive geniuses that have lived — and still live — amongst us.” He identifies by name — and toasts — the many titans of industry who helped create the modern, industrial, technological world.

Watch Brook’s detailed, moving survey and his celebration of the producers, his full talk is here.

In the aftermath of Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II, collectivism was still very much alive. Soviet Russia, America’s wartime “ally,” was now its greatest enemy — but one that was more intellectual than military. Ayn Rand’s screen guide, now available for the first time as a book, was written and produced in 1947 as a warning about this ally and its subtle ways using films to undermine America and the individualism it represented. This first archival edition of “Screen Guide” is supplemented by an 11-page afterword by founding CEO of ARI, Michael S. Berliner, providing important historical background from Ayn Rand’s life and career. The Ayn Rand Institute is pleased to reprint the afterword.

The Screen Guide exemplifies the convergence of two significant aspects of Ayn Rand’s life to that point in time: film and political ideology.

Ayn Rand’s Connection to the Film Industry

Films played such an important role in a 30-year period of Ayn Rand’s life that a mini-biography can almost be written by tracing her connection to films, beginning with her mid-teens up to the publication of her “Screen Guide,” when she was in her early 40s. Although she may have attended foreign films earlier, that period officially starts in the winter of 1922 with the first entry in her movie diary, D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. That diary was an ongoing list of movies she attended between 1922 and 1929. It was so important to her as a documentation of her movie-going that she had her sister Nora reproduce the contents in letters to Rand, who had, for reasons unknown, not brought it with her to America. Nora began incorporating that list into her letters apparently just a few days after Rand arrived in America. Rand then copied the information into a small notebook.¹ Each entry contained the film title, her grade for the film, the date and theater, the director, and the principal cast. Nora concludes the list with: “That’s the end!!! Well, aren’t I the most heroic person in the world? The Crusades were child’s play compared to my labors here. To recopy 170 movie entries! . . . I curse the Technicum for giving you free passes.”

The “Technicum” to which Nora referred is the State Technicum for Screen Arts, a school created by Soviet dictator Vladmir Lenin to advance Soviet film. Hoping to learn screenwriting, the 19-year-old Alisa Rosenbaum enrolled in the Institute in the fall of 1924, but she attended for only one academic year: Before she could take courses on screenwriting, she received an invitation to visit relatives in Chicago.

And it was likely that writing assignments at the Technicum marked the start of her writing career. Her first two published works were film-related booklets, both written in 1925: “Pola Negri,” and “Hollywood: America’s City of Movies.”2 Since these were both written before she came to America, her likely source of information was movie magazines that her Chicago relatives were sending to her.

But it was the content of Western films that had such great impact. Operettas (particularly those by Emmerich Kálmán) had been her main inspirations and windows on the West, but, as she put it in her 1960–61 biographical interviews: “movies supplanted the operettas in my life . . . because that was a much more specific, not merely symbolic, view of life abroad . . . . I began to see movies every night practically. And that was the most wonderful period. For Russia that was one of my happiest periods as such. I don’t mean in the total, but at least in this aspect: because it was almost as if I had a private avenue of seeing the world outside. So that those movie stars and movie magazines from abroad became, well, the world from Mars, the voice from Mars.”3 What those films showed of America was especially inspiring: “There were some American movies where you could see New York, just shots, usually long shots, and I would sit through two shows just to catch it . . . and it seemed completely incredible. I can’t tell you how glamorous it was at that distance.” That glamor inspired a goal for the teenage Alisa Rosenbaum: get to America and never return.

When she arrived in “Mars,” on February 19, 1926, she stepped — at first indirectly and then directly — into the film world. In Chicago, Sarah Portnoy, matriarch of one of the two families of relatives with whom she stayed, owned the New Lyric Theater, a movie house on Chicago’s South Side, which Ayn Rand attended almost daily: she saw 234 films in 183 days.

When she wasn’t going to films, she spent her time writing scenarios, as she later related:

Now, the first six months, you see, I had to spend here writing those stories, learning to speak English, and then I had decided that I would go to Hollywood, because I couldn’t yet hope to write in a literary English. I had figured out that, since this was the day of the silent movies, I could write — even if it’s slightly broken English — enough to write an outline, the scenario, just the original of a story, and then somebody else could write the titles. . . . It was putting things in reverse, because, you know, in Hollywood you have to make a name for yourself in some other branch of writing before you go to Hollywood, but I reversed it.

So, after those six months in Chicago, she took the train to Los Angeles, bringing with her an introduction to the publicity department at the studio of Cecil B. DeMille, her favorite American director. Then, on September 4, 1926, her first full day in California, came the “fairy-tale” event of her life: Headed to DeMille’s studio in Culver City, she took the right bus line but in the wrong direction, and it was that fortunate mistake that enabled her to launch her early film career and indirectly to meet her future husband. She finally got on the correct bus to Culver City but arrived later than expected at the studio. After submitting her letter of introduction and getting a perfunctory response, Rand prepared to return to Hollywood, where she had a room at the Hollywood Studio Club, a residence for young women seeking careers in the film industry. Then, in her own words, “Now I walk out of the studio . . . and it has a driveway in front of the main building that goes to a gate. And as I start [to] walk down that driveway, I see an open roadster parked, and a man at the wheel talking to somebody outside the car, and it was DeMille. . . . I was just stunned, because it was such a lucky coincidence.” Because she had taken the wrong bus, she caught DeMille on his lunch break. “I recognized him from pictures I had seen. And I stood there staring at him. . . . So I walked on to the gate, and I stopped at the gate to wait to see him drive by. And it wasn’t too long before he started driving. He drives up to the gate, stops, looks at me, and asks, ‘Why are you looking at me?’ Very, very pleasantly. Apparently he had noticed me before. So I told him I had just come from Russia and I am very happy to see him. So he opens the door of the car and says, ‘Get in.’ I didn’t know where we were going; I got in and he started driving. Now isn’t that a fantastic story?”

The story doesn’t end there, for DeMille drove her to the backlot, where they were shooting crowd scenes for his epic King of Kings. In the car, DeMille told her “If you want to work in pictures, you should begin by watching how they work on the set and by observing and learning, so this will do you good.” He then gave her passes for two days, hired her as an extra and eventually as a junior screenwriter. Her career was off and running, and so, ultimately, was her romantic life: On her second or third week at the DeMille Studios, she spotted Frank O’Connor on an early-morning streetcar from Hollywood to Culver City, sought him out on the DeMille set, where he was also working as an extra, later ran into him by chance at a Hollywood library, and married him in April 1929.

After the DeMille Studios closed in 1928, Rand got a job in the wardrobe department at RKO, a job that supplied an income while she wrote We the Living. She lived across the street in an apartment building where she met producer David O. Selznick’s assistant, who gave her the idea for Peter Keating, the second-hander, whose character type features so prominently in The Fountainhead. (Rand’s original title for the novel was “Second-Hand Lives.”) After moving to New York City in 1934, she worked for Paramount Studios, reviewing books submitted to the studio for possible adaptation. Then, after The Fountainhead was published in 1943, she returned to Hollywood to write the screenplay for the film version to be produced by Hal Wallis, who was fresh from his success producing the classic Casablanca. It was upon her return that she became involved with pro-free enterprise people in Hollywood, in particular the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA).

Ayn Rand’s Political Activism

Ayn Rand’s history with politics and political philosophy hardly needs recounting. She witnessed the start of the so-called Kerensky Revolution in February of 1917, and, when 12 years old, adopted the anti-Bolshevik Alexander Kerensky as her hero (downgrading him to “mediocrity” when she met him in 1945). Then, in her mid-to-late teens, she began having political discussions with her father, whom she described as favoring individualism and free enterprise. Although she made anti-Soviet entries in her diary, she kept those ideas secret, knowing that they could be a death sentence. But when she came to America, she became active in politics, working in the 1940 Willkie presidential campaign, writing her “Individualist Credo” and “Individualist Manifesto” and working to form what she called “The Individualist Organization.” Particularly daunting and motivating was her shock at the state of American politics. When she was writing We the Living, she expected that the prevalent view of Communism would be the same as hers. As she explained in her biographical interviews:

Did I know the degree of Pink penetration in America? No. I had no idea of it. I did not know very many people in Hollywood, but those I knew were certainly not Left. And I did not have the impression of the enormous prevalence of Pink sympathizers. Now remember, this was before the New Deal, when the novel was started. And Russia was not even recognized. I did not follow politics or New York publications closely enough to see any particular Pink trend. And I do believe, in retrospect, that it accelerated enormously after 1933, after Roosevelt. . . . My impression, more than anything else, was that people are not sufficiently aware of the menace and the evil of Communism, but that they would be in sympathy with it, I didn’t expect. . . . I took for granted that nobody, except the worst kind of hypocrites, can ever be or advocate altruism.

Still a relative newcomer to America, Rand did not know that the Red Decade had arrived, that period in American history when reverence for the “Soviet experiment” was at its highest.

The Screen Guide

Ayn Rand was not the only anti-Communist in Hollywood. Formed in 1944, the MPA’s membership included DeMille, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, Barbara Stanwyck, Hal Wallis, and John Wayne. For a short time, Rand was on the executive committee. The MPA organized the writing of “Screen Guide,” which was published over the group’s name in its newsletter, “The Vigil.” Details of the publishing history and Rand’s dealings with the MPA can be found in Robert Mayhew’s Ayn Rand and Song of Russia.

If We the Living can be considered a promise kept to the family friend who urged her to “tell the rest of the world that we are dying here,” then “Screen Guide” can be considered a similar warning. She was telling moviemakers and moviegoers to beware of unknowingly absorbing dangerous ideas — not beware of the Communist Party but of altruistic/collectivist ideas that pervade the motion pictures. The Ayn Rand Papers, housed at the Ayn Rand Archives, contain clippings from major newspapers (including the New York Times) with stories announcing the publication of the guide. These stories are by-lined news stories that summarize “Screen Guide,” including numerous quotes and stressing the MPA’s support of freedom of speech.

Ayn Rand’s Assessment

Let Ayn Rand continue the story about the guide’s impact:

This was just about the time of the Hollywood hearings. And, originally, two men from the Thomas Committee — that was the House committee investigating it — came to Hollywood to interview conservatives. And what they wanted mainly was only factual, journalistic material about penetration of the Director’s Guild, the Screenwriter’s Guild, and things like that. All facts. Well, I had nothing to do with any of it. I didn’t belong to the Writer’s Guild. But, at that same time, the FBI was helping them to investigate, and they attended some of our meetings, of the Board.4 And they had heard about the “Screen Guide for Americans.” It was interesting to me that they had heard it before it was out. And asked us for galleys of it, just for their own interest. Which we supplied. It was just being finally put into booklet form then. And about a week later, I got a call from those investigators that they wanted me to come to Washington to testify on the ideology of films. So, I’m sure it was connected. I later learned that the galleys or some report on it had gone to one of the chief investigators for the Thomas Committee, who was an ex-communist, but of thirty years ago, or something like that. And he was their expert on Communism. He had been urging them to do something ideological for years. And when he saw a report on this booklet, he is the one who urged that I be brought to testify. [I was willing to testify] to bring it out into the open. So long as there was a chance, it would have been the only forum. The real reason why I felt it would be all right, and the real good that I accomplished was this: prior to that hearing there would have been no way to get anything about it into any newspaper or magazine. The idea of Hollywood penetration was hopeless ideologically. As I said, there were quite a few articles appearing about Reds in Hollywood but never about propaganda on the screen. That was the real issue, you see, the touchy issue for Hollywood. And incidentally, the producers and all were quite willing to let it be discussed that there were a few communists around. But it’s the content of movies that they did not want to touch. I suspect partly because the Red pressure would have been on that, partly because they were all scared to death of not knowing how to handle those issues and didn’t want to be involved in ideological disputes. Now, the good that that hearing accomplished is that that was the turning point for Red propaganda on the screen. It vanished after that completely. And then later, a few hints kept coming back, but so feebly and so subtly that only Party members would ever know it. I mean it was too feeble to do any harm to the general public. And there I take credit, for the “Screen Guide for Americans” did it. Now, the best thing was that that “Screen Guide” (in condensed form, but the most important highlights) was reproduced in the drama section of the Times,5 the Sunday Times front page, you know, the drama section, which there would be no way of getting to, except in connection with this hearing. . . . Several other newspapers across the country did the same. My name, you know, is not on it, because it was written for the organization. But one magazine, Plain Talk, reprinted the condensed form without permission, with my name on it.6 And that was the best accomplishment. Then, at first, when the “Screen Guide” came out, the major studios generally kind of ignored it. Progressively, thereafter, I began hearing one studio and another ordering it from the MPA in tens and dozens. And all the points that I made in it — particularly, you know the attacks on the businessmen as villains — disappeared, certainly in the form in which they had been. If you watch old movies on TV, you’ll see the difference. And there I really take credit for it.

The format of the guide is a list of “don’ts,” addressing Conservatives in general but film producers in particular, urging them not to sanction ideas and positions that are destructive of their ideals. Thus “Screen Guide” was not merely a warning about the subtle ways that collectivist ideas are spread. As a call not to support one’s enemies, it was her first public statement about moral sanction, a principle integral to the story of Atlas Shrugged (a crucial insight of the novel’s hero is that “I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win — and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent”). This principle was the theme of Rand’s last public talk, “The Sanction of the Victims,” where she implored businessmen to cease financing universities that are the source of collectivist and thus anti-America ideas. It is, she said, “a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers.”

By the late 1940s, Rand began to cut her ties to the film industry. She had resigned from the executive committee of the MPA, The Fountainhead film had been released in 1949 and had moved the novel back onto the bestseller lists, and she and Frank moved permanently back to New York City in 1951. One final confluence between political ideology and film was her editing for re-release of the newly rediscovered Italian film of We the Living. Produced illegally (i.e., without Rand’s permission) in 1942 in Fascist Italy, a print was discovered in 1968, and Ayn Rand worked on editorial issues, including the script and subtitles, making sure that it contained no remnant of the Fascist ideology that had been introduced by the Italians, who had banned the film when they realized it was as anti-Fascist as anti-Communist.

The immediate practical effect of the guide was to alert people to the dangers of unknowingly spreading Communist propaganda. But Rand’s dealings with the Hollywood Conservatives showed her the futility of dealing with issues unphilosophically, which is what they did. Thus, her admonition to Leonard Read (see her February 28, 1946 letter in Letters of Ayn Rand) that what is needed is philosophic not economic education, and her proclamation to Rose Wilder Lane that her “personal crusade” was not to fight collectivism or altruism (which, she said, were “only consequences”) but to go after “the real root of evil on earth: the irrational” (see letter in revised edition of Letters of Ayn Rand). “Screen Guide” was an early instance of Rand stressing the need to look beneath the surface, a path she traveled in her many political analyses and explained in her 1974 article “Philosophical Detection.” Revealing the fundamental philosophic ideas underlying political and social policies and showing the effects of those ideas was a theme of much of her nonfiction writings after the publication of Atlas Shrugged. “Screen Guide” was also an early (the first?) appearance of one of those uniquely “Ayn Rand” identifications, “the sanction of the victim,” which she so eloquently explained in her New Orleans talk shortly before the end of her life.

Screen Guide for Americans is available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle, with an audiobook to follow soon.

In a 1961 interview, Ayn Rand was asked whether she considered herself primarily a novelist or a philosopher. “I would say I am primarily both, equally and for the same reason,” she replied, explaining that her purpose in both fields was “to define and present an ideal man, the specific, concrete image of what man can be and ought to be.” Nevertheless, readers often approach Rand’s philosophy mainly through her nonfiction writings. In doing so, they gain only an incomplete grasp of her philosophy.

To help readers gain a more complete grasp, ARU Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Moral Idealism of Ayn Rand: From “Anthem” to “Atlas Shrugged,” a new anthology of essays by Onkar Ghate, ARI’s chief philosophy officer. The book debuted on June 27 during Tal Tsfany’s State of ARI presentation at OCON 2026.

As Robert Mayhew, a leading scholar of Rand’s fiction, writes in the foreword to the anthology, there is an “intimate and inextricable connection between Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, and her novels.” Indeed, “in order to understand [her] views on such philosophical issues as free will, reason and emotion, and self-esteem, it is not enough to read her nonfiction; one must attend to her novels.”

Ghate does more than just attend. In eight essays, his volume examines how the heroes in Rand’s fiction strive to embody her moral ideal, translate it into action, and confront a world hostile to their values. For example, Ghate shows how, in Anthem, Equality 7-2521’s discovery of electricity leads him to grasp that his own mind is free and self-governed, breaking collectivism’s metaphysical hold over him. Turning to Atlas Shrugged, he argues that Dagny Taggart’s first ride on the John Galt Line shows her recognizing the “unity of spirit and matter,” that spiritual values should be made real in the material world through purposeful action. Likewise, Ghate examines Leo Kovalensky’s decline in We the Living, showing that even a man of real virtues can be spiritually destroyed if his devotion to life never fully develops.

While Rand’s novels are deeply philosophical, Ghate stresses that this does not make them didactic. In the opening chapter, he challenges the familiar charge that Rand’s fiction is “a conference talk, a classroom lecture, a sermon disguised as a novel,” arguing that such objections rest on faulty categories. Rand’s aim, Ghate explains, was to create “a new kind of story,” one in which the “discovery of philosophical principles drives the plot.” In Anthem, for instance, Equality 7-2521’s rediscovery of himself as an individual drives the actions he takes, the conflicts he enters, and ultimately makes his triumph possible.

The final chapter broadens the point that Rand’s fiction is not didactic through an analysis of John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged. According to Ghate, far from being “a digression” or “a pause in the action,” the speech is crucial to the novel’s plot and theme. As part of the producers’ strike, it is itself an element of the novel’s action. Further, by articulating the principles behind the strike, Galt explains the actions of the characters, from Francisco d’Anconia’s destruction of his own copper empire to Dagny’s search for the destroyer behind it all.

The Moral Idealism of Ayn Rand is available now on Amazon in paperback and Kindle, with an audiobook to follow soon.

Three new mini-books debuted during ARI CEO Tal Tsfany’s keynote talk at Objectivist Summer Conference 2026 on June 27. Two of these short works, enriched by historical documents from the Ayn Rand Archives, explore Rand’s relationship with America and its ideals, and the third applies these principles to the space industry.

Screen Guide for Americans by Ayn Rand, with an afterword by Michael S. Berliner, is the first publication of Rand’s 1947 pamphlet to include archival facsimiles of materials that provide context for the text. In her pamphlet, Rand advised patriotic movie producers on how to defend their films against implicit unwanted communist propaganda. Berliner’s new afterword, written for this definitive edition, looks at how the “Screen Guide” related to Rand’s interest in film and political ideology, how it prefigures a profound moral issue that she explored in Atlas Shrugged and her nonfiction essays, and how she assessed the pamphlet’s impact.

While the original pamphlet was being prepared for publication, the House Committee on Un-American Activities took notice of it and invited Rand to testify. As Rand later reflected: “. . . That was the turning point for Red propaganda on the screen. It vanished after that completely. . . . And there I take credit, for the ‘Screen Guide for Americans’ did it.”

Ayn Rand’s Immigration Story: I Chose to Be an American by Agustina Vergara Cid and Brandon Lisi traces Rand’s journey from revolutionary Russia to her ultimate success as a writer in America, and includes archival facsimiles and photographs documenting her immigration process. Vergara Cid and Lisi show how Rand’s belief in America’s founding ideals sustained her through years of bureaucratic and existential hardship — and fueled her lifelong fight to defend the country she loved.

Freedom to Launch by Mike Mazza collects three essays, with a preface by the author, about the spectacular rise of the private space industry. “Set free to build and operate space launch vehicles, the private space industry has pushed the boundaries of space flight beyond what was once science fiction,” writes Mazza, who proposes reforms to further liberate the industry — ending government subsidies and securing property rights in space — that he argues would usher in the progress needed to make lunar vacations, or even trips to Mars, a reality.

All three mini-books are available now in paperback and Kindle eBook, with audiobook formats to release soon.

The signers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to fight a militarily superior enemy to secure that independence. 250 years later, the American president signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Iran — a far weaker and viler enemy — securing none of his stated war objectives, but acceding to most of the enemy’s demands.

Why has the world’s strongest military power allowed this to happen, in such dramatic contrast to the example of its founders? The answer we must consider is that there’s one final battle in the American Revolution still to be fought — not a military battle, but an intellectual one.

To explain America’s foreign-policy collapse, some will point to the commander in chief’s cowardice and cynical pragmatism about the upcoming elections. His character flaws are many and profound. But few would accuse the president of insensitivity to his base. He is obviously eager to continue appeasing Republican voters who welcomed his promise to stop “forever wars.”

But this just raises the question in a different form. How did once hawkish Republicans —traditional advocates of a confident American foreign policy — become so meek?

A clue to the answer — and a sign that the unfought battle is intellectual — is found in the thinking of the generation of Americans including Tulsi Gabbard, J.D. Vance, and Pete Hegseth who fought in the Iraq war, witnessed its failures, and now guide American policy.¹

Hegseth, who led the “Department of War” into Iran, has put his thinking on record. His 2024 book The War on Warriors recounts his experience in Iraq with the Army’s 101st Airborne. There, as he led a platoon in search of al Qaeda operatives, he was regularly flummoxed by rules of engagement that handicapped his men’s ability to defend themselves and even mandated the release of suspected enemy fighters who would go on to attack them again.

The rules of engagement that bedeviled Hegseth exemplified the Bush administration’s overall approach to its “war on terror.” Time and again Bush sought to elevate the interests of foreign civilians and even enemy soldiers over those of American citizens and soldiers. We saw this not only in restrictive rules of engagement, but in the recurring insistence on dropping humanitarian aid along with bombs, and using war to spread the “democracy” that elected Iran-aligned Islamists in Iraq.

In Hegseth’s thinking, the error of Bush’s policy was to “conflate international law with just war theory.” “Just war theory” is the traditional Christian doctrine that Republicans have also recently invoked to justify the Iran war, in response to criticisms from Pope Leo. Hegseth’s invocation of that doctrine signals his underlying commitment to Judeo-Christian morality.

It’s undoubtedly true that various international treaties encouraged “humanitarian” restrictions that disabled America’s ability to fight a just war. But Hegseth openly doubts that any notion of “just war” can be translated into “universal rules” of war. He says men are too sinful by nature to follow such rules, so we might be “better off winning wars according to our own rules” rather than caring about what he dismissively calls “morality plays.”

Hegseth’s insistence that “just war theory” can never be translated into actionable rules amounts to the confession of a man — and of a nation — in the grips of a contradiction. It’s the contradiction between a morality that demands we humbly turn the other cheek to love our enemy, and the real-world practical requirements of military victory.

To resolve this contradiction is a key element of the American Revolution’s unfought intellectual battle.

But it cannot be resolved by having it both ways. The contradiction is real, and “just war theory” cannot dissolve it. That theory already drastically restricts permissible war and (as I have argued earlier) is in tension with Christianity’s pacifist roots. The pope himself recently repudiated it as inconsistent with those roots and the nature of modern warfare.2 We can either be good Christians or we can confidently fight wars of righteous self-defense and win. We cannot do both.

It’s well-known that Christian moral principles are defined in opposition to the practical needs of life, whether they concern warfighting or moneymaking or sexual fulfillment. So we should expect that a defense secretary trying to answer practical military questions will find little if any real guidance from those principles. He will conclude that warfighting inherently involves (in his words) “shades of gray.”

A culture whose moral principles repudiate practicality can offer no principled guidance for how to be practical. Whatever shaky confidence the practically oriented might muster is then unguided by any standards. This further encourages range-of-the-moment, shoot-from-the-hip pragmatism. We see this in Trump’s cynical foreign policy agenda of coddling dictators (Putin and Xi), betraying allies (Europe and Israel), and toying with weak neighboring rivals (Venezuela and Cuba) only because it’s easy.

The Iran war epitomized the spurt of confidence unguided by ideals. The decision to start the war was not the result of a strategic vision, guided by long-term commitment to achieving specific values, but the whim of a president likely looking to distract from domestic controversies. As a result, even very short-term contingencies, like a lack of cooperation from recently spurned allies or the Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz were not planned for.

Such a narrowly “practical” approach is also doomed to be ineffective, because nothing ambitious can be achieved without a single-minded focus on long-range goals — i.e., values. The shifting Iran war objectives (unconditional surrender, regime change, nuclear and ballistic missile disarmament, etc.) were announced and abandoned so quickly because they were unachievable in an unplanned, whimsical, unprincipled war.

In the face of failure arising from such thoughtlessness, it’s then easy to collapse in humiliation, especially if one’s only notion of a moral principle in the first place was humility.

The last, unfought battle of the American Revolution is to finally throw off the shackles of the morality of Christian humility. There was nothing humble about the Declaration of Independence. To declare to the world an intention to stand on your own feet and fight to the death for the right to the pursuit of your happiness is an act of rational pride, not humility. That declaration was possible only because of an Enlightenment philosophy of individual rights that consciously or unconsciously repudiated the Christian morality of humility.

But most American intellectuals never formulated a moral philosophy that fully sanctioned the pursuit of happiness or with it the doctrine of individual rights. They never completed the American Revolution because they never broke free from old European moral thinking (whether Christian or neo-Christian egalitarian). And so America has long struggled with a contradiction between the only moral philosophy it’s known since its founding, and its practical ambitions (in business, in technology, in military affairs) for living life and achieving happiness on earth.

This is why Ayn Rand called for “a moral revolution to sanction and complete the political achievement of the American Revolution.” It’s why she said “For a nation, as for a man, a Declaration of Independence implies a declaration of self-esteem. Neither can stand without the other.”

Anyone who cannot understand how a militarily powerful modern nation like America could capitulate to a weak, medieval theocracy like Iran must know on some level it is not for any failure of power. It’s for unwillingness to use it. But our will is guided by our moral code, and no matter how much many evade it, our dominant moral code says: “love thy enemy.” If ever we are to escape the cycle of spurts of unmoored confidence followed by humiliation, we must declare independence from that moral code and seek another.

Ayn Rand’s planning material for We the Living is available with full-text searching

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Curated readings, short assignments, and regular Q&A sessions will help cultivate active, independent engagement with Rand’s key nonfiction works

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A version of this article was originally published by the Southern California News Group on June 21, 2026.

On July 4 the United States will mark 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. The public celebrations, the fireworks, the parades, the bipartisan commemorations all promise to be spectacles. Too little thought, however, has been given to what’s truly distinctive about America. Two media outlets — The Free Press and the Wall Street Journal — stand out for commentary about America’s birthday that highlights capitalism. The Wall Street Journal’s editor-in-chief described capitalism as “arguably the country’s most distinctive characteristic.”

But to truly understand that characteristic, one must confront a disquieting truth: Today, virtually no one embraces capitalism.

Across the political spectrum, whether the rhetoric centers on due process, the First Amendment, or making America great again, capitalism is the one thing all sides oppose. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were not akin to today’s progressives searching for the next economic handout or today’s conservatives clinging to faith, family and tradition. They were radicals, steeped in Enlightenment thought—and the American Experiment earned its name because they were consciously inventing something new.

To grasp that achievement, we must grasp that they were heirs both to John Locke and to Adam Smith. Just as they sought to separate church from state, so they sought to separate economy from state.

The new American government stripped the state of much of its power to enforce ideological orthodoxy or suppress dissenting views. Gone was the divine right of popes or kings to dictate doctrine. In the New World, the fate of a Socrates or a Galileo would be different. “It does me no injury,” Jefferson wrote, “for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or none. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Likewise, the government was stripped of much of its power to pick economic winners and losers. Titans of industry like Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan emerged to transform business and production, earning fortunes in America that the Old World would have strangled in the cradle — through such controls as guilds, royal monopolies, charters, and aristocratic privilege that dictated who was permitted to rise.

America was designed as a haven for the thinker and the producer, for creators of ideas and creators of wealth. Protecting the individual’s rights to life, liberty and property—this was the root of American prosperity and power. America was built for individuals who sought self-reliance, who sought the freedom, intellectual and economic, to pursue their own happiness.

Of course, the journey was complicated by intellectual inconsistencies and severe headwinds. The disestablishment of religion across the states had to continue well into the 19th century. The atrocious denial of rights to millions of enslaved people required a Civil War to begin correcting. But as America approached full capitalism in the latter half of that century, individuals’ standard of living soared, ushering in the modern world.

Today, however, this political ideal has few champions. One dominant political tribe seeks to impose a new “woke” orthodoxy—dictating speech, curriculum, and hiring practices. The other tribe seeks to impose old-style religion—expelling foreign dissenters, censoring late-night critics, and forcing young women to carry a small mass of human cells to term.

Economically, one tribe proudly attains the mayoral office of New York City by declaring it will force some people to subsidize other people’s “free” healthcare, education, and housing. The other tribe proudly wields federal executive power to pick winners and losers through economy-wide tariffs, imposed at the president’s whim but open to be renegotiated if you’re willing to bend the knee.

Capitalism is what made America great. But at our 250th anniversary, it is still — in Ayn Rand’s words — “an unknown ideal.”

What’s required to revive capitalism and restore America’s actual greatness? Grasp Rand’s insight into its true nature: full, consistent capitalism requires “a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”

Image credit: Roy Rochlin / Getty Images Entertainment / via Getty Images

Most people would never go to a medieval bloodletter to treat a fever, or listen to a quack offering a cure for cancer taken from medieval scrolls. The life-saving benefits of modern medical science are too obvious for anyone sane to fully ignore.

Why then do so many listen enthusiastically to clerics of Bronze Age religion for advice about our most important life choices — i.e., morality?

Notably, not only “conservative” commentators but numerous “progressives” have fallen all over each other to praise the recent Catholic encyclical Magnifica Humanitas by Robert Prevost (“Pope Leo XIV”). They exhibit a widespread cultural dependency on religious morality, an irrational, toxic habit we should have kicked long ago.

Among religious “conservatives,” Prevost’s tome was met not only with deference but adulatory relief. The editors of the National Review reveled in the fact that AI companies like Anthropic and eventually “all eyes” looked to the church as a moral authority.¹ They’re reassured that so many would take the church’s moral advice seriously despite its decades of enabling child sexual abuse, like alcoholics reassured by a crowded bar.

The aura of religion’s moral authority blinds even nominally secular commentators into seeing its obvious vices as though they were virtues. The secular “progressive” Atlantic featured a columnist whose favorite passage from Prevost’s tract condemned any attempt to “eliminate suffering,” because it recognized the importance of exalting our “limitations” and “woundedness.”2 He echoes the addict’s delusional rationalization that purity is pathological, because life needs a little poison.

Religion’s aura may dazzle because we do need light. There are real questions worth answering about the proper development and use of AI. And AI itself cannot answer our deepest moral questions — about AI or anything else. There’s no substitute for human intelligence. But then we should work to answer these ethical questions in the same way that tech researchers used to develop AI: intelligently. We should make rigorous, critical, ambitious use of the scientific method, rather than religious faith.

So it’s revealing that Prevost’s tract contains no new data about the consequences of using AI, no proposed experiments for evaluating the effects of regulating it — no new thinking at all. Many of his anecdotes are not even about AI per se, but about decades-old problems with the digital economy, e.g., the plight of workers involved in reviewing content for “disturbing material.”3 A rational thinker would consider that AI image recognition technology could save people from reviewing this content and look for ways to encourage the development of such technology. But Prevost is no such thinker.

His missive is only a repackaging of conventional anxieties about AI, candy-coated with superficial facts about tech and fancy theological terminology to make Catholic values easier to swallow. The values are thoroughly faith-based and mystical. We’re told we must protect “dignity” by forcing taxpayers to fund jobs that create no value for private employers. They supposedly possess this dignity “by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God.”4 We’re told the state must protect the “common good” through regulations on AI innovation. This “common good” is “not the sum total of individual benefits” but a transcendent “greater good” that “we could not explain.”5 We’re told to take this all on faith, without rational explanation.

Religious faith has long operated like a cartel in the morality business. Its customers think they can’t get it anywhere else, supposing that morality inevitably appeals to someone’s feelings. They assume it cannot be scientific or fact-based. So religious faith, itself a kind of feeling, seems the only source of morality.

But just as we can’t leave the guidance of our most sophisticated and powerful technology to mindless machines, we also can’t leave it to mindless faith and other unscrutinized emotions. It’s time to think rationally about how to kick the religious morality habit and formulate a scientific code of ethics.

Our best scientists serve as role models. Consider Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI.”6 For decades he toiled in obscurity, convinced that if neurons help brains think, electronic “neural nets” could emulate them. His peers thought this was hopeless: AI needed to emulate logicians’ formal algorithms, and replicating the more organic cognition of living things would take too much computing power. Indeed, many of his hypotheses failed. But colleagues suggested hybridizing neural nets with other algorithms. He listened, and did more experiments. When the necessary computing power was available, he and his colleagues developed some of the first reliable image recognition technology, selling it to Google for a fortune. The rest is history.

Hinton’s achievement might not have been just a result of impressive intelligence, but also of a commitment to certain values. Scientists seek the truth, come what may, regardless of peer skepticism. They willingly abandon pet hypotheses in favor of proven rivals. They courageously, ambitiously push forward to know more and more truth, building practical applications that test their theories further, improving human life in the process. Scientific objectivity is not “value-free.” Objectivity — the methodical pursuit of the truth — is itself a value.

What if, to understand scientific objectivity, we need to see it as requiring moral character virtues of honesty, integrity, and pride in one’s work?

Whether they know it or not, the best scientists could already be offering us an implicit alternative moral code — and the factual basis of value claims. Biologists can’t offer evolutionary explanations without showing that traits or behavior are naturally selected when they promote the good of the organism. And doctors regularly identify facts about what is healthy for our bodies and thus good for our lives.

Don’t we also need to assess the “health” of our personal character to live a happy life? What if this is the job of a scientific ethics?: To discover the virtues practiced by scientists — and engineers, and businessmen — by which we characteristically discover the truths by which we explain, predict, and control the world, and thus successfully live.

Yet our culture discourages even the possibility of a scientific ethics, because of its continuing dependence on a toxic religious morality that promotes fear of the truth, hatred for those who pursue it and of their success in life. Religion has sold this fear and hatred for centuries and even secular ethicists have absorbed it. It’s why they tolerate the values that Prevost proclaims on blind faith. It’s why they resonate with the central image in his screed, the Bronze Age myth of the Tower of Babel, about how God punished ambitious builders, fearing they would gain confidence in their own minds. And it’s why they even empathize with his perverse lamentation of using technology to eliminate suffering, fearing that it will somehow “dehumanize” us.

The scientific pursuit of truth is the most glorious distinction of our humanity, and AI technology is its latest expression. To be proper custodians of this technology — not to mention of our economies, our governments, and our nuclear weapons — we must learn to extend the virtues of science to every domain of life — especially to morality. Elsewhere I have outlined the case that’s already been made for such an ethics but so far ignored by our culture. We need to find a scientific ethics if we are to break free from addiction to a morality that is the toxic brew of atavistic witch doctors.

AynRandCon-Europe 2026, held in Porto, Portugal, attracted students and fans from Poland, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and 24 other countries, filling the lecture hall to capacity. The student-focused conference aimed to deepen attendees’ understanding of central Objectivist ideas and inspire students to consider an intellectual career. By the close of the three-day event, attendees reported an enriched understanding of Objectivism, and a significant number of students opted to continue studying with us, some of whom are considering an intellectual career.

Dr. Yaron Brook kicked off the first day with a talk clarifying Objectivism's distinctive understanding and defense of capitalism, highlighting the values of reason and freedom —  and the morality of self-interest. Dr. Onkar Ghate followed with a deep philosophic analysis of why people abandon reason for faith — and what it does to them and to societies at large — using Ayaan Hirsi Ali — a former Muslim and outspoken atheist who converted to Christianity — as a case study and drawing on a range of historical examples. Ghate argued that the battle between reason and faith, or science and religion, should be understood as a battle between philosophy and religion. What is at stake is whether one’s most fundamental starting points and justifications rest on a rational, scientific, philosophic foundation — or a mystical one.

The second day focused on morality and why ambitious thinkers should consider an intellectual career. Ghate explored Rand’s rational egoism, and Tal Tsfany delivered a lecture on self-discovery, passion, and the power of ideas to change the world. Finally, a panel featuring Brook, Ghate, Tsfany, and Elan Journo explored what it takes to pursue an intellectual career.

Our outreach extended well beyond the conference itself. In the weeks before, Dr. Aaron Smith led a series of online discussions to prepare students and give them a preview of what studying with us can offer. After the conference, high-potential students were invited to follow-up discussions with Smith, deepening their development while giving us the opportunity to stay in touch before the new academic year begins.

In addition to its intellectual and aspirational values, AynRandCon-Europe met a social need for many of its attendees. During the lengthy breaks between lectures and our organized social events, attendees had plenty of time to forge connections with one another. Many reported joy and excitement at meeting so many new people who share their values, and the atmosphere was lively and vibrant throughout.

Between the caliber of the speakers, the quality of the attendees, and the beautiful Renaissance Hotel venue, AynRandCon-Europe 2026 set a new bar — and left us already looking forward to the next one.

Image credit: Nick Brundle Photography / Moment / via Getty Images

In this episode of The Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, Robertas Bakula and Mike Mazza discuss two major developments in the AI industry: Bernie Sanders’ proposal for an AI wealth fund and the White House’s order to block access to Anthropic’s newest models.

Topics include:

• The Anthropic Ban

• Fear-Mongering About Security

• Fear-Mongering About Jobless Future

• Is there “Collective Knowledge”?

• Lack of Concern with Individual Rights

Resources: 

• Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, “Marketing AI without Empowering Resentment”

• Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, “Fear of Progress: The Quest to End Autonomous Driving”

This episode was recorded on June 16, 2026.

Image credits: Circuit: Tatiana Sviridova / Moment / via Gettuy Images
ChatGPT:  Silas Stein / picture alliance / via Getty Images
Cladue: Samuel Boivin / NurPhoto / via Getty Images
Trump: Jim Watson / AFP / via Getty Images
Sanders: Frederic J. Brown / AFP / via Getty Images

Have political connections to Donald Trump’s second administration become a get-out-of-antitrust-jail card?

In June 2025, the Department of Justice, following an alleged “boozy backroom” meeting between officials and lobbyists, settled its attempt to block the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)–Juniper Networks merger.1 Democratic senators, Republican appointees fired after decrying the settlement, and antitrust purists all protested that antitrust had become “politicized” because corruption and personal favoritism had replaced legal procedure.2^, 3^, 4^, 5 But that was just the beginning.

Less than a month after Paramount agreed to pay Trump a $16 million lawsuit settlement, the Trump administration green-lit the Skydance–Paramount merger.6 Skydance’s CEO is the son of Larry Ellison, a close personal ally of the president.

Shortly after, the family connection seemed to pay off even more. Netflix abandoned its pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) in the face of massive regulatory hurdles. The freshly baked Paramount–Skydance snatched WBD, expecting a smooth sail through DOJ offices in exchange for “sweeping changes” at Trump-critical CNN.7^, 8^, 9^, 10

Finally, the DOJ and Live Nation Entertainment struck a surprise settlement agreement, stunning the judge who had just kicked off the trial.11 It followed a White House meeting prompted by Donald Trump’s friend and former Live Nation board member Ariel Emanual. Trump obliged, calling around to ask, “What’s the holdup”?12

The administration’s antitrust enforcement exhibits the consequences of leaving vast, arbitrary power in executive hands. Antitrust scrutiny is often a matter of life and death for a business. While politically favored firms coast through reviews, others face the full wrath of regulators.

But the critics are misleading the public about the alternative to Trump’s use of antitrust power. In their letter to the judge, Democratic senators argue that the HPE–Juniper deal should be reviewed based on merit and public interest, not political favors and influence peddling.13 Many states’ attorney general refused to sign the settlement and pushed the Live Nation trial to its conclusion, boasting about taking on the role the corrupt federal government agency abdicated.14 The same coalition also promised a “vigorous review” of the Paramount–WBD deal.15

All of them presume that there could be non-arbitrary, legally proper antitrust enforcement. But there never has been such a thing. Trump’s use of antitrust to make businesses fall in line is just the most recent overt instance of a long history of arbitrary enforcement driven by favoritism. Antitrust has been subject to political whim from the outset.

The Long History of Presidential Favoritism in Antitrust

The Sherman Antitrust Act itself, the bedrock of the U.S. antitrust law, was born of political favoritism. Senator John Sherman sought Republican votes from small local manufacturers who wanted protection from competition with larger, more productive national corporations. A promise to control trusts also helped Republicans sway Democrats away from opposing another form of controlling trade Republicans preferred — tariffs.16 With the Sherman Act on the books, business survival came to depend on the regulators’ and president’s favor rather than productivity.

The famous “trustbuster,” Teddy Roosevelt, used political power to target what he called “bad trusts” (associated with the publicly reviled and uncooperative J. D. Rockefeller), while sparing the “good trusts” (linked to the more supportive House of Morgan).17

The other Roosevelt, FDR, similarly manipulated enforcement. He basically suspended antitrust during the early New Deal to secure corporate cooperation with price controls.18 But when he needed a scapegoat for failing New Deal policies, FDR launched a rhetorical war against business concentration.19 His appointee to lead Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, Thurman Arnold, would preside over the most aggressive period of antitrust enforcement to date (even though that wasn’t FDR’s intention).20 Soon though, Arnold was pushed out by the administration that needed big business’s support in the war effort.21 Thus, business experienced periods of lax, extremely aggressive, and again lax antitrust enforcement, morphing with the changing goals and rhetoric of FDR’s administration.

The pattern of brazen influence-peddling continued with both Democrats and Republicans.

President Johnson “threatened to block a merger involving a leading Houston bank unless the head of the bank helped secure the endorsement of the leading Houston newspaper for Johnson’s 1964 campaign.”22 Meanwhile, favorable rulings by the Federal Communications Commission allowed LBJ’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, to maintain a TV station monopoly in Austin, Texas.23 No antitrust enforcer looked her way, thanks to Johnson’s political clout.

In 1969, President Nixon ordered his deputy attorney general to stop interfering with the International Telephone & Telegraph’s purchase of Hartford Fire insurance Company (the largest merger in America at the time) because ITT’s CEO was a friend, an ally, and a contributor. These campaign contributions to influence antitrust merger decisions became part of the Watergate scandal.24

Just weeks after Obama’s reelection, his appointees dropped an investigation into Google that could have turned into the biggest antitrust case since Microsoft’s. Unsurprisingly, some former Google executives, including CEO Eric Schmidt, were crucial assets in Obama’s 2012 campaign.25

The tables turned against Google when the first Trump administration, now criticized for not enforcing antitrust, pushed a case against Google right before the 2020 elections to make Trump appear tough on Big Tech.26

Throughout their 135-year history, U.S. antitrust laws always followed the presidential whim of the moment. President Trump’s blatant use of antitrust during his second term to reward his allies and punish dissenters is raising more eyebrows just because it’s more brazen. Sherman shrouded his favoritism towards small manufacturers under the language of promoting “competition.” Trump simply doesn’t care to obscure his motives, such as wanting a change in CNN’s content and leadership.27

Delinking the power that antitrust controls give the government over business from presidential whim would make antitrust enforcement somewhat less arbitrary. But purging such corruption from the halls of the DOJ and the White House would not and could not make it objective.

Objective Enforcement in the Courts?

When an administration threatens to prevent a business merger, why don’t the companies say to the government: “See you in court”? Litigation is expensive, of course, but companies like Netflix can afford it. If the executive branch makes antitrust enforcement decisions for nefarious reasons, the need to convince a judge that it is actually following the law should limit its ability to do so with impunity.

But there is a reason companies are reluctant to go to court. No matter what the facts are about its business operations, a company and its expert lawyers cannot determine if they have a winning case. This is not only because the Supreme Court over time only increased the uncertainty that businessmen face in “predicting in any particular case what courts will find to be legal and illegal under the Sherman Act,” but because the antitrust “laws” themselves are neither clear nor well-defined.28 Companies facing roadblocks or massive fines or break-ups cannot know how the judge should rule in their case any more than they can know which cocktail will sway an administration official’s arbitrary power in their favor.

Consider the central principle of antitrust: The Sherman Act declares illegal every contract, combination, or conspiracy that is deemed to be “in restraint of trade or commerce.”29^, 30 But any contract is a “restraint of trade” of sorts by its nature: If I sign a contract that says I will purchase spare parts from you for five years in exchange for consistent delivery, a discount, and maintenance and repair services, we thereby both “restrain trade” for five years with anyone else who would like to fix my machines or sell me parts. Yet no businesses can plan long-term without such “restraints.”31

For example, Schwinn & Co. found that the only way it could compete in the bicycle market against mass merchandisers like Sears and Montgomery Ward was to assign exclusive territories to independent bicycle wholesalers. A condition of this contract was that wholesalers could not sell to anyone other than franchised retailers, and retailers could not sell outside their assigned territory.32

But in 1967 the court ruled Schwinn’s contracts illegal “restraints of trade.” Had Schwinn just vertically integrated with retailers by directly owning them (as it started doing after the ruling), it would have avoided antitrust scrutiny. But no matter how many lawyers it consulted in advance, Schwinn could not have known that vertical integration wouldn’t be condemned as “restraint of trade,” but contracts with independent retailers would. Other companies have been severely punished for vertical integration as allegedly a form of seeking monopoly power. Moreover, about a decade later, the courts reversed course, ruling that territorial restraints were actually acceptable.33 No one, then or now, can say which court’s “interpretation” of antitrust law — territorial restraints are or are not illegal — is correct.

Now take the rules prohibiting “attempts to monopolize.” After a century of debate, judges still have no way to distinguish between “willful acquisition or maintenance of [monopoly] power” and “growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident,” as the Federal Trade Commission says courts should do.34^, 35

In the famous Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America) case, Judge Learned Hand tried but failed to make this distinction meaningful. In his 1945 opinion, Hand first reiterated the arguments that “a single producer may be the survivor out of a group of active competitors” and should not be punished after winning “merely by virtue of his superior skill, foresight and industry.”36 But then he condemned Alcoa for precisely these traits, writing that “nothing compelled” the company to willfully “embrace each new opportunity as it opened [Alcoa’s foresight], and to face every newcomer with new capacity already geared into a great organization [Alcoa’s industry], having the advantage of experience, trade connections and the elite of personnel [Alcoa’s skill].”37

Hand failed because on a free market there is no such distinction to be made.

A company willfully pursues market power by building superior products and engaging in excellent, future-looking, long-term strategy. Yet to avoid a charge of “willful acquisition” of power and to instead grow “naturally” in the eyes of antitrust law, the company would have to not embrace new opportunities, not build a team of top talent, not anticipate changes in the market, and not invest in future production. But then no growth would exist. Businesses do not grow automatically, as though preprogrammed by nature, and they don’t grow accidentally. They grow through conscious, ambitious plans to make a profit by besting competitors. Both “natural growth” and “willful acquisition,” if they refer to anything, refer to the same thing.

But because antitrust law pretends that they are distinguishable, any business can be charged with an antitrust violation simply for pursuing success, whenever a regulator or a judge feels like it. All that is needed is just to place the growth and success of a company like Alcoa into the arbitrary category of “willful acquisition of power” rather than the arbitrary category of “natural growth.” Alcoa and the like have better chances to defend themselves in the backroom of a cocktail bar than in court.

Then there is the Clayton Act that prohibits exclusive dealing where it would “substantially lessen competition.”38

Consider the HPE–Juniper merger. On one interpretation, a merger between an enterprise IT provider (HPE) and a networking specialist (Juniper) increases competition by creating an integrated entity capable of tackling Cisco, the current WLAN market leader. But under another interpretation, the deal reduces competitive pressures in the enterprise wireless LAN sector by reducing the number of companies in that market.

How would one adjudicate between these perspectives? Allowing the merger because it enhances competition or preventing it for “substantially” inhibiting competition are both compatible with antitrust law. A judge might as well flip a coin. Which means that there are no objective criteria by which the companies could know that their envisioned conduct, their prospective merger, is lawful or unlawful.

Similarly, some argued that Netflix’s attempted purchase of WBD would “kill the entire movie theater business” through consolidation.39 Others countered that Netflix is competing not only with Disney and Amazon, but with YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, and video games: “Combining Netflix and Warner Bros. doesn’t reduce competition. It strengthens traditional entertainment against far larger digital rivals and preserves a major studio.”40 Both verdicts — that the purchase restrains trade or enhances it — are compatible with antitrust laws.

Under antitrust law, businesses cannot know in advance whether their most routine business decisions are legal or illegal. This means that they are not operating under the rule of law. And this is why they are reluctant to go to court. It’s akin to a dice roll.

The history of antitrust enforcement shows that attempting to navigate antitrust laws in the courts is in principle no different from navigating executive favoritism through personal relationships with politicians and informal backroom deals. Only it’s a judge one needs to “convince” instead of someone politically connected enough over a cocktail. Because antitrust law itself is arbitrary, even the best intentions of the judiciary can’t rectify this problem.41

There Is No Better Alternative to “Politicized” Antitrust

Arbitrary enforcement is not an unfortunate bug of the antitrust system. It is a feature that resulted from trustbusters’ realization that writing antitrust laws to be as definite as laws against traffic violations or theft, which prohibit exact and specific actions that are knowable in advance by the citizenry, wasn’t feasible.

Trustbusters could have banned specific activities like exclusive sales agreements, preferential contracts, or price discrimination (such as selling the same item at different prices in different places).42 But such clarity would effectively outlaw business itself, a result beyond the goals of even the most aggressive anti-big business pundits. Louis Brandeis, a leading progressive legal scholar and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice, for example, believed concentration was inherently evil. But even Brandeis had to disgruntledly acknowledge and help persuade President Woodrow Wilson that one cannot enumerate, define, and outlaw “unfair” practices that allow business to grow big without simultaneously criminalizing ordinary contracts that every small business engages in and depends on.43^, 44

So instead, they left us a system that grants arbitrary power to the executive and judiciary to decide when they happen to like or dislike a business’s practices. As a consequence, an uninterrupted string of favoritism and whim-based decisions plague successful American businesses to this day.

Donald Trump’s use of antitrust to reward his favorites and punish critics is brazen.45 But contrary to the wishful thinking of his critics, judicial process dressed in the veneer of objective application of vague statute cannot resolve the problem. As we’ve seen, the difference is illusory.

Calling for “depoliticization” of antitrust as if that is an obvious solution is a farce. We should castigate the corruption of backroom deals. But it is mere posturing unless we grapple with the fact that there is no such thing as the objective application of arbitrary power.

This essay by Ben Bayer was originally published in New Ideal on July 19, 2019. New Ideal is the online journal of the Ayn Rand Institute. Free subscribers gain access to more content than is published on our Substack. Subscribe here.

The “new atheists” and the “intellectual dark web” are two of the most interesting circles of thinkers to have emerged in the last fifteen years. In the overlap between the two circles, there is a small cadre of thinkers like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker who oppose both religion and “political correctness” in the name of the “Enlightenment values” of science and reason.

The emergence of thinkers who celebrate reason and critique forms of irrationality on both the cultural “right” and the “left” is an extremely positive development. Enlightenment values gave birth to the United States of America and they have the power to move our culture in a direction of more freedom, innovation, and progress.

And yet, there is a reason that Enlightenment values are now in need of defense. They have come under sustained attack because the thinkers of the original seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment failed to fully understand their philosophical roots. If today’s champions of science and reason are to succeed, they need to do more than to recycle the ideas of the past. No doubt they themselves realize that they need new ideas.

If we are to judge by one crucial sign, there is one respect in which the new champions of the Enlightenment are insufficiently radical; indeed, they are downright conventional. This is the stance they take on what I will argue is a crucial presupposition of the values of science and reason: a commitment to the reality of human free will.

How new defenders of the Enlightenment deny free will

The idea that human beings have free will, that each individual is fundamentally in control of his destiny and is not the pawn of deterministic genetic or environmental forces, was a core idea implicit in the Enlightenment period. It’s the idea that made possible this period’s celebration of the individual: of anyone’s ability to become educated, to produce and invent, and to rise by his or her own efforts.

Arguably, it was this conviction about the efficacy of individual initiative that made possible the period’s spirit of rebellion against authorities both religious and secular, and thereby enabled the many forms of social and economic progress that Steven Pinker documents in his recent book Enlightenment Now.

Yet both Pinker and Harris are openly critical of the concept of free will. Harris, for example, wrote an entire book arguing that free will does not exist. He draws on findings from contemporary neuroscience, biology, and psychology to argue that “we can’t make sense of [free will] in scientific terms.”¹ While Pinker has not devoted an entire book to the subject, his volume The Blank Slate argues that what we know about genetics is “eroding the concept of free will and personal responsibility” and that our “conscious mind — the self or soul — is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.”2

Pinker and Harris are not the only figures critical of free will among recent secular champions of science and reason. In essay after essay in the various organs of the intellectual dark web, we see a special predilection for one form of determinism or another. We see an ongoing articulation of the assumption that the only alternative to academic orthodoxy’s explanation via environmental “social construction” is explanation via genetics and evolutionary history. Left out of the conversation entirely is the possibility of a factor beyond “nurture” or “nature”: that human beings choose their paths, rather than being shunted along those paths by either social pressure or ancestral endowment.

This element of the worldview of the new defenders of the Enlightenment is decidedly orthodox. There is nothing more intellectually conventional than the assumption that we can only explain behavior by nature or nurture. It has long been held by intellectuals across the board that free will is an unscientific idea, a kind of superstitious holdover from religion.

But if there’s an orthodox dogma that real intellectual renegades need to challenge, it’s this assumption that free will is unscientific. Drawing on the work of a serious intellectual innovator (Ayn Rand), I will present a view of free will that should clarify why a commitment to the reality of free will is what makes meaningful the very idea of scientific objectivity.

Why reason and science need free will

Suppose you enter a conversation about the relevance of an alleged discovery of disparities in average IQ among ethnic groups. You might argue, as Pinker does, that it wouldn’t make a difference to the case for the political rights of individuals, because “[e]nlightened societies choose to ignore race, sex, and ethnicity in hiring, promotion, salary, school admissions, and the criminal justice system because the alternative is morally repugnant.”3 Surely in saying this, both you and Pinker are saying that members of a society ought to choose to pursue the morally enlightened path, rather than choose the morally repugnant alternative path.

For that matter, think about why you would start such a conversation in the first place. You wouldn’t get involved if you thought there is no possibility that someone in your audience will at least edge his way slightly closer to your view of the truth. To enable this, you might encourage him to look at the facts, for instance facts about what people have in common even though their IQs may differ. In doing this, part of what you are saying and thinking is that he ought to choose to look at the facts and follow the rational path, rather than to choose to ignore them and follow the irrational alternative path.

These two examples illustrate the fact that unless people face real alternatives in their action and thinking, these conversations have no point. That is to say, unless people have free will, the very conversations that defenders of Enlightenment values want to have are pointless.

In fact the same presupposition, that we face real alternatives in life, far from being unscientific, is itself a crucial part of scientific knowledge and practice.

Defenders of science like Pinker and Harris will surely agree that good scientists don’t base their theories on ancient tradition or popular prejudice. This is why they side with Galileo against the church and with Darwin against the creationists. Surely they will acknowledge that good scientists will even resist the conventional prejudices of their own scientific colleagues, as Franz Boas did when he worked to overturn the racist theories cherished by the leading anthropologists of the nineteenth century.4 But what’s common to all of these cases of good science is the scientist’s choice to observe the facts on his own and then to use dispassionate logic to test his theories against the facts, not fantasies or feelings or entrenched assumptions about what “everybody knows.”

Scientific objectivity requires even more than simply resisting the prejudices of others. It also means choosing to resist one’s own idiosyncratic hunches or musings. Consider Johannes Kepler, the great astronomer. After many dozens of attempts to save the idea that the orbit of heavenly bodies must be circular, he chose to give it up. He realized the only shape that could make sense of the astronomical data was an elliptical orbit, even though he had long cherished the idea that the motion of the heavens must be perfectly circular.5 Then the physicist Isaac Newton used Kepler’s data and conclusions to formulate his own law of universal gravitation, but famously chose to refuse to speculate about the cause of gravity. He knew he didn’t have the data to infer it, even as other scientists like Descartes famously erred on the same subject as they failed to resist the temptation to speculate.6

Galileo, Darwin, Boas, Kepler and Newton were scientific achievers. They were not simply passive observers recording the facts; they were active interpreters who had to carefully deliberate about whether they had checked every relevant fact, performed every important test, solved every equation. They could have given in to laziness or dogmatism, but they didn’t. In many cases they even exerted heroic effort to maintain their adherence to the facts in opposition to what must have been an extraordinary social pressure to ignore them. That’s why we celebrate those who exercise scientific objectivity and criticize as unscientific those who fail to. When scientists exercise the discipline of keeping their minds focused on the facts rather than indulging in fantasy and prejudice, they are choosing to use their minds in the proper way.

Every one of us faces the same choice of looking at the facts or not, and we face it constantly. This is what it means to have free will. You can observe your free will in action any time you take a moment to introspect your thought processes. Your free will is your choice to focus or not, your choice to be rational or irrational, your choice to be objective or subjective. It’s what Ayn Rand called the choice to think or not to think.7 I agree with her that this is the real essence of free will.

The fact that free will is implicit in the practice of science is part of what made it an implicit core tenet of the Enlightenment. Science, reason and objectivity are values — norms that are regarded as ideals to be pursued. But to regard them as normative, action-guiding values implies the possibility of choosing them or not. If we are determined by our genetics or environment, there is no such alternative. We will do whatever we are determined to do; no other outcome is possible. This means that determinism is at odds with the deepest commitments of the Enlightenment.

All of this means that when critics of free will suggest that we ought to pay attention to the alleged scientific facts in support of their position, their argument is incoherent. They think we really ought to look at the facts, and agree with their position, which presupposes that we can choose to look at the facts (or not).8 But the position they argue for is that we can’t help what we do, so we have no choice about whether we do or don’t look at the facts. The allegedly scientific argument against free will undercuts itself.9

Free will is consistent with the scientific worldview

Even though it is demonstrable that science requires free will, the allegation that there is something mysterious and unscientific about free will is widespread, and it warrants a response. It is an allegation with a long history and many facets, but addressing a few of the representative allegations should suffice for our purpose. (In the concluding section, I will also try to explain why this worry about free will has been so enduring, in spite of its shortcomings.)

One concern is that the idea of free will is in tension with a principle that is central to the scientific worldview, the principle of cause and effect. Harris, for example, argues that just as we cannot be held responsible for things we may do as a result of neurological disorders, we also cannot be held responsible for anything we do with a normal brain, since both are cases in which our actions are caused by prior physical events.10 What’s more, he argues (following a popular argument by dilemma) that if our decisions and actions are not determined by any antecedent factors, they would then be random, causeless accidents, and still not things for which we are responsible.

It is important that many scientists today acknowledge that it is no longer obvious that every element of the universe follows mechanistic, deterministic laws: quantum phenomena at the subatomic level are often seen as notable exceptions. Whatever the proper interpretation of quantum physics, the fact that not everything that we observe readily fits a deterministic framework should remind us that in science, observations come first, not theories. Our theory should not begin with the assumption that all causality is mechanistic; we should accept mechanistic causality into our worldview only to the extent that we observe it and find the need to infer it.

The obvious source of observational data about free will is our ability to introspectively observe ourselves making choices. Interestingly, Harris regularly claims that he himself cannot introspect any conscious cause of his actions: he notes that he does not understand why he makes various decisions (like tea versus coffee).11 Yet as we have illustrated, the choice of tea versus coffee is not the central kind of choice in which our free will consists. It is our choice to raise or lower our level of awareness, the choice to search for the truth or not, a choice that any scientist should realize he or she faces in any process of investigation.

Any theory of causation needs to be reconciled with this introspective data. The idea that the only alternative to mechanistically determined causation is random chance assumes that causal relationships hold only between present actions and antecedent events. But there is an alternative to this view of causation. In another conception of causation, a causal relationship is the simultaneous relationship between the nature of an entity and its actions. This is fully consistent with the idea that it is in our nature as human beings to be able to choose from a finite array of definite possibilities, and that it is the person or agent, not any previous state, that is the cause of his chosen actions.12

A second common concern is that to believe in free will, one has to accept a mystical view about an immortal, disembodied soul, a view that is either unsupported or contradicted by what we know today about biology and physics. Pinker reiterates this concern when he says that free will would only make sense if the human soul were a kind of “ghost in the machine, a spirit or soul that somehow reads the TV screen of the senses and pushes buttons and pulls levers of behavior.”13 His concern is buoyed by the worry that the idea of free will is inherited from religion, not science.

As I have described it, there’s nothing supernatural about free will. On the contrary, free will is just an aspect of the human mind’s natural capacity to be conscious of the world. It’s a power that requires first and foremost a biologically healthy, functioning brain. It’s a power that goes out of existence when the brain is damaged or when the body ceases to function. It’s a fact about what it means for a human being to be conscious, not an attribute of some immortal soul.

We do not need to invoke the supernatural to explain the human mind’s power to think or not. On the contrary, the idea that an all-powerful divine being knows the future and controls our destiny has always been at odds with the idea of free will. Historically, the first advocates of determinism were religiously oriented thinkers (in particular, the Stoics and St. Augustine). Those same religious thinkers struggled to make room for the idea of moral responsibility in a universe governed by a supernatural power. They gave “compatibilistic” definitions of “freedom,” stripping it of any implication of real alternate possibilities (just as many contemporary secular determinists do).14

It was only after religious thinkers invented determinism that philosophers like Alexander of Aphrodisias, Pelagius, and Thomas Reid came to free will’s defense.15 They were religious themselves, so they had a devil of a time trying to reconcile the free will they defended with the existence of a divine power.

Free will is consistent with discoveries in neuroscience

Of special interest today is the allegation that specific scientific findings, especially in the field of neuroscience, reveal facts about the brain that rule out the presence of free will. In particular, Sam Harris showcases studies like those done by Benjamin Libet as refuting the existence of free will.16 These studies surely demonstrate important facts about the brain, but their results should be unsurprising to anyone who takes free will seriously. (Note that this section can be safely skipped by anyone uninterested in the details of neuroscience.)

Libet’s experiments show that people who are asked to spontaneously move their wrist report having made the conscious decision about when to do so about 350 ms (i.e., about one third of a second) after unconscious brain activity that is associated with a readiness to move (the “readiness potential”). This is taken by skeptics about free will as evidence that it is unconscious brain activity and not the conscious decision that is causally fundamental to our actions. They see the conscious decision as an effect (perhaps a merely accidental side effect) of the deeper cause in the brain.

The Libet experiment helpfully demonstrates that human action is a complex product of the interaction between the conscious mind and the physical brain. This should be a surprise to no one, except for those who think free will is a capacity of a disembodied soul that floats free from the body and has the power to affect it without mediation by the brain. But as mentioned above, the power to raise or lower our degree of awareness is a power that depends on and is mediated by the physical brain.

Philosophy alone cannot predict how the brain mediates the powers of the conscious mind. But it can help us understand the significance of those scientific discoveries by defining the scope of those conscious powers.

Free will is fundamentally the control you have over your conscious thinking processes; it is not a form of control over every spasm of your body or every rumination of the subconscious mind (say, about a desire for coffee vs. tea). Even when you intentionally move your body in a given situation, it is often on the basis of specific desires and beliefs about the results of the action, and these beliefs and desires may be stored in your subconscious.

But intentional actions count as intentional, even when spurred by subconscious beliefs and desires, because those subconscious mental states were themselves programmed by your previous choices, about the extent to which you choose to think or not about your factual knowledge and about what you value.17 This has important consequences for how to interpret the Libet experiment.

Someone who feels an urge to flick his wrist randomly in a Libet-style experiment has already made many conscious choices leading up to this point. First, he had to choose to use his mind or not to answer the question of whether to participate in the experiment, vs., say, simply accepting the invitation passively as a result of social pressure. Having made the choice to use his mind to answer the question, he then deliberated about whether participating in the experiment was worth his time. Having decided to participate and strap on the apparatus, he then decided to comply with the instructions, rather than simply daydreaming through the experiment. This point is of special interest: it is when he consciously chose to instruct his subconscious mind to pick a random moment at which to flick his wrist.18

The experiment certainly helps to show that a prior decision to act spontaneously works through subconscious instructions that depend on measurable brain activity. But again, this should not be surprising. Nobody who seriously believes in free will thinks that when one decides to act spontaneously, one gives instructions to a free-floating soul which temporarily leaves the body and then returns to magically cause the body to move without mediation by the brain.

The decision to instruct oneself to act spontaneously certainly happens well before the measured readiness potential, and yet it is not a moment measured by the experiment itself. Nobody has ever done a Libet-style experiment showing brain activity preceding and determining this prior decision, or any of the other decisions leading up to it that are more obviously cases of the choice to think or not. I don’t think they ever will.

Any Libet-style experiment asks subjects to introspect their choice so as to record its timing. But the possibility of measuring the precise timing of such an event is rendered notoriously difficult, if not impossible, if it is the choice to engage or re-engage the use of one’s consciousness, or not.

If one begins in a semiconscious daze, one is not alert enough to record precisely when one raises one’s level of awareness. If one is already fully conscious and chooses to maintain that state, it is not clear at which point one should mark the beginning of a choice that is made continuously. And because the choice to focus means focusing primarily on facts other than the choice itself, one’s ability to monitor the choice itself would involve divided attention and would likely be imprecise.

The imprecision here matters. Experiments of this type attempt to identify the brain activity that allegedly causes our choices mere fractions of a second before we make them. No self-report about the timing of a choice to focus could be precise enough to be compared meaningfully to brain activity measured on the scale of thousandths of a second.

Those looking to the Libet experiment for anything of significance about free will are simply looking in the wrong place.

Of course, the most fundamental reason that no experiment will ever disprove the existence of free will is that no experiment can give us reason to change our minds about whether or not it is possible to change our minds. No scientific evidence can refute an essential presupposition of the scientific method itself.

In the meantime, we should welcome with a warm embrace all of the facts discovered by neuroscience. But we should remember that good science doesn’t just passively record facts, it actively interprets them, making an effort to avoid prejudice. However we eventually interpret the data of neuroscience, one thing will be sure: if scientists are going to identify its truths, they’ll need to choose to focus their minds to do it. That means using their free will.

The unactualized potential of the Enlightenment

I mentioned earlier that the concept of free will was an idea implicit in the achievements of the Enlightenment. It was implicit because few if any Enlightenment thinkers were willing to defend it explicitly.

So it is not an accident that today’s neo-Enlightenment figures are skeptical of free will: many of the greatest defenders of science and reason in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were themselves determinists (e.g., Spinoza), or at least ambiguous in their promotion of free will (e.g., Locke). Those who came the closest to defending the idea that human beings make genuine choices, undetermined by antecedent factors, packaged their arguments with untenable metaphysical doctrines like mind-body dualism (e.g., Rene Descartes), faith-based epistemologies (e.g., Thomas Reid), or both (e.g., Immanuel Kant).

Kant was a noteworthy and pivotal figure in the Enlightenment’s treatment of the concept of free will. On the one hand, Kant recognized in scattered places in his work that there is something incoherent about supposing that deterministic beings could have rational, objective reasons for believing in determinism. (A deterministic being is simply prompted to believe things, and cannot objectively evaluate what he believes as rational or irrational.19)

On the other hand, Kant’s deeper theoretical views committed him to the idea that the “phenomenal” world studied by scientists is deterministic. So is, he thought, our consciousness as we ourselves introspect it. This meant that no one could ever observe free will. This formalized the prejudice that free will is inherently unscientific. On Kant’s view, free will, if it exists at all, has to exist in the “noumenal” realm, a realm inaccessible to reason and observation. How we are to know that such a realm exists is never explained. Kant famously held up the triumvirate of “God, freedom [meaning freedom of the will], and immortality” as objects of faith rather than reason.

For many reasons we cannot explore here, Kant’s philosophy was instrumental in bringing the Enlightenment to a close, and his packaging of free will with the notions of God and the immortal soul is just one of the reasons.20 When he popularized the claim that free will, a key presupposition of the scientific method, was itself akin to these other religious concepts, he engendered secular skepticism about free will that led to a torrent of philosophical determinism in the nineteenth century (from Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and many, many others), which in turn went on to set the scene for today’s intellectually orthodox secular skepticism about free will.

You can see the remnants of Kant’s package deal among the advocates of Enlightenment values today. Because they see themselves as advocates of science and reason, they are rightly skeptical of the claims of religion. But because they accept Kant’s package deal, they assume that consistently scientific thinkers should reject free will on the same grounds.

The new “back to the Enlightenment” thinkers have much to recommend them. But until these champions of science and reason think more deeply about the ideas that made the scientific revolution both meaningful and possible — chief among these being the concept of free will — they will not be able to appreciate what made this period so revolutionary. They will remain entrenched in the intellectual orthodoxies that have prevented a return to Enlightenment values since approximately the time of Kant. This means they themselves will not be able to become the renegades they would like to become. They should make a different choice.

In this episode of the Ayn Rand Institute podcast, Ben Bayer and Connor O’Leary discuss Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical about AI.

Topics include:

• Valid questions, backwards approach

• Concerning near-universal acclaim

• Dependence on religious morality

• Faith-based moral concepts

• Appealing to fear and resentment

• Hostility to human intelligence

• We need a rational morality

Resources: 

• Ayn Rand, “Requiem for Man,” Capitalism the Unknown Ideal

• Anthropic vs. Trump: The Moral Responsibility of Tech Companies, Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, March 12, 2026

• Marketing AI Without Empowering Resentment, Ayn Rand Institute Podcast, April 23, 2026

• Ben Bayer, How to Build a Secular Morality, New Ideal, June 10, 2026 (just came out yesterday)

This episode was recorded on June 5, 2026.

Image credits: Pope: Carlos Alvarez / Contributor / via Getty Images; Circuit: haydenbird / E+ / via Getty Images

Soon ARU Press will release a collection of Ben Bayer’s essays, Breaking Free From Faith-Based Morality. The collection will feature essays previously published in New Ideal on the subject of the religious roots of altruistic morality. The collection is aimed at secular readers who consider themselves rational and scientific, but who are nonetheless in the grip of the morality of altruism that dominates our culture. It argues that altruism is essentially faith-based, and that a principled commitment to reason requires abandoning it. To offer them an alternative, the final chapter of the book shows how Ayn Rand validated a fully scientific ethics. We are pleased to publish this final chapter online in anticipation of the release of the book.

In 2023, Ayaan Hirsi Ali scandalized the atheist community by announcing that she had converted to Christianity. She argued that atheism offers no meaningful positive values, at a time when the West needs to defend its values — whether from militant Islam or the “woke” movement on campuses: “[W]e can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: What is it that unites us? The response that ‘God is dead!’ seems insufficient.”

To Ali, only Christianity can provide the guidance we need. She credits it as the source of “an elaborate set of ideas and institutions designed to safeguard human life, freedom, and dignity.” By contrast, as Christianity’s cultural influence has waned, we are left with the problem that

the “God hole” — the void left by the retreat of the church — has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. . . . The line often attributed to G. K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”¹

Here she echoes a theme that religious apologists have sounded for centuries: Only the existence of a divine moral lawmaker who transcends human interests and culture can ensure the existence of meaningful, objective moral guidance.2

Doubtless, religion’s decline has created a cultural void that the secular dogma of “woke” egalitarianism has been eager to fill. And this is due in no small part to atheists’ failure to offer the world a convincing philosophic code of objective moral guidance.

But the alternative to “irrational quasi-religious dogma” is not irrational fully religious dogma. In reality, it’s religious faith that truly makes it possible to “believe in anything” about matters of value, undermining objectivity. In this essay, I will show the real meaning of objectivity, and the arguments that have already been given for the guidance it implies. It’s guidance that many atheists have so far failed to embrace when offered, let alone to formulate for themselves.

Atheists typically try to answer the question Richard Dawkins grapples with in his book Outgrowing God:

Lots of people seem to think you need to believe in some sort of god, any kind of ‘higher power,’ in order to have any chance of being moral – of being good. Or that, without belief in a higher power, you’d have no basis for knowing right from wrong, good from bad, moral from immoral. This chapter looks at . . . whether we need belief in God or gods or some sort of ‘higher power’ in order to be good [my emphasis].3

Dawkins says belief in a God who punishes immorality could motivate ostensibly moral behavior.4 He also observes that non-believers like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and George Soros can be very generous in their philanthropic giving, and that there are very few atheists in prison.5 He then offers biological and cultural explanations for this behavior. The leading cultural explanation is the influence of various ostensibly secular moral philosophies. The implied answer to his question is, we don’t need religion for moral guidance, for other secular theories can provide this guidance as well.

But to say that we don’t need religion for moral guidance implies some people can still get it from religion. This “me too” approach concedes that religion has really offered meaningful guidance worthy of emulation. But we should not be so ready to concede that faith-based religious morality has ever offered meaningful guidance, especially if, as I shall argue, it cannot offer objective guidance.

There is an alternative. We can build a secular, scientific account of morality. As I will argue, only a scientific theory can offer truly objective moral guidance. The point is not that we don’t need religion to find meaningful moral guidance. The point is that religion cannot offer it in the first place.

In this essay I will show how to build a secular, scientific morality from the values of science itself, beginning with the value of scientific objectivity. To clear the ground for building it, we must first brush aside religious misconceptions about objective morality. They fail to appreciate its true meaning, and clarifying this meaning will help show why the value of objectivity explains our admiration for important virtues of character. This will point the way to objectively identifying the factual basis for moral truths.

A fully scientifically objective morality must also be willing to challenge the content that many current secular moral theories have inherited from religious codes. Atheists who truly value the rebelliousness of the Enlightenment must be willing to break free from the dominant culture that surrounds them.

Why religion is the enemy of objectivity

Far from being an exemplar of objective morality, religious morality is anathema to it.

There is a powerful but still underappreciated objection to the idea that divine commandments provide the basis for objective standards of morality. It concerns the arbitrariness of the alleged divine commands themselves.

The classic illustration is the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament. God commands Abraham to kill his only begotten son, and Abraham willingly begins to comply. Believers take solace in the fact that God was only testing Abraham and didn’t make him go through with it.6 But what God is testing — and what the story is celebrating — is Abraham’s willingness to kill out of arbitrary blind faith. If God says he should not kill, that makes it immoral; but if God arbitrarily changes his mind and asks Abraham to kill an innocent child, it is moral after all.7 A moral code with divine commandments as its basis is shot through with arbitrariness.

This is the answer to those who bemoan that atheists are capable of believing anything. On the contrary, it’s precisely a religious morality of groundless faith that demands arbitrary belief. The example of Abraham’s submission to God’s arbitrary will has too often inspired believers, from Christian inquisitors to Islamic terrorists and mullahs, who arbitrarily believed their acts of murder and oppression to be noble because it was dictated to them by a higher power.

Defenders of religious morality claim that theirs is an “objective” morality because human beings have no say in what God commands, so whole cultures can be “wrong” if they disobey these commands.8 But this also means God cannot be wrong, no matter what he commands. What God commands of Abraham, for example, is unaffected by the extreme distress Abraham might feel or the pain Isaac would suffer from being sacrificed.

Does the mere independence of an alleged divine commander’s will from human consciousness make a code based on it “objective”?

“Objective” is sometimes used to mean the sheer mind-independence of a fact. But while a divine commander’s will is imagined to be independent of human minds, it’s obviously not supposed to be independent of every mind. It is itself supposed to be the will of an alleged supernatural mind. That means that according to divine command theory what counts as moral is totally dependent on God’s arbitrary caprice.9

In fact, only in a godless universe can any facts be truly mind-independent. In the fantasy of a God who creates the universe, all of nature depends on his mind for its existence and character. Such a God could have made the laws of nature radically different: gravity could work in reverse, living creatures could be immortal, etc. God could suspend any law he authored by permitting “miracles.” He could make all of his creation disappear. There are no objective facts in the universe imagined by theistic religion.

More importantly, religion poisons the very practice of the objective method of discovering truth.

When ordinary non-academics speak of “objectivity,” they don’t simply mean the mind-independence of a fact. They mean the method that minds use to know these facts.10 Objective journalism and objective science are objective not because the perfect newspaper article or lab report already exists out there in reality, waiting to be discovered.11 Rather, they’re objective because they are products of human beings who have attended to the relevant mind-independent facts because they practice objectivity, the logical method of committing to discovering the truth, come what may.

The objectivity of human value should be thought of in the same way. Values are not mind-independent entities. Rather, valuing is something human minds do: It’s the conscious evaluation and pursuit of certain objects by conscious beings. We have a choice about how to evaluate these objects: We can do it by rationally deciding what furthers our lives, or we can default by acting on unprocessed emotional reactions.

Refugees who flee a primitive, oppressive country for a modern, civilized one, are often valuing objectively, not subjectively. It is not wishful thinking that their life would be better in one country rather than another; they can have perfectly good reason to think it is true. In this approach, objective values are what we form through a commitment to the truth, while merely subjective values ignore or defy it.

Far from being objective, the values of religious morality are thoroughly subjective. The whole lesson of the story of Abraham is that God is testing Abraham’s blind willingness to follow a command to kill. He hears a voice in his head and is expected to follow its demands without being able to know where it comes from, whether from the imagined God, a demon, or just his own delusions. He’s relying, at bottom, on an unscrutinized feeling of fear, not any commitment to the truth.

This is why religious moralists in practice do not appeal to any kind of reasoning from first principles to justify the content of their moral code. Instead, they appeal directly to the arbitrary authority of scripture, scriptures purporting to contain revelations about God’s will like the one experienced by Abraham. We are given no reasoned explanations for why scriptural commandments serve any purpose, human or divine. Though some religious commandments may have been informed by the life experience of their human authors, they often command us to surrender what is actually good for our lives. Like Abraham, most follow these commandments not out of reverence for real values in their lives but out of irrational fear of disapproval or punishment by real and imagined authorities.

Because objectivity means following a scientific method to know the truth, faith-based morality is the enemy of objective morality. Atheists should not seek to show why one does not need to be religious to uphold an objective morality. They should be clear that religious faith cannot uphold an objective morality. Only a scientifically objective approach that rejects blind faith can.

Being a truth-seeker rather than a blind-faith believer also accounts for the essence of other morally admirable character traits. Seeing this is the first step to building a truly objective code of morality.

Admirable character traits of the truth seeker as moral virtues

Consider what was so admirable about Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s story, at least before she converted to Christianity.

Ali was born and raised in a fundamentalist Muslim family in Somalia. At an early age she was indoctrinated by clerics, beaten by her mother, even subjected to horrific female circumcision. When her family left to live in Nairobi, Kenya, she received a more cosmopolitan education that opened her mind to new books and ideas. When her family tried to arrange her marriage with a man she’d never met, she rebelled and escaped to Europe to make a new life for herself. Famously, she rejected Islam and became an atheist.12 She spoke up intransigently against injustice and oppression, even in the face of death threats year after year.

When Ali first rose to prominence, her secular admirers agreed that the primitive, Islamic society she had rebelled against was vicious and celebrated her escape from this society as a real act of moral heroism.

Notably: admiration is a moral emotion that responds to admirable character traits. We admired the will to overcome obstacles and speak up even in the face of grave threats. These are the same character traits that many admire in other great activists, dissidents, and artists. In admiring how they all “speak up,” we are admiring their indefatigable commitment to learning and telling the truth.

But that is also the central value of the scientist.

Consider Katalin Kariko, one of the co-developers of the Covid mRNA technology. To identify the biochemistry behind this new and dynamic form of vaccine technology, she had to engage in the right methods of thinking. To achieve the value of knowledge, objectivity demands not only a commitment to use the right methods to discover the truth, but also to reject the temptation to blind oneself by convenient fictions. So Kariko had to form the right general habits of thought like: the intellectual honesty to avoid lazily fudging data because of confirmation bias, the courage to move forward without external support and in the face of hostility, and the independent thinking needed to experiment with entirely novel genetic methods.

Kariko’s story shows that the character traits of the great scientist are just supremely clear examples of the character traits of the morally virtuous man or woman. The intellectual virtues of science are continuous with moral virtues. Because human action is guided by thought, choosing the right ways of thinking — the ways that keep us focused on the facts rather than fantasy — is essential to choosing the right way of acting, and hence of forming the right kind of character.

Many widely recognized moral virtues have the same relation to the value of seeking the truth. Honesty means commitment to the truth, not faking it. Integrity means valuing the truth enough to act on it. Justice means recognizing the truth about the characters of other people.13 And this is only a preview: There’s more to be said about how many other virtues relate to a basic virtue of the rational pursuit of the truth.14

But what does it mean to identify moral virtues? Can there be such a thing as scientific truth about what’s the right or wrong virtue to practice? What could make the principles of morality objectively true, i.e., provable by reference to observable facts?

The factual basis of moral value judgments

Part of the reason atheists are so late to the game in defending a secular code of morality is that secular skeptics have long thought moral value judgments have no basis in facts. They have sided with David Hume’s view that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.”15 Morality, they say, is a subjective relic of religious superstition, and if God is dead, morality is a joint casualty.

One source of this skepticism is that moral value judgments contain very abstract concepts, not closely tied to the observable things around us. We can’t see honesty or integrity or justice or goodness in the way we see tables or chairs, dogs or cats.

But a concept’s high level of abstraction doesn’t make it just hot air. The concept of the “atom” refers to something totally invisible. Full proof of the existence of atoms came only in the 19th century, when scientists were about to infer their existence as the cause of a variety of observed effects. Now everyone (aside from a few highly skeptical philosophers) thinks that scientists refer to real facts when they talk about atoms, even if the concept is highly abstract.

Highly abstract concepts can refer to real facts by means other than causal inference. Sometimes they simply condense a wide array of disparate observable facts. Consider concepts of the scientific method like “experiment,” “hypothesis,” “replicable,” etc. They refer to real activities, mental products, and their qualities in relation to a scientific purpose. Thermometers, sheets of gold foil, and cathode ray tubes have no visual resemblance. But scientists use these various objects to do experiments that helped prove the atomic hypothesis, provided that the results were replicable.

We need to conceptualize the actions of the scientific method because our thoughts are not automatically true — we are fallible. Thinking the world is flat doesn’t make it so: To learn its shape, we need to make systematic astronomical and terrestrial observations. Wanting to be pregnant doesn’t make one pregnant: Only specific biochemical tests reveal whether the effect has been brought about by its actual causes.

So precisely because we need to base our thinking on the facts, we also need concepts of methods of rational thinking, concepts of norms. There are better ways of doing experiments, of forming and testing hypotheses, and there are worse ways. Experiments should be replicable, evaluation of results should often be double-blind, and experimenters should not fall prey to confirmation bias, etc. There are definite courses of mental action that help us identify the truth. Our concepts for these scientific and logical norms refer to real facts because the methods are real facts, and we need to use these methods to discover further real facts.

Importantly, scientific and logical norms don’t just describe the research process; they prescribe courses of actions that scientists ought to pursue if they are to achieve the value of the truth. So if concepts of scientific norms refer to real facts, concepts of moral norms could do the same. What if moral norms simply identified the fundamental means to achieve some other salient end?

We obviously need concepts of practical norms to guide action toward success more generally. These norms are themselves based on scientific findings, most obviously in the life sciences. Biology describes and explains the processes of growth, locomotion and metabolism. Physiology describes and explains specific living activities of specific organisms: respiration, circulation, digestion, excretion, etc. But biological explanation itself is an essentially normative practice, and this has normative implications.

For all that secular moralists invoke evolution in the attempt to explain the ethical beliefs of human beings, they miss the key aspect of evolutionary science that bears most directly on value theory.16 Evolutionary biology explains the origin of the structure, traits and behavior of living things by explaining how those features came to be good for the organism, resulting in the replication of its species. See how quickly Richard Dawkins resorts to this language in his defense of evolutionary explanation in The Blind Watchmaker:

[B]iologists can be much more specific than that about what would constitute being ‘good for something’. The minimum requirement for us to recognize an object as an animal or plant is that it should succeed in making a living of some sort. . . . It is true that there are quite a number of ways of making a living — flying, swimming, swinging through the trees, and so on. But however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.17

We appeal even more directly to value judgments about the good of the organism in the applied life sciences. Fields like medicine and nutrition not only describe but prescribe methods needed to fend off or cure illness and sustain health: methods of immunization, medication, surgery, nutrition, etc. A new virus or poison or mental pathology hinders life; a new vaccine or antidote or therapy helps sustain it. The actions and products that actually result in self-perpetuation of life are those we regard as healthy or proper, as good for the life of the organism.

What if principles of morality are like the principles of the applied life sciences? They would concern not just the health of one’s body but the health of one’s soul. Here “health of one’s soul” only means the health of one’s personal character, one’s basic, psychologically characteristic mode of operation, the basic premises and emotional dispositions one works from habitually. The existence of the entire field of clinical psychology demonstrates that there are healthy and unhealthy psychological characteristics. Moral norms could identify the actions needed to become the kind of person with the kind of character who lives successfully. Virtues like honesty, integrity, courage, and justice could help one to acquire the knowledge one needs to find and make a better life.

Importantly, while such moral norms could help us strengthen our character to navigate our relations with other people, they need not be limited to rules for social relations. Indeed, what makes dissidents and scientists so courageous is precisely their commitment to live free from others’ influence, to go by the judgment of their own mind in answering the big questions of life. And it can also be courageous to act in the face of great challenges, even when imposed not by others but by nature. Consider the courage of someone battling a deadly cancer. The relationship that morality governs is not primarily that between you and other people, but that between you and reality.

Because there are scientifically knowable facts that make it true that moral virtues are good for human beings (ultimately, biological facts), a code of such virtues could be an objective morality.

Dramatizing a morality that celebrates objectivity

In my opinion, the philosopher who did the most to show how the values of science inform secular objective morality was Ayn Rand. She was a radical whose absolutism about the value of reason led her to challenge conventional views about morality, whether religious or otherwise. That attitude systematically informed her social and political analysis, creating her reputation as a cultural iconoclast.

Some may find it odd that a non-academic novelist would have special insight into the foundations of an objective morality. But recall how early in the essay I observed the character traits of admirable people. I modeled this on Rand’s own method of inquiry.18 As a novelist interested in projecting ideal characters, she made careful observations of real people she admired, and conceptualized the character traits that distinguished them from others. Her creative process began with collecting the data about moral character with which the science of ethics must begin.

Rand’s earliest fictional heroes and heroines are, above all, truth seekers and truth tellers in search of freedom. Kira Argounova of We the Living strives to escape the Soviet Russian communist system that works to crush her career as an engineer and the man she loves. Equality 7-2521 of Anthem escapes from the dystopian totalitarian society that rejects his reinvented light bulb after he’s rejected his society’s moral code. Howard Roark of The Fountainhead is an architect with a new vision of how to build who is unwilling to compromise it for wealth or fame, or to cater to society’s irrational moral demands.

Rand held up her heroes and heroines as admirable precisely for their devotion to objectivity. As a practitioner of objectivity herself, she was not content to simply admire them. This is where her work as a novelist shaded into her work as a philosopher, as she sought to understand why they were admirable. In both the traits she celebrates in her fiction and in her nonfiction conceptualization of them (in speeches in the novels and in later nonfiction essays), we see her moving from firsthand observations to highly abstract standards of value that integrate and explain the more concrete virtues and values she had earlier identified inductively.

After writing The Fountainhead (1943), Rand had identified certain key moral virtues animating her heroes in the pursuit of their values, especially the value of the truth: virtues like honesty, integrity, and independence.19 By the time she had written Atlas Shrugged (1957), she had identified the fundamental virtue linking all of these (and others): the virtue of rationality.20 She saw all of the virtues as actions of recognizing important facts of reality that bear on human living.21 As forms of rationality, they each govern both thought and action as each is subject to the same basic questions:

A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? — Right or Wrong? Is a seed to be planted in soil in order to grow — right or wrong? Is a man’s wound to be disinfected in order to save his life — right or wrong? Does the nature of atmospheric electricity permit it to be converted into kinetic power — right or wrong? It is the answers to such questions that gave you everything you have — and the answers came from a man’s mind, a mind of intransigent devotion to that which is right.22

In Rand’s view, “right or wrong” applies to both thought and action generally, because both are exercised by choice, and both are evaluable by reference to reality-oriented standards. They can be justified or unjustified, rational or irrational. Thought itself is the crucial human action that guides all others.

But Rand’s work as a philosopher did not end with simply finding a common denominator among the moral virtues. She was also deeply concerned with the question of how and why moral norms count as cognitively meaningful truths, the kind of truths that skeptics and relativists would consider impossible.

The philosophic foundations of Rand’s objective morality

In her nonfiction treatise “The Objectivist Ethics” (1961), Rand explores the foundations of morality that she first identified in a speech by the hero of Atlas Shrugged. Here I’ll only highlight some of the essentials of her view of the foundations of objective morality.23

She begins by asking her readers to be deeply philosophical about the very starting point of ethics:

The first question that has to be answered, as a precondition of any attempt to define, to judge or to accept any specific system of ethics, is: Why does man need a code of values?

Let me stress this. The first question is not: What particular code of values should man accept? The first question is: Does man need values at all — and why?

Is the concept of value, of “good or evil” an arbitrary human invention, unrelated to, underived from and unsupported by any facts of reality — or is it based on a metaphysical fact, on an unalterable condition of man’s existence?24

One hallmark of her concern for objectivity here is first her unwillingness to begin by simply choosing among the conventional codes of values our culture already has to offer. She is preparing the way for a radical critique of nearly all of those codes and an independent reconstruction of a new moral code from the ground up.

A second hallmark is her concern to do this reconstruction with attention to basic philosophical questions about what could make a code of morality true or false in the first place. Rather than looking for a theory that captures popular “intuitions” about moral case studies — asking how applying the concept of “value” makes us feel — she asks about the metaphysical basis of the concept of “value,” i.e., what if any facts it refers to in reality.

She goes on to argue that it is the fact that a class of entities faces the alternative of existence or non-existence that explains the need for and thus the meaning of value concepts like “good” and “bad.” Only living organisms, unlike inanimate entities, face this alternative in the sense that they must engage in “self-generated, goal-directed action” to maintain their existence. To maintain their existence, living organisms must follow a specific course of locomotion, nutrition and growth:

That which is required for its survival is determined by its nature, by the kind of entity it is. . . .[T]he fundamental alternative of its existence remains the same: if an organism fails in the basic functions required by its nature — if an amoeba’s protoplasm stops assimilating food, or if a man’s heart stops beating — the organism dies. In a fundamental sense, stillness is the antithesis of life. Life can be kept in existence only by a constant process of self-sustaining action.25

Inanimate entities can of course be destroyed, but they don’t need to do anything to remain in existence. If the universe were lifeless, with nothing but stars, rocks, and energy fields, there would be no goal pursuit to succeed or fail, no entities to which anything could be good or bad. In such a counterfactual unbiological universe, we would not need to invoke value concepts to explain the continued existence or change of various inanimate entities. Physical and chemical explanations would suffice.

Rand had been thinking about these basic questions about the foundations of value theory while writing her novel Atlas Shrugged, and she even found a way to dramatize this very issue, one that might otherwise seem like a technical theoretical issue, in an important scene. A minor character, a recent college graduate who had been enamored of skeptical-relativist ethical theories comes to abandon his jaded worldview after having been inspired by the admirable rationality of his boss (Rearden). Fueled by this inspiration he stands his ground when their factory is attacked by agitators, and is mortally wounded. His philosophical development in favor of moral objectivity reaches its denouement as he comes face to face with the value significance of the life or death stakes of his predicament:

His eyes wandered over the vast darkness, then rose to Rearden's face; the eyes were helpless, longing, childishly bewildered. “I know . . . it’s crap, all those things they taught us . . . all of it, everything they said . . . about living or . . . or dying . . . Dying . . . it wouldn’t make any difference to chemicals, but — ” he stopped, and all of his desperate protest was only in the intensity of his voice dropping lower to say, “ — but it does, to me . . . And . . . and, I guess, it makes a difference to an animal, too . . . But they said there are no values . . . only social customs. . . No values!” His hand clutched blindly at the hole in his chest, as if trying to hold that which he was losing. “No . . . values . . .”26

Tragically he dies, and Rearden observes that “what he was carrying in his arms was now that which had been the boy’s teachers’ idea of a man — a collection of chemicals,” dramatizing how value concepts apply only to the living, not the inanimate.27

Understanding the connection between life and value also points to the ultimate value that sets the standard of evaluation. “Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action.”28 What is living action (nutrition, locomotion, growth) good for? It’s good for more nutrition, locomotion, growth.29 Life is an end in itself, not in the sense of being an end state, but in the sense of being a self-reinforcing activity that is the means to the end of more of itself.

And there is nothing else beyond an entity’s engagement in such self-reinforcing activity that is at stake. Value concepts identify success and failure conditions for this activity. They have no other factual basis. As she cashes it out, “To speak of ‘value’ as apart from ‘life’ is worse than a contradiction in terms. ‘It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible.”30

This represents a crucial part of the answer to Rand’s question: Do we need values at all, and why? Fundamentally, we need them because we are living organisms. This in turn explains how the concept of “value” can be used to grasp and express truths: The concept is used to identify the truth of what furthers the life of an organism.

Rand goes on to explain that human beings need a code of values — moral values — because we are a distinctive kind of living organism that must consciously choose the values we pursue, and so we need guidance in our choices. Objective moral values are values that are chosen because they’re consciously, rationally validated by reference to the facts about what is required to further one’s life.31

By using a scientific method to search for the basis of the concept of “value,” Rand also formed a theory of value that accounted for the value of the scientific method itself. A consequence of her unwillingness to defend a value theory that simply rationalizes cultural moral prejudice is its distinctively modern approach to key issues in moral philosophy.

Rand’s distinctively modern objective morality

Rand was ahead of her time in realizing the philosophic significance of the difference between the living and the inanimate.

We have already seen (in the passage from Dawkins about how biologists think about what it means to be “good for something”) how judgments of biological value are implicit in evolutionary explanations. In recent years, certain philosophically minded scientists have started to catch up with Rand, unpacking the implications of biology for value theory. Steven Pinker, for instance, puts it this way:

Life and happiness depend on an infinitesimal sliver of orderly arrangements of matter amid the astronomical number of possibilities. . . .[The second law of thermodynamics] defines the fate of the universe and the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and knowledge to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.32

Explaining how living things resist entropy requires the attribution of goals or aims (“to fight back. . .” is teleological language). These are not usually conscious purposes (as they are for human beings). In his book articulating the neuroscientist and bioanthropologist Terence Deacon’s theory of natural teleology, Jeremy Sherman describes the aims of a simple bacterium:

Of all the possible work that glucose could do, within the bacterium those possibilities get channeled, limited, narrowed, constrained, or aimed into work that benefits the bacterium. Work isn’t possible without energy, but glucose energy doesn’t aim itself. The bacterium does the aiming. . . .

The bacterium’s means include its capacity to aim or channel that glucose into the bacterium’s functional work, which among other things includes finding more glucose.

And the bacterium’s most fundamental end? As I’ve already suggested, it’s circular. The bacterium’s fundamental end is regenerating its ability to aim work. It regenerates its own aims, and reproduces them, regenerating its aims in its progeny selves.33

Sherman goes on to explain how recognizing these natural goals is the key to solving Hume’s “is-ought” problem.34

Moral theories based on facts about the biological requirements of human life are nothing new. In the last few decades, prominent philosophers like Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson (among others) have followed the lead of the arguments first offered by Aristotle in ancient Greece to formulate codes of morality that derive from the “human form of life.”35 But Rand’s approach even parts ways with these traditional life-based accounts of ethics in favor of a more scientific approach.

Even the contemporary Aristotelians are still working from a pre-modern view of biology. The idea they borrow from Aristotle is that there is a kind of proper functioning for each distinctive type of living organism. There’s something right about this, but they have little to say about what explains a given organism’s distinctive form of life.36 They will say, for instance, that it’s the function of the bacterium to pursue glucose, or the function of bobcats to hunt, without explaining what makes this process out of so many others so special.

While Rand also revered Aristotle, her deeply biological perspective on value made her approach to ethics much more modern.37 Her understanding of what explains an organism’s distinctive form of life is informed by a post-Darwinian approach to biology.38 Living things are distinguished from the inanimate insofar as they are engaged in a constant struggle for existence. Everything about a living organism’s physiological structure, its use of energy, and its behavior makes a difference for better or worse in that struggle. Its distinctive form of living is the most distinctive and powerful activity it relies on to help win that struggle for existence. Here we see her surveying the range of distinctive forms of life according to their survival value:

The simpler organisms, such as plants, can survive by means of their automatic physical functions. The higher organisms, such as animals and man, cannot: their needs are more complex and the range of their actions is wider. The physical functions of their bodies can perform automatically only the task of using fuel, but cannot obtain that fuel. To obtain it, the higher organisms need the faculty of consciousness. A plant can obtain its food from the soil in which it grows. An animal has to hunt for it. Man has to produce it.39

We’ve already seen how the values she’s celebrating in the person of her fictional heroes and heroines are implicitly the values of the scientist: virtues such as honesty, independence, integrity. The fact that the distinctively human form of life depends essentially on human consciousness is a sign of how Rand, unlike almost any other thinker, appreciates the biological value of the pursuit of truth itself.

The content of her code, her celebration of objectivity, is equally modern in its orientation. And it depends on an especially objective survey of what makes human life possible.

The modern code of the producer, not the predator

Even as Rand argues that basic value concepts derive from organisms’ struggle for existence, she does not mean that human life is “red in tooth and claw.” She was far from a “social Darwinist.” Our basic means of survival is not predation or exploitation of others of our species, but the discovery of causal connections that enable us to discover the resources, build the tools, trade with others, and otherwise reshape our natural environment to our purposes. In other words, she saw rationality itself as the distinctively human form of life:

Man cannot survive, as animals do, by the guidance of mere percepts. . . . He needs a process of thought to discover how to plant and grow his food or how to make weapons for hunting. His percepts might lead him to a cave, if one is available — but to build the simplest shelter, he needs a process of thought. No percepts and no “instincts” will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge — and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it.40

For human beings, nothing better enables thriving in defiance of entropy than grasping the truth about what enables successful living.

Rand realized that reason’s power to discover the truth included fundamentally the truth about the practical requirements of successful living. So she uniquely added productiveness to her list of the moral virtues.41 Human life requires not only the pursuit and attainment of the values needed for survival, but the creation of these values out of the raw material of nature. This is at the root of her view that human beings survive not by exploiting each other but by trading the values they’ve created with those created by others. Here again we see her sensitivity to the differences between organisms’ distinctive forms of life:

The men who attempt to survive, not by means of reason, but by means of force, are attempting to survive by the method of animals. But just as animals would not be able to survive by attempting the method of plants, by rejecting locomotion and waiting for the soil to feed them — so men cannot survive by attempting the method of animals, by rejecting reason and counting on productive men to serve as their prey. Such looters may achieve their goals for the range of a moment, at the price of destruction: the destruction of their victims and their own. As evidence, I offer you any criminal or any dictatorship.42

It’s this rejection of a life of force and the embrace of productiveness that is at the root of her embrace of the “trader principle” and with it, her case for capitalism.43

Here Rand’s theory significantly updates the old Aristotelian view. Aristotle held that practical and theoretical reason were essentially distinct functions, and that the latter was a superior faculty dedicated to the contemplation of timeless truths for its own sake. Aristotle thought that those who were better suited for philosophic contemplation should be served by “natural slaves” who could not engage in such superior forms of reasoning.44 For Rand, whose thinking is informed by the scientific and the industrial revolutions, “theoretical” reason is a powerful practical tool, not a form of play.45

Here too Rand was ahead of her time. For too long philosophers sympathized with Nietzsche’s irrationalist idea that believing useful falsehoods is what helps us survive.46 Religious philosophers like Alvin Plantinga ape Nietzsche’s amateur take on evolutionary theory when they blithely assume that cognitive faculties evolved to survive could not be adapted to know the truth.47

Some philosophically minded scientists like Steven Pinker and Kevin Mitchell have started to catch up with Rand’s seemingly obvious idea that our mind’s grasp of truth serves our survival.48 Brains that developed to grasp truth, especially highly abstract truth about the causal dynamics of the world, are better suited to explain, predict and control it. So they are also more likely to be favored by a process of evolution by natural selection.

In recognizing and celebrating the power of individual human productive ability, Rand makes a case for individual freedom and by implication repudiates Aristotle’s old arguments for slavery.49 Importantly for Rand, human reason is not automatic but must be operated volitionally. It’s precisely because this must be chosen that we need political freedom to make choices if we are to live. Her celebration of rationality also implies that justice is a virtue: the virtue of applying rationality to the judgment of the character of other men, by recognizing and rewarding the value of friends, repelling and punishing the evil of enemies, and the need to respect the rights of all.50

But the fact that reason operates volitionally also means that we must choose which values to pursue and even whether to value our lives or not. This is why we need the guidance of morality. But the fact that we must choose the values we pursue — including the overall ends that dictate our means — is the basis of a skeptical worry we should now address.

Answering relativism by evaluating the ultimate ends

At the heart of our need for a moral code, for Rand, is our need to guide our volitional choices. This is one of the reasons she rejects the “categorical imperative” approach. We have no unconditional duties because all moral norms are understood only as identifying the causal requirements of achieving chosen values, including the value of life itself.51

But philosophers sometimes think moral norms can’t just express knowledge of the means to a chosen end. They argue one could then choose any arbitrary horrific goal and thereby justify it. This would amount to a form of relativism.

For example, they’ll object that we could choose death as our goal and evaluate a suicide terrorist as good because he’s highly effective at killing, even at killing himself. What if Mohammad Sidique Khan (one of the 2005 London Underground bombers) exclaims “we love death as you love life?” That’s his chosen goal — shouldn’t we now just evaluate his means to his chosen end? He was very effective in his ability to destroy and so would count as virtuous in relation to that end.

Indeed the difference between the suicide terrorist and the productive builder is emblematic of the civilizational conflict that exploded on September 11, 2001. If we can’t explain why one is objectively evil and the other is objectively good, the modern religious apologists will object that we need values more robust than those based on the choice to live.

It is possible to assess the causal efficacy of some “means” to any arbitrarily chosen “end,” but moral evaluation is also concerned with evaluating the ends themselves.52 Here Rand’s defense of why it’s only the fact of life that makes the fact of valuing possible shows why we can evaluate one chosen ultimate end as good and everything else as evil.53

One can say that death is one’s goal. But one can’t say it with any cognitive meaning. Rand’s whole reason for thinking that life is what makes values possible is that one must do certain things to live while one doesn’t need to do anything to become inanimate. Death is the default state if one does nothing at all. So there are no “musts” or “should” governing action toward it. This is why it’s important that what makes life an end in itself is not simply being one of many possible end states. There are many such end states one could pretend to treat as a goal. “Life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action.”54

So it’s true that the end of life has to be chosen. All values are in relation to the choice to live, and there is no categorical imperative “Thou shalt live.” But Rand’s point is that, while one can choose not to adopt it, there is only one thing that can be chosen as an end in itself: one’s own life. Any other choices incompatible with that end are evil.

From this perspective, one can not only rule out the “ends” of nihilistic killers, but also many of the other highest “goods” proposed by moral philosophers. To the extent that these codes seem plausible, they draw their plausibility from implicit reliance on the end of life. For example, the utilitarians who identify the greatest happiness of the greatest number cash in on the sense that pleasure is good because in fact it’s the sensation that indicates the successful attainment of a biologically necessary goal. But they go astray when they try to treat an aggregate sum of many individuals as a kind of ultimate good, when it’s not good to any living entity for any purpose, because there’s no super-organism to whom this aggregate sum matters.

Just as one might wonder what fact lets us privilege one’s own life as an ultimate end, one might also wonder what permits regarding the value of scientific rationality as a basic virtue. How do we know that the value of rationality isn’t just a “Western prejudice,” a purely emotional preference derived from Enlightenment culture? When suicide terrorists say they love death more than life because their faith compels them to, how can we dispute their preference for avowed irrationality? This parallel skeptical worry is addressed in the same way.

Importantly, the commitment to know the truth is not a preference but a choice. It’s the choice to ask questions and pursue the truth, versus refusing to ask questions out of fear of the truth. Seen this way, it’s not a choice between two coequal alternatives, like chocolate and vanilla. It’s a fundamental choice to engage one’s reason or to subvert it. It’s only once we engage reason that we can make deliberative choices between alternatives and reveal or begin to habituate our preferences.

Just as life is not a co-equal alternative to death, so choosing to engage one’s mind to grasp the facts is not a co-equal alternative to closing one’s mind through blind faith. The ultimate value of life is not an arbitrary end but the precondition for the possibility of values as such, and rationality is not the product of an arbitrary preference but the precondition of evaluating anything else as arbitrary.55 These points are parallel because for Rand, embracing reason comes to the same thing as embracing life, since in fact rationality just is the distinctively human way of life.

The close linkage of accepting rationality and accepting the ultimate value of one’s life is another sign that there is no special skepticism about objective morality that isn’t just skepticism about the possibility of rational knowledge as such. As I’ve argued throughout, to accept the scientific world view is already to accept a set of values. Formulating an objective morality is simply working out the implications of this set of values for practical action in the world.

By the same token, anyone serious about rejecting religious faith in the name of rationality should also reject every implication of religious morality, including any of the content of its moral code that’s been unwittingly inherited by secular ethics.

Rand’s radical rejection of all religious morality

Because Rand saw rationality as the basic virtue, indeed because she thought human life required embracing reason as an “absolute,” she was radically opposed to religious morality. She rejected all faith-based morality, including any attempt to secularize faith-based morality via appeals to intuition or convention.

Rand saw faith not just as a failure to exercise rationality, but as a negation of the moral virtue of rationality and hence as anathema to morality. In reality, she saw faith as “fear of independence,” a vicious choice to submit one’s mind to the authority of others, as Abraham is supposed to have done before almost killing his only son.56

As a minor character in Atlas Shrugged puts it: Morality is “judgment to distinguish right and wrong, vision to see the truth, courage to act upon it, dedication to that which is good, integrity to stand by the good at any price.”57 Religious believers who accept their moral dogmas on faith, fearing disapproval by authorities or God himself, know no such dedication. A moral code based on fear of disvalue is the opposite of one based on love for values.

What’s more, if morality is fundamentally based on the needs of human life, there is a demonstrable incoherence in the religious view that the will of God is the font of moral authority. To illustrate her point that it’s only living things that can pursue goals, Rand offers the following thought experiment:

[T]ry to imagine an immortal, indestructible robot, an entity which moves and acts, but which cannot be affected by anything, which cannot be changed in any respect, which cannot be damaged, injured or destroyed. Such an entity would not be able to have any values; it would have nothing to gain or to lose; it could not regard anything as for or against it, as serving or threatening its welfare, as fulfilling or frustrating its interests. It could have no interests and no goals.58

Everything she says about the hypothetical robot applies in spades to a hypothetical God. In the religious fantasy, God too is immortal, immutable, and indestructible. But then he too can have nothing that makes a difference to him for better or worse. Thus, it makes no sense to attribute to him the will or plan to achieve any higher purposes, in accord with which human actions can be judged as good or bad, right or wrong.

As with utilitarianism, religious morality gains its plausibility to the extent that it mimics a life-based morality. If we were to imagine God as a living being, we could imagine that some events could serve or thwart his purposes.59 If we thought of ourselves as like his children we might think of his moral guidance as like the wisdom of a more experienced human being about living life. Religious morality cashes in on these confusions by drawing from the roots of morality in the needs of individual life and then tearing up those roots by transferring its ultimate goal to an imaginary immortal higher being.

In light of this and other parallels between the method of religious and utilitarian morality (note also the connection between faith and the method of intuition), it’s natural that they also share similarities in the content of their moral code. While utilitarians talk about the basic value of happiness, they also argue that morality sometimes demands that an individual sacrifice his happiness to achieve the greatest happiness of the greatest number.60 So the utilitarian “consequentialists” share with their Kantian “deontologist” rivals the idea that morality concerns impersonal, impartial, or agent-neutral value. The influence of both of these theories is the reason secular ethics today is dominated by one version or other of altruism, the idea that morality is essentially other-regarding or “unselfish.”

Given how Rand understands value per se as a relationship between actions and successful living, she rejects the idea that morality is concerned with impartial or agent-neutral value. She embraces the connection between value and interests, in particular self-interest, and rejects the equation of morality with altruism. And she must, because the very basis of value is the requirements of a living thing’s struggle for its own existence. This is why she is an avowed opponent of all versions of the morality of self-sacrifice, religious or secular.

Rand’s idea that there is a “virtue of selfishness” is obviously controversial and raises many questions (which have been answered at length in various books). Many stem from a confusion between her view and a Nietzschean predation view that we have already addressed.61

Rand portrays human social life as healthy and successful when it’s characterized by win-win mutual exchange to mutual benefit, not by win-loss exploitation. Just as she denies that one should sacrifice others out of irrational desire, she likewise denies that one should sacrifice oneself to others’ desires. This is part of the reason she adds a final virtue to her list, one seen by Christian morality as a mortal sin: pride.62 As she sees productiveness as the virtue concerned with the creation of material values, pride is the virtue concerned with creating psychological values like self-esteem, an effect of which, she claims, is

your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others.63

Conclusion

Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells us that she converted to Christianity in part because “atheism failed to answer a simple question: What is the meaning and purpose of life?”

On several levels, she is correct. Atheism fails to answer that question because atheism is simply the lack of belief in God, and a simple absence of belief answers no question. It’s also true that many atheist thinkers have failed to take seriously people’s need for these answers and have simply failed to do serious work formulating a secular, rational ethics. To the extent that many have tried, they’ve often modeled their attempts on ideas they take from religious ethics and so fail to offer a true alternative.

But in light of the alternative I’ve now presented, Ali’s sweeping implication that no atheist thinker has offered serious answers to these big questions cannot be taken seriously.

Ayn Rand was born in a repressive, authoritarian society (Soviet Russia). She had the independence to flee from it and take refuge in the West (she came to America in 1926). She too was an atheist. But when Rand came to the West, she did not take the thinkers in her midst as offering a satisfactory alternative to the system she escaped. She was not content to pick one of the dominant moral or political philosophies of her day off the shelf, even though they were revered in the country that was her salvation. She took the best elements of the philosophy of the West (the Aristotelian worldview), but proceeded to try to answer the major questions of morality on her own.

As a radically independent thinker, Rand was willing to challenge the basic dogmas of religious morality that were embraced by religious and secular thinkers alike. Anyone who admires the independent pursuit of truth, anyone who does not need truth to be dictated to them by external authorities, should be willing to do the same.