“Man’s Life” as the Standard of Value in the Ethics of Aristotle and Ayn Rand

The two philosophers differing conceptions of human life made a difference to the content of their ethics and politics

Editor’s note:

In January 2026, The University of Pittsburgh Press released its fourth volume in the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series. The latest volume, edited by philosophers James G. Lennox and Gregory Salmieri, Two Philosophers: Aristotle and Ayn Rand, compares and contrasts and explores the historical connection between Ayn Rand and Aristotle, the only philosopher to whom she acknowledged a significant philosophical debt. The Ayn Rand Institute is pleased to reprint (with permission), an excerpt from this volume, Salmieri's own major survey of Rand and Aristotle's ethics.

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“There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value.”
AYN RAND, ATLAS SHRUGGED

It is with this sentence from Atlas Shrugged that Ayn Rand began her first exposition of her mature moral philosophy.¹ The Aristotelian resonances are palpable. Aristotle was the first to conceive of life as an activity of which there are distinct forms corresponding to different species, such that there could be such a thing as “Man’s Life” — a form of life specific to human beings.² Aristotle characterized this human form of life as a life of reason, and he was the first to hold up such a life as a standard of value — a “target for living well” — with reference to which an individual could choose all of his goals and actions (EE I.2 1214b6–11). In these respects, Rand’s ethics is deeply Aristotelian, but her conception of the rational, human form of life differs markedly from Aristotle’s own, and there are related differences in the roles the standard of Man’s Life plays in their respective moral philosophies.

According to Aristotle, the ideal of Man’s Life is realized most fully by a philosopher engaged in contemplation of eternal verities — an activity that (in his view) is not meant to bear fruit in action. This same ideal is realized, though in a secondary way, by a political leader prudently deliberating for the sake of his city.³ The contemplator and the statesman both live lives of leisure, in which their time is released from the activities needed to produce the goods needed for survival, and so they are able to focus on living well as distinct from merely living. Thus, for Aristotle, a life of moneymaking (chrēmatistēs) fails to realize the ideal of Man’s Life, because it is something forced upon one by lack of resources (EN I.5 1096a5–6).⁴ By contrast, Rand wrote that “the words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.”⁵ It is “the Producer” whom she regarded as “the man of reason” or “the thinker” (FTNI 21), and she characterized production as “the application of reason to the problem of survival” (CUI 17). Although she writes of producers in all professions and at all levels of ability, her ideal is epitomized by “[t]he great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors” (Fountainhead 710).

In the first two sections of this paper, I elucidate the content of the human form of life as understood by Aristotle and Rand, respectively. In my third section, I show how the differences in their view of Man’s Life reflect (and contribute to) different views of how a form of life can serve as an ethical standard. These differences, in turn, have implications for the extent to which their respective moral philosophies provide objective guidance rooted in knowledge of human nature, rather than merely systematizing existing mores or reading them into human nature. Accordingly, I close with a discussion of the objectivity of what each thinker regards as moral knowledge.

Aristotle’s Leisurely Ideal

The subject of Aristotle’s inquiry in ethics is “the human good” — that is, the ultimate end sought in and achievable by human action.⁶ By the end of Nicomachean Ethics I.7 (cf. EE II.1) he has identified this good with the excellent performance of the human function. For Aristotle, life is (in its fundamental sense) an activity (DA II.3), and what distinguishes human life from plant and animal life is that the activity centrally involves reason. Thus he thinks that the target at which we must aim to live well is a complete life of reason-involving activity performed excellently. To do something well or excellently is to do it in accordance with the appropriate virtues, and human virtues are those states from which reason functions well. Consequently, most of the rest of the Nicomachean Ethics (and Eudemian Ethics) is given over to examining virtue. Since Man’s Life is political — that is, lived in citystates — the treatise ends (EN X.9) with a transition into the Politics, which work provides further details about Man’s Life, taking care to distinguish its proper realization — “living well” — from mere “living” (Pol. 1257b41–8a1).

Aristotle’s teaching in Nicomachean Ethics can be briefly summarized as follows. Virtue comes in two broad types corresponding to two broad roles that reason plays in our lives: intellectual virtue perfects our thinking itself, whereas characterological virtue perfects our desires (and consequently our decisions) so that they accord with excellent reasoning.⁷

Thinking can be subdivided into two broad types: contemplation of truths that cannot be changed and deliberation about things we can effect. Contemplation is perfected by the sciences (epistēmai) — chiefly by sophia, which is the science by which we contemplate being qua being in light of its fundamental and universal causes. Deliberation is divisible into deliberation about how to produce specific types of effects (such as health or buildings) and general deliberation about how to act (including whether and when to produce the aforementioned effects). The first sort of deliberation is perfected by the various arts (technai), and the second, by phronēsis.⁸

The characterological virtues are stable dispositions to have desires or feelings that accord with the dictates of phronēsis. Each characterological virtue corresponds to a type of desire or feeling — for example, temperance, to the desire for bodily pleasures; mildness, to anger; wit, to the desire to joke and laugh. The virtue is a disposition to have the relevant desire or feeling in the right amount along any of the dimensions along which it might be possible to have it excessively or deficiently. Anger, for example, may be too intense or not intense enough, it may be directed at too many people or too few, and it may come on and pass too quickly or too slowly. Along each of these dimensions, this is a way of being angry that is intermediate between the errors of excess and deficiency, and this is the way that accords with phronēsis. The characterological virtue of mildness (the subject of EN IV.5) consists of being disposed to be angry in this intermediate way. Since desires or feelings motivate action, each characterological virtue motivates its possessor to act in a characteristic way, and one acquires a characterological virtue by being habituated into its characteristic way of acting.

Phronēsis and the characterological virtues form a set, as neither is possible (in its fully developed form) without the other. The exercise of these virtues is an instance of the functioning that is a human being’s chief good. Because of this, a life focused on exercising these abilities to their fullest qualifies as a happy or successful life. This is the political life — the life of a statesman. For it is in managing the affairs of a city that one has occasion to exercise one’s deliberative abilities on the largest scale with regard to the most important practical problems, and in doing this one faces many decisions that call for the exercise of characterological virtue. However, there is a still better life: the contemplative life, which is devoted to the development and exercise of sophia.

The contemplative life is better than the political because the activity on which it is focused is valuable only for its own sake, rather than being valued (even partially) for any contribution it makes to anything distinct from itself. By contrast, some of the value of a statesman’s deliberation derives from the fact that it enables contemplation.⁹ The productive activity that is perfected by the arts is primarily valued for its products, which are valuable (ultimately) because they enable activities of the other two types. Although there are indications (esp. Met. A.1) that Aristotle accords some intrinsic value to productive activity, and although there is a tradition inspired by Aristotle that extols the technai as virtues, it is clear from the Politics that Aristotle does not think that a life centered around productive work can be well lived. Indeed, he thinks that the performance of many of these activities is incompatible with living well (and so should disqualify one from citizenship).¹⁰ For some people to live well — to fully realize the human form of life — these activities must be relegated to their inferiors, who then participate in living well only by enabling it in their superiors.

What, then, is the human form of life that serves as an ethical standard for Aristotle? Schematically, it is an ordered set of activities in which one activity (contemplation) is intrinsically valuable and performed entirely for its own sake, while all the others exist at least in part to serve it. This subservience makes the subservient activities less valuable than the activity they serve. Some of the lesser activities may also have some intrinsic value (perhaps, as suggested by Lear [2004], due to their resemblance to the one best activity), but others are merely instrumental. The merely instrumental activities (at least many of them) diminish any life that includes them.

At best, such instrumental activities are an unwelcome distraction from the real business of human living; but Aristotle thinks that many of them also degrade the soul of anyone who performs these activities, and that this makes such people unfit for the leisurely activities of contemplation and statesmanlike deliberation.¹¹ Such productive activities can thus have no part in the lives of those individuals who most fully realize the human form of life, so on a societal scale Man’s Life is characterized by a caste system in which some classes of people exist to serve others.¹²

This social hierarchy recapitulates an ontological hierarchy, at the top of which sits Aristotle’s God — a self-sufficient, supernatural mind that engages only in contemplation of itself. The movements that make up the natural world can be characterized as a side effect of this divine selfcontemplation. The natural world is no part of God’s aim, but realizing something like the self-sufficiency of God’s contemplative activity is the aim of the motions of the bodies within the natural world (from stars down to animals and plants). The human contemplator approximates this ideal most closely, becoming godlike in a way that makes it ambiguous whether he, in performing this activity, is part of the natural world at all.¹³

Thus, Aristotle suggests that the life of contemplation may be a divine form of life that is better than the human one. If so, then it may be that it is God’s Life, rather than Man’s, that is the standard of value — the target at which we should aim in all our actions. Aristotle raises this possibility in Nicomachean Ethics X.7, where he rejects the advice to “think human, since you are human” (1177b33) and urges readers to pursue the divine life of contemplation, which seems superior to human life. However, the conclusion of that chapter makes clear that he doesn’t accept the premise behind the advice that pursuing the life of contemplation (insofar as this is possible to a human being) amounts to directing one’s aim away from Man’s Life. Since a man’s mind is his best and most controlling element, it is what he is most of all. Thus, in aiming away from contemplation (which most gratifies the mind), a man would be aiming away from his own life.

Still, even if Aristotle can resolve the tension between a human being’s aiming at the divine and at the human, the role of divinity in Aristotle’s philosophy complicates the idea that Man’s Life is the standard of value in his ethics. For the very notion of the divine creates a standard that is distinct from Man’s Life. It is in accordance with this divine standard that Man’s Life is better than that of other animals and that, among human lives, a contemplator’s life is better than a statesman’s or a producer’s. To fully realize the standard of Man’s Life, as the best contemplators do, is to realize as fully as mortality permits this supernatural standard.

Rand’s Productive Ideal

For Rand, the activity that epitomizes reasoning is not a contemplation detached from meeting material needs; it is production: “the application of reason to the problem of survival” (CUI 17). By (almost all) contemporary lights, this view has an obvious advantage over Aristotle’s: if producing things required by human survival is an essential part of Man’s Life, rather than a distraction from it (or worse), then the ability of some of us to lead fully human lives needn’t depend on some exploited underclass’s doing this (intrinsically worthless, but instrumentally valuable) work for us. However, some might worry that, in centering human life on productive work, Rand is overfocusing on material needs and neglecting the higher values in life that make it worth living. In Aristotle’s terms, we might worry that by centering human life on “the problem of survival,” Rand is showing that what she prizes is merely living, rather than living well (Pol. I.9 1257b40). This is Aristotle’s criticism of those who overvalue moneymaking (chrematistikē). By his lights, such an attitude is slavish, and one might even imagine Aristotle viewing contemporary society as one from which freedom rather than slavery has been eliminated.¹⁴

This notion of universal slavery looms large in criticisms of capitalism (Rand’s ideal form of society) from all quarters.¹⁵ Critics of Rand have often pointed out the limitations of (what they see as) an ethics that makes all value merely instrumental on prolonging one’s life.¹⁶ Some readers have tried to avoid these implications by interpreting Rand along more Aristotelian lines.¹⁷

In explicating her view of Man’s Life as one of production, we should be mindful of how she might respond to such criticism. Toward this end, it will be helpful to consider how she developed her mature view (which is the target of such criticism) starting from a position that is closer to Aristotle’s.

In early notes and in her first novel, Rand draws a distinction that might be compared to Aristotle’s distinction between living well and merely living. It is the distinction between living (as Rand’s protagonists do) and merely existing (as she thought most people did).¹⁸ Distinctions along these lines can be found in other literary authors, and considering a few quotes will help us see what is and is not distinctive to Rand:

• A contemporaneous English translation of an essay by Victor Hugo (1864a), whom Rand considered the “greatest novelist in world literature” (RM 147), reads: “It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live. Now, do you wish to realize the difference? Animals exist, man lives. To live, is to understand. To live, is to smile at the present, to look toward posterity over the wall. To live, is to have in one’s self a balance, and to weigh in it the good and evil. To live, is to have justice, truth, reason, devotion, probity, sincerity, commonsense, right, and duty nailed to the heart. To live, is to know what one is worth, what one can do and should do. Life is conscience.” (Hugo 1864b, 256)¹⁹

• Leo Tolstoy (2000, 239) wrote of people who exhibit “a lack of life force, of what is known as heart, of that yearning which makes a man choose one out of all the countless paths in life presented to him and desire that one alone.”

• Oscar Wilde (1891, 17), in extolling the individualism he thought would be possible only under socialism, wrote, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except in the imaginative place of art. In action, we never have.”

• Jack London (2015, 6493) described many people as “unburied dead” and is reported to have declared: “The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”²⁰

• Francis Hodgson Burnet (1907) described the protagonist of her novel The Shuttle as having “a genius for living, for being vital”: “Many people merely exist, are kept alive by others, or continue to vegetate because the persistent action of normal functions will allow of their doing no less” (112, cf. 60). “She’s Life itself! … What a thing it is for a man or woman to be Life — instead of a mass of tissue and muscle and nerve, dragged about by the mere mechanism of living!” (274).

• Sinclair Lewis (1920, 265), who was Rand’s favorite contemporary writer in the 1930s (cf. Mayhew 2007b, 219–20), wrote of people who exhibit “the contentment of the quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking.”

There are differences between the views expressed in these passages, but in all of them “living” (or being “alive”) is associated with a spiritual quality that many (perhaps most) people lack. The people who aren’t alive engage in metabolism and move about in the world eating and working to satisfy their physiological needs, but their existence lacks purpose and is devoid of passion.

In contrast to such people, consider what Kira Argounova, the heroine of Rand’s We the Living, says about being alive: “What do you think is living in me? Why do you think I’m alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want and that something which knows how to want — isn’t that life itself?” (WTL36 496, cf. WTL 385).²¹ What Kira has wanted since childhood was to build aluminum bridges (WTL36 43, WTL 35). What she seeks out of life is a specific productive career, but in Rand’s descriptions of this ambition, we read nothing about the purpose the bridges are to serve or why she thinks building them out of aluminum will serve this purpose; much less do we hear about any money she hopes to make from the bridges. What attracts Kira to building is not any survival need that she thinks her bridges will serve (for herself or for others), nor is it a protestant (or proletarian) ethic that valorizes work as such. We’re told that Kira “had chosen a future of the hardest work,” despite her “aristocratic … conviction that labor and effort were ignoble” (WTL36 42–43, cf. WTL 34). What attracts her is a spiritual quality in her chosen work. It is the audacity of shaping the physical world on a grand scale — of bending it to her will. What Kira admires and seeks to realize in her own life is the self-assertiveness of a unique individual’s creating something on a grand scale. We can see this same attitude in Rand’s admiring description of Petrograd: “Petrograd was not born; it was created. The will of a man raised it where men did not choose to settle. An inexorable emperor commanded into being the city and the ground under the city” (WTL36 285, cf. WTL 223).

Howard Roark, the hero of The Fountainhead, is also a builder. Here is what he says, early in the novel, about why he chose this career: “It’s because I’ve never believed in God… . Because I love this earth. That’s all I love. I don’t like the shape of things on this earth. I want to change them” (Fountainhead 38–39). It is certainly not for the sake of the clients that Roark wants to build: he tells us early in the novel that he intends to have clients in order to build, rather than the reverse (14). He later describes “the meaning of life” as “the material the earth offers you and what you make of it,” illustrating his point by bending a tree branch into an arc and saying, “Now I can make what I want of it: a bow, a spear, a cane, a railing” (577).

Although the careers that Rand extols in her early writing (through The Fountainhead) do meet survival needs, she focuses not on solving the problem of survival but on the spiritual-cum-physical achievement of imposing one’s vision on the world. This, for the early Rand, is what Man’s Life is about. To use a distinction employed by Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged, we might say that the early Rand saw Man’s Life as a life of living up to “the best within us” rather than a life devoted to such mundane matters as “business and earning a living” (Atlas 6).²² The mundane matters are for the sake of the higher, spiritual ones.

In Atlas Shrugged, however, this way of thinking is subverted. In the novel’s denouement, Eddie comes to realize that “business and earning a living and that in man which makes it possible — that is the best within us” (1166). Rand’s point here is not that Kira’s and Roark’s priorities in her earlier novels were inverted. Her point is, rather, that it is essential to the spiritual activity she extolled in those earlier works that this activity is the ultimate source of the material values on which human survival directly depends. Recognizing that the spiritual activity that Kira called “living” is self-sustaining enables us to live (and to love our lives) more fully and consistently.

We can see some germs of this perspective, in Rand’s earlier work and in some of the other nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors quoted above. These authors often portray the spiritual qualities associated with living (as opposed to merely existing) as making characters effective, and this efficacy extends to such productive enterprises as the factory by which Jean Valjean reinvigorates the town of Montreuil-sur-Mer in Hugo’s Les Misérables, Betty Vanderpole’s rebuilding of the Stornham Court estate in Burnett’s The Shuttle, and Martin Edin’s literary career in London’s eponymous novel. Burnett is explicit about the connection between Betty’s “genius for living” and literal survival, for she writes of this genius keeping her alive and contrasts this with being “kept alive by others.”

The revitalizations of Montreuil-sur-Mer and Stornham Court are instances of bourgeois or upwardly mobile newcomers supplanting the practices of an exhausted aristocracy, and so these episodes could be seen to represent a respect in which the emerging capitalist social system is more vital than the feudal system it was supplanting. Socialist authors, such as Wilde and London, looked forward to the greater material prosperity that they imagined would result once the abolition of private property (somehow) enabled more widespread vitality. We can see this same motivation in Andrei Tagonov and Stepan Timoshenko, the most admirable Communist characters in Rand’s We the Living. These men are among the living, and they “made a revolution” in order “to raise men to our own level.”²³ In time Tagonov and Timoshenko realize that the Soviet regime they have made possible sacrifices the living for the sake of those who merely exist and that the result is both spiritual desolation and grinding poverty. This point is made also in Rand’s Anthem (published between We the Living and The Fountainhead), which depicts a collectivistic society of the future that, because of such sacrifices, has regressed to a pre-industrial state of existence in which hardly anyone lives past middle age.

Howard Roark articulates the point in his courtroom speech in The Fountainhead. He attributes the spiritual activity that is characteristic of Rand’s heroes to the faculty of reason, and he emphasizes reason’s role in both Man’s “glory” and his survival:

His vision, his strength, his courage came from his own spirit. A man’s spirit, however, is his self. That entity which is his consciousness. To think, to feel, to judge, to act are functions of the ego.

The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power — that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He lived for himself.

And only by living for himself was he able to achieve the things which are the glory of mankind. Such is the nature of achievement.

Man cannot survive except through his mind. He comes on earth unarmed. His brain is his only weapon. Animals obtain food by force. Man has no claws, no fangs, no horns, no great strength of muscle. He must plant his food or hunt it. To plant, he needs a process of thought. To hunt, he needs weapons, and to make weapons — a process of thought. From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man — the function of his reasoning mind. (Fountainhead 678–79)

The elevated way of life celebrated in Rand’s early fiction is one that she views both as the proper human form of life and as quite different from how people typically lead their lives. In these respects, her view is like Aristotle’s distinction between living well and merely living. But Rand’s early conception of Man’s Life differs from Aristotle’s in two important respects. The first is that Rand emphasized individuality and personal values in a way that Aristotle did not (but nineteenth-century literary authors did). The second is that the life Rand idealized involves such paradigmatically productive activities as building bridges, skyscrapers, and (in Anthem) light bulbs.

From Rand’s early conception of Man’s Life, it is a comparatively small step (especially after the industrial revolution) to observe that the work of creative geniuses plays an outsized role in human survival. This takes us to The Fountainhead’s view of the great creators. It is a further step from here to grasp that the same spiritual activity (though in different forms and at different scales) makes possible all of the actions by which human beings produce the (spiritual and physical) values on which human survival depends. It is a still further step to grasp that this fact about the spiritual activity with which Kira identified living is essential to this activity. This last step, which is unique to Rand, marks a fundamental development in the understanding of Man’s Life. Absent this step, “Man’s Life” is understood as a certain, elevated lifestyle — a specific way of spending one’s time — to which human nature suits us. Rand’s insight upgrades it into a genuine conception of a life.

Rand characterizes life as “a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action” (VOS 16, cf. Aristotle, DA 416b17 on the power of nutrition). For different living species to have different forms of life is for them to sustain themselves by different processes of self-generated action. The human process — the only process by which even a human being’s crudest physiological needs can be met — is a rational process. Rational activity is not just a distinguishing feature of human life by dint of which we live well, as opposed to merely living; rather, reason (or “man’s mind”) is man’s “basic tool of survival” (Atlas 1011).

This is true even in the most primitive hunter-gatherer conditions (which Roark alludes to in his speech). But, so long as human beings lived a primarily agricultural and low-tech form of existence, it would have been difficult to appreciate the full scope of reason’s role in human survival. Aristotle, of course, acknowledges that reason (via the technai) plays a significant role in the process of human survival, but he thinks that all the relevant technai were discovered and perfected (or nearly perfected) long ago, and their continued exercise doesn’t much impress him.²⁴

The most intense and impressive activities of reason of which Aristotle was aware (such as those involved in axiomatizing geometry or in identifying causes of astronomical phenomena) played no obvious role in human survival, so it is not surprising that he regarded such exercises of rationality as ends-in-themselves that make no contribution to the business of living. From Rand’s perspective, however, Aristotle’s view represents an intense valuing of the mind coupled with an impoverished understanding of what she called “the role of the mind in man’s existence” (FTNI 97, RM 72). This last is what she described as the theme of Atlas Shrugged.

Before delving deeper into Atlas, it’s worth commenting on the allusion to Aristotle in the passage from Roark’s speech. Roark describes the creator’s mind as “a first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover.” Roark’s creators are like the Aristotelian Prime Mover in at least two respects. First, they are first causes, as opposed to things that act only because they are moved by others. The primary contrast here is to the people Roark calls “second-handers” (Fountainhead 633–36) — those whose lives are animated only as the aftereffects of the thinking of others. In the years after The Fountainhead, Rand would further articulate her view of human thought as a first cause into a theory of free will that is centered on a primary choice to engage or disengage one’s mind.²⁵

The second respect in which Roark’s creators are like Aristotle’s Prime Mover is that they engage in their activity for its own sake, rather than for the sake of an end beyond itself, and (at least many of) the positive effects of their activities on others form no part of their motivation. However, unlike the purely contemplative activity of the Aristotelian Prime Mover, the Roarkian Creators’ activities are productive and so are deeply engaged with the natural (and, in some cases, social) world.²⁶

The work Roark regards as an end-in-itself isn’t limited to contemplating architectural principles, or even to designing buildings in his head or on paper. He loves to build. This love certainly includes the products of the building; for it is essential to the activity (and to Roark’s love of it) that it produces buildings that serve a purpose.²⁷ Nevertheless, Roark doesn’t build for the mere sake of the buildings’ existing (or their purpose’s getting served), but for the sake of building them. If he found that there were already plenty of buildings of the sort he liked in the world (apart from his action), rather than being fulfilled he would look for something else to create. What he wants isn’t simply the world to be shaped a certain way; he wants to shape it.

As the example of Roark illustrates, valuing a productive activity stands in a subtle relation to valuing its product. For the activity to be productive it must be aimed at the product, and the activity’s value depends on the product’s actually serving a survival need. But what one values in valuing the product is not the (generic) fulfillment of that need, but the product itself. And part of valuing a product as such is regarding it as something produced (whether by oneself or by someone else). Loving a productive activity is not just loving either a need’s getting met or the product by which it gets met; it is valuing the activity of meeting the need by creating the product. The need is an essential part of the context that gives rise to the activity, but the need’s satisfaction is not that for the sake of which the activity is loved.

If Rand’s ethics is correct, then all proper human activities play a role in fulfilling biological needs, and this is essential to these activities’ being proper. Nevertheless, it is possible for someone to love such an activity without attending to the need that gives rise to it (as Kira does in the case of engineering), or without even being aware of this need. Hidden in the remains of a railroad tunnel from a collapsed and forgotten industrial civilization, the hero of Anthem begins conducting scientific experiments with no purpose in mind beyond satisfying his curiosity. It is only after he has reinvented the light bulb that he comes to realize that the scientific research he loves is life-sustaining as well as spiritually rewarding, and it is later still that he comes to see working to sustain one’s life as noble.²⁸ Arguably, Aristotle was in a similar epistemic position when he regarded contemplation as an end-in-itself. Like the hero of Anthem, he loved seeking causes, which he saw as epitomizing the activity of reason, but he misunderstood the role of such reasoning in human life as a whole.

This brings us to Atlas Shrugged’s theme of the “role of reason in man’s existence.” As I’ve written elsewhere (Salmieri 2009b), this theme can be divided into two broad aspects: reason as the productive faculty and reason as the valuing faculty. As the productive faculty, reason is the source of material values on which human life depends. The novel illustrates reason’s role (through technology) in the production of food, shelter, and other necessities of survival. It illustrates the grand scale of the reason-guided productive activity that makes possible the comparatively long, safe, and healthy lives that modern residents of first world countries take for granted. And it illustrates the intensity of the reasoning involved in the relevant productive achievements. Reason is also the valuing faculty, in that it is responsible for the spiritual activities that Rand extolled in her earlier writing. It is by reason that (as Kira put it) we “know how to want,” and this knowing is the source of personal commitments to values and of the emotional intensity that the early Rand viewed as essential to living (as distinct from merely existing).

Atlas treats these two aspects of reason’s functioning as a systematic whole. The activity that the heroes love and engage in as an end-in-itself is one of rationally conceiving life-supporting values and then bringing these values into existence through productive action. This activity is portrayed as the core activity of human life. The novel illustrates how values of many sorts (romantic love, sex, abstract science, philosophy, art, wealth, friendship) each play a role in this process, and it shows the corrupted and destructive form these values take when pursued in ways that drop this context. Thus, for the mature Rand to say that man is the “rational animal” (ITOE 44) is to say that the very process by which human beings live is essentially rational.

The components of this life stand in various means-end relations, as when one cooks a meal in order to eat it, but these relations are not all unidirectional (as the Aristotelian means-end relation seems to be), and so the value of a means is not always derived from and lesser than the value of the end. One cooks in order to eat, but one eats in order to have energy to perform activities of which cooking is one. Living, which is the ultimate end, is not some atomic activity to which all one’s other activities are mere means. Rather the end — one’s life — is a complex, self-sustaining activity, composed of many parts (some more central, others peripheral).

Rand’s conception of one’s life as one’s ultimate value should not be confused with the idea of an “inclusive end” that figures in the secondary literature on Aristotle’s ethics.²⁹ An inclusive end is one that subsumes (some of) the other values that are pursued for its sake rather than merely resulting causally from them. In some versions of this view, the other values are made more valuable by being constituents of the inclusive end, but as the idea is usually understood, each of the values subsumed in the inclusive end has some intrinsic value apart from its effects and from its participation in a larger whole. The inclusive end is valuable because it combines things that are valuable in themselves, and (perhaps) because the combination enhances its constituents in such a manner as to make the whole more valuable than the sum of its parts.

For Rand, by contrast, there are no intrinsic values, and the value of each component of a life depends entirely on its effects and on its relation to the whole life.³⁰ This is true for life in general (e.g., for a plant’s life or an animal’s). In the human case, there’s an added component. Since it is reason that integrates the pursuit of these many values into a self-sustaining life, each value’s status as a value depends on the valuer’s knowing how to achieve and utilize the value in a way that serves his life as a whole. Of course, this knowledge can be more or less extensive and more or less explicit. We will see in the next two sections how Rand thinks moral philosophy gives us explicit abstract knowledge of how to integrate values into a human life, and how Aristotle’s ethics relates to hers on this count.

Abstract Standards and Personal Purposes

Because Aristotle’s conception of Man’s Life includes practicing one of two specific occupations (that of a philosopher or that of a statesman), it strikes contemporary readers as unduly narrow and insensitive to the deeply personal factors that incline different people to different careers. We now take it for granted that there is a wide range of possible and equally valuable careers, and that a person’s choice between them will depend on personal preferences or other individuating factors.

Aristotle isn’t blind to the fact that ethical principles need to be applied to individuals in a way that is tailored to their differing features and circumstances — indeed this is something he stresses. But there is a difference between tailoring the same suit differently for different individuals and designing a different suit for each. This point should be familiar from The Fountainhead: Keating adapts old designs to new sites (which requires a modicum of intelligence), whereas Roark creates a new design for each building (always following the same abstract architectural principles). There is an emphasis on the value of creativity, individuality, and the personal in Rand’s work (and in modernity generally) that is missing (or at least muted) in Aristotle. We can see this in the somewhat differing roles that (what amounts to) the idea of a standard of value plays in the work of the two philosophers.

Although I suggest Aristotle and Rand both treat Man’s Life as a standard of moral value, the terms “standard of value” and “morality” are not found in Aristotle, so it is worth saying a bit about how Rand uses them and about the corresponding terminology in Aristotle. Rand defines morality as “a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions — the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life” (VOS 13). And she defines a “standard” as “an abstract principle that serves as a measurement or gauge to guide a man’s choices in the achievement of a concrete, specific purpose” (27). So, when she speaks of the standard of value of a morality, she means an abstract principle by which one can guide one’s life as a whole by selecting specific goals and specific means to them.

Aristotle formulates what amounts to this same idea of a comprehensive guiding principle for life via the metaphor of a target: “Everyone who is able to live according to his own choice should set up some target for living well (whether it’s honor or reputation or wealth or education) looking to which he will take all of his actions; since not having one’s life arranged toward some end is a sign of great folly. So, first of all, we must define for ourselves without haste or carelessness (i) those things in which living well consists and (ii) those things without which living well is impossible for human beings” (Aristotle, EE I.2 1214b6–14).³¹ The idea of a “target for living well” is explained by the comment that it is something the person can “look to” in taking all of his actions and, thereby, arrange his life toward an end. Aristotle’s advice isn’t simply that everyone who can should erect some such target; for the context makes clear that he thinks there is a correct target, which we can identify by attending to two questions: (i) In what things does living well consist? (ii) What (other) things are prerequisites for a human being’s living well? The four possible targets Aristotle suggests (“honor, reputation, wealth, or education”) are candidate answers (which Aristotle goes on to reject) for the first of these questions.³² The candidates’ function in the passage is to concretize the idea of a target around which a life could be organized. Each target is abstract enough to serve as a standard of value (in Rand’s sense) — a guide by which a person could select his more specific goals and values. And each leads to a distinctive and recognizable type of life. Having introduced the idea of a target (or standard of value), Aristotle immediately shifts to the task of identifying the correct target.

The passage we have been discussing comes from Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, but we find the target metaphor also in the Nicomachean Ethics. There it is introduced after Aristotle discusses the goods of various endeavors and the respects in which one good can be subordinate to another. This suggests to him the idea of a “chief good,” which is desired for its own sake and for the sake of which we do everything we do. If there is such a good, Aristotle writes, knowledge of it will make us “like archers with a target to aim at, more likely to hit on what is right” (EN 1094a22–24). Later, he recapitulates that “there is a target to which the man who has reason looks and heightens or relaxes his activity accordingly” (1138b22–23).

I take it that, for Aristotle, the target and the ultimate good are the same in one respect but distinct in another. To use an Aristotelian turn of phrase, they are the same in number, but their being is not the same. There is a certain item — a certain activity (as we’ll see) — that is the chief good for human beings, and this item is the human good, whether or not anyone recognizes it as such. Moreover, this activity is the good of each particular human being, whether or not that human being recognizes this. But it is only when I recognize this item as my good that it becomes a target for me — something I can use to consciously guide my action. And the good’s status as a target makes it easier for me to attain it.

Does Rand share this view of the relation between the ultimate value and the target? She writes: “An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means — and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil” (VOS 17).

Here the ultimate value is said to set the standard of value rather than to be that standard, but the same thing — an organism’s life — is placed in both roles. We saw earlier that Rand distinguishes between a standard and a purpose; the former is an abstraction that serves as a guide to the achievement of the latter, which is a concrete. She applies this point to the human case as follows: “Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man — in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life” (VOS 27).

The point that a standard is abstract — whereas a purpose is concrete — presumably applies in the case of nonhuman organisms as well. Lassie’s life will be her ultimate value; and because Lassie is a dog, Dog’s Life will be the standard with reference to which it can be determined what furthers or threatens Lassie’s life.³³ Of course, Lassie herself will not consciously appeal to this abstract standard when evaluating things, but her owner or veterinarian may make decisions for her with this standard in view. Moreover, an account of the reason Lassie pursues the various items she does would appeal to the standard of Dog’s Life. For example, an explanation of why she’s so protective of Timmy would appeal to the fact that a dog is a domesticated pack animal that lives by serving its human master. Unbeknownst to Lassie, this fact about Dog’s Life (when combined with facts about Lassie’s circumstances) explains her valuing of Timmy. This distinction between standard and purpose is more important in the case of human beings precisely because, unlike dogs, we can have an abstract understanding of our form of life and use this understanding to select our personal values. Moreover, the process of applying the abstract standard to one’s own concrete case is an important instance of the reasoning that is the distinguishing feature of human life.

The target Aristotle speaks of in the first books of the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics is presumably meant to be the relatively abstract account he’s providing in those works. This account is the same for a beginner in gymnastics and for Milo the wrestler (to repurpose Aristotle’s example from EN 1106a33), even though the specific actions that each one will need to take to hit this target will be different. Central to Aristotle’s conception of practical virtue is the ability to reason well about particular cases. This reasoning involves a nuanced recognition of how relevant abstract considerations pertaining to the standard apply to an individual case, in light of the many factors that differentiate the individual and his circumstances from those of others.

For Rand, there is an additional respect in which the distinction between the abstract standard and the concrete purpose matters: part of reason’s role in life is choosing one’s purposes — including one’s overarching purpose in life. This is not simply a matter of recognizing how some predetermined, universal end can best be achieved given one’s distinctive features and circumstances. Rather, it is a matter of conceiving of a new, distinctive end for oneself. “You set the goal and the meaning; the field of choice and possibilities is immense; the only necessity involved is that you use the material as it is and your tool (reason) as it is — that you understand them for what they are before you choose or achieve a purpose” (Papers 032_11B_002_060 / Journals 294).

Once one recognizes all the pertinent facts, including those that give rise to the need for a moral standard and all the particular facts about oneself and one’s circumstances, there are inexhaustibly many possible lives one can choose as one’s purpose. Each of these purposes constitutes a concrete instance of the human form of life that must be conceived with reference both to the abstract standard (and the facts that give rise to it) and to the differentiating features of oneself and one’s circumstances. This conceiving is not merely a matter of adapting an existing form to a new concrete situation, it’s a new creative act.

An analogy may be instructive here. Think of a poet composing a sonnet for the wedding of two friends. In doing so, he makes reference both to the abstract form of a sonnet and to the many specific details of the couple and the occasion. But there are many possible poems that are instances of the sonnet form and that would be suitable to recite at this wedding. The poet’s task is not to pick out the most suitable poem from this infinite set (as if the infinity of potential poems already existed somewhere to be selected from).³⁴ Rather, his task is to compose a sonnet for the occasion. The sonnet is a new creation of the poet. And, even though a sonnet is a fairly rigid form, think of how different the poet’s activity is from simply plugging concretes about the couple into some preset formula — like filling out a Mad Lib. Most notably, the poem will need to have a theme and a central idea for how to express this theme in the sonnet form.³⁵ But neither the theme nor the central idea is established by the sonnet form, by the occasion of the wedding, or by any facts about the couple. All of these factors will be relevant to the poet’s choice of theme and central idea — and to all the other choices involved in executing the central idea — but the choices themselves involve new acts of creative reasoning on the poet’s part. Composition consists largely in such acts of creative reasoning. And it is in the nature of such acts that, no matter how well the poet does his job, it would be possible for someone to do it equally well by composing a wholly different sonnet (perhaps with a wholly different theme). It is this sort of creative reasoning that, in Rand’s view, is involved in setting the core purposes that shape one’s life and thereby composing an ultimate value (or purpose) for oneself. In this process moral principles (including the standard of Man’s Life) play something like the role of principles of literary composition.

I don’t know that Aristotle would disagree with this point. Even within the contemplative life, there must be many choices about which things to study in which ways. How does one divide one’s time between studying mathematics and the natural world? In one’s study of nature, does one focus more on animals (as Aristotle did) or on plants (as did Theophrastus)? Even if different options may be better for different people with different talents or circumstances, it’s doubtful that such considerations would mandate a single best syllabus for any individual’s contemplative career. Likewise, there are presumably different roles a statesman could play in his city, and it may be that, even given a particular set of facts about his talents and circumstances, there are multiple political careers for him to choose among. However, although Aristotle’s view is consistent with there being such scope for personal choice and may even imply it, this is not something he calls attention to, and he does not valorize the making of such choices as an exercise of reason.

To return to the example of the wedding sonnet, if we value the sonnet, we do not value it simply as a functional item that serves its purpose in the wedding ceremony (to whatever extent it does). Rather, we also value it as the work of a specific artist, bearing the mark of his specific personality and sensibility. Likewise, when Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged loves Taggart Transcontinental and John Galt (the two concrete values that are central to her life), she loves them not merely as values that can constitute and sustain a human life, but as her specific chosen ends. There is an individualistic element here that we might call Romantic, insofar as it stems from an emphasis on the choices of individuals reflecting the details of their souls.

This individualistic, Romantic perspective is largely absent from Aristotle. He comes nearest to it when he points out that poets love their own works (and parents, their own children) more than they do other people’s, because they are their own creations.³⁶ But there is something impersonal — and unromantic — in his accounts of love and of literary creation. Although, as Robert Mayhew argues in chapter 13 of this volume, Aristotle’s theory of literary creation stresses some of the methods of literary integration that would later be essential to the Romantic movement in literature, it lacks the emphasis on the author’s distinctive personal values that is also characteristic of this school.³⁷ Likewise Aristotle’s account of love (discussed by Allan Gotthelf in chapter 14 of this volume) stresses the importance of character and virtue to the highest forms of love, but he says comparatively little about the sorts of individualizing features that make one person love a particular other person as distinct from others who may share his virtues — the sorts of features that Rand captures in her concept of a “sense of life.”³⁸

Rand’s distinction between a standard and a purpose brings out the abstractness of the former and the concreteness of the latter. The relation of the abstract standard to the concrete purpose isn’t one of tailoring the former to the latter but, rather, of using the former as a guide in one’s creation of the latter. This distinction helps us think in a new way about what we might call paradigmatic instances of the standard — individuals that fulfill it perfectly and dramatically. Aristotle’s God and the people whom Rand (borrowing Aristotelian language) calls “Prime Movers” are examples of such paradigmatic instances of Aristotle’s and Rand’s respective moral standards — of Man’s Life.³⁹

The more we think of contemplation (or whatever one holds as the highest activity) as a single concrete activity that admits of some variation (such that it can be tailored to individual cases), the more natural it is to identify this standard with an individual who embodies it most fully. If one does this, one’s standard becomes in effect likeness to this individual. Aristotle’s cosmology and ethics are both plausibly interpreted along these lines. The stars revolve in order to be like God, and the philosopher contemplates for the same reason. We can describe this as seeking to be like God — or as seeking to realize in oneself the abstraction of which God is the fullest embodiment. But insofar as the standard is such that there is a single way to embody it most fully, these two descriptions amount to the same thing. By contrast, when a standard is understood as an abstract principle that exists for the sake of guiding us in the achievement of different concrete purposes, there cannot be any single, unique paradigm instance of the standard with which it can be identified in the way that the activity of contemplation can be identified with Aristotle’s God.

John Galt is Rand’s fullest literary embodiment of her moral standard, and there is a sense in which anyone attempting to live up to this standard is striving to be like Galt. Indeed, Galt serves as an inspiration to the other heroes in Atlas Shrugged, and Rand writes of the ways in which literary heroes can serve such a role.⁴⁰ However, it is in the nature of Rand’s standard that Galt’s life is just one of a potentially infinite number of different lives that could fulfill the standard perfectly — lives that involve wholly different careers, interests, friends, priorities, and so on, all falling equally under such abstractions as “rationality,” “productiveness,” and “pride.” Such lives are not variations on any single theme, any more than are all Romantic piano concertos or all buildings designed in accordance with Roark’s principles. It is essential to a building’s perfectly realizing these principles that it is not just numerically unique but is integrated around a distinct idea conceived to fulfill its individual purpose in its individual setting. In the same way, Galt’s individuality is essential to his realizing Rand’s ideal. One seeks to be like Galt (or to build like Roark or to compose like Tchaikovsky) not by seeking to be concretely like him but by realizing in a new and distinctive way the same abstractions that he epitomizes.⁴¹

For Rand, paradigmatic concretes play a heuristic role in helping one to hold and implement a standard, rather than themselves serving as standards to which other things approximate. We can see this in her brief discussion of the “psycho-epistemological function of a personified (concretized) human ideal”:

Observe that every religion has a mythology — a dramatized concretization of its moral code embodied in the figures of men who are its ultimate product…. This does not mean that art is a substitute for philosophical thought: without a conceptual theory of ethics, an artist would not be able successfully to concretize an image of the ideal. But without the assistance of art, ethics remains in the position of theoretical engineering: art is the model-builder.

Many readers of The Fountainhead have told me that the character of Howard Roark helped them to make a decision when they faced a moral dilemma. They asked themselves: “What would Roark do in this situation?” — and, faster than their mind could identify the proper application of all the complex principles involved, the image of Roark gave them the answer. They sensed, almost instantly, what he would or would not do — and this helped them to isolate and to identify the reasons, the moral principles that would have guided him. (“Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” RM 10, emphasis added)

The concretized ideal is a model created by the artist to dramatically embody abstract principles. And its proper function is to help us to isolate and identify these principles, rather than to serve as a standard directly. We live well, not to the extent that we approximate to being Roark but to the extent that we, like Roark, act with such virtues as independence and integrity.⁴²

The Objectivity of the Moral Code

Part of the appeal of the idea of a distinctively human form of life as a standard for ethics is that it purports to provide an objective standard for morality. We are a certain species with a certain nature that fits us to live in a certain way. Moral principles can be derived from an understanding of this nature and its implications, rather than being mere systematizations of our (personal or societal) preferences or prejudices. I take it that the promise of some sort of objective grounding for ethics accounts for much of the appeal of works such as Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness, with its suggestion that moral goodness and badness are akin to features that make members of other species fit or unfit to carry on the ways of life of their species.⁴³

I indicated earlier how the most abhorrent features of Aristotle’s ethics — his endorsement of slavery and attitude toward productive work — stem from his distinction between instrumental and intrinsic values, and I showed how Rand’s alternative view of value underwrites a view in which a nonexploitative harmony of interests is possible between people (and within each individual). Now I want to raise a related, methodological question. Is there anything in Aristotle’s approach to ethics that provides a ground on which he could and should have rejected the exploitative features of the classical Greek way of life that we now regard as evil? More generally, does an Aristotelian approach to ethics put us in a position to reflect critically on the way of life into which we have been acculturated?

Of course, we cannot expect that Aristotle could have seen everything that we now recognize as wrong with every classical Greek practice or institution. Nor should we expect it to be easy for us to identify any immoral aspects of current mores that may be obvious to future generations. However, part of the job of moral philosophy is to equip us to differentiate the good from the parochial — to determine what is wrong as well as what is right about the ways of life to which we’re accustomed and to evaluate challenges to this way of life once they’ve been suggested. The idea of a human function or form of life that can serve as a moral standard brings with it a promise of objectivity. It suggests that the way of life the Aristotelian advocates is grounded in nature rather than in the customs or prejudices of an individual or a society. If the human form of life is our standard of value, then, once we encounter radical suggestions such as that slavery may be wrong or that moneylending may not be, we should be able to use the standard to settle the matter. No doubt, it may take skill or nuance to apply the standard correctly, but it ought to be possible to do it, and it ought to be possible to recognize cases in which it has been done. Otherwise, the standard is nothing more than a codification of our preexisting moral attitudes — including any relevant prejudices we may have.

The abhorrent and parochial features of Aristotle’s own view of Man’s Life should make us sensitive to the possibility of simply reading into nature our own prejudices, whatever they may be. The connection between Man’s Life and survival in Rand’s ethics is meant to give us a means to ensure that no mere prejudices get included as elements of Man’s Life.

When Rand describes “Man’s Life” as the standard of value, this phrase is not meant to name some preferred lifestyle that she counts as “living well” for a man and that she venerates over other ways in which men might equally well sustain themselves. Rather, she means “man’s survival qua man” — that is, “the terms, methods, conditions and goals required for the survival of a rational being through the whole of his lifespan — in all those aspects of existence which are open to his choice” (VOS 26). Each of the moral values and virtues that she identifies as components of “Man’s Life” are supposed to play a causal role in the process by which a human being survives across a human lifespan. This is not to say that a person would necessarily (or even probably) die young without it. There are all sorts of ways in which organisms can subsist despite dysfunctions. But a trait is not a dysfunction at all unless it drains or distracts from the process by which the organism survives. Likewise, any alleged immorality is not genuinely immoral unless it is a drain or distraction from the process by which a human being survives, and conversely nothing is genuinely moral unless it makes some contribution to this process. Rand’s morality is meant to identify in abstract and essentialized terms the portions of that process that are subject to choice. (Dysfunctions that aren’t due to choice are unhealthy — or otherwise bad — without being immoral.)

The idea of an ethical standard based on Man’s Life cannot provide objectivity if our conception of that form of life derives the whole of its content from the habits and mores that happen to be dominant in our milieu. This is, in effect, how Rand viewed Aristotle’s standard: “The greatest of all philosophers, Aristotle, did not regard ethics as an exact science; he based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do, leaving unanswered the questions of: why they chose to do it and why he evaluated them as noble and wise” (VOS 14). Aristotle did consider — at least to a certain extent — why a phronimos acts as he does. The chapters on the characterological virtues, for example, describe some of the considerations relevant to particular virtues. But Rand is right that Aristotle didn’t think these questions admit of exact and abstract answers.

In any case, the neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists who extol phronēsis do not prize any of the specific considerations from which Aristotle says the phronimos reasons. What these ethicists stress (and often exaggerate) is the quasi-perceptual character of phronēsis itself.⁴⁴ Thus they reference the phronimos as the standard of what to do, and the standard (such as it is) to which Aristotle himself appeals is neglected. Some interpreters and revivers of Aristotelian ethics go so far as to deny that there is any abstract standard there.⁴⁵

If the idea of a human form of life as a standard of value is to do any real work, it needs to derive at least some of its content from a broadly biological understanding of what a form-of-life is, in general, and what the human form is, in particular. However, it would also be a mistake to read off ethics in too facile a manner from an antecedent understanding of biology. Some worry that the attempt to ground morality in biological functions opens up the possibility that traits such as violence and deception could turn out to be virtues.⁴⁶ And we should not forget that forms of nonprocreative sex have often been deemed vicious on the grounds that they involve uses of our sexual organs that are counter to what are supposed to be their natural biological purposes. If we think such conclusions are unwarranted, we must be on guard against the possibility of erring in our attempts to derive ethical content from our understanding of human biology.

If we are concerned about objectivity, we can neither prejudicially valorize as parts of Man’s Life whatever moral views we happen to hold, nor can we blithely infer moral content from biology while remaining (as Aristotle puts it) “inexperienced in the actions of life” (EN 1095a3). There is a third alternative. If there is a human form of life, if moral goodness consists in realizing it (or approximating to it), and if we are decent people who know some significant moral truths on the basis of our inarticulate experience (or because of our upbringing), then we ought to be able to draw on an independent understanding of our natures as members of the human species to understand why the actions or traits that we correctly regard as morally good form part of the human form of life (whereas their contraries do not).

The fact that the human form of life is essentially rational is a rudimentary biological fact graspable without specialized study — analogous to the fact that falcons and other birds of prey live lives of predation, whereas deer lead lives of grazing and fleeing. Rand’s ethics, which is intended as an articulation the contents of Man’s Life, traces out the consequences of this and related facts. These consequences are not meant to be deduced from biological facts ab initio. Just as, in an Aristotelian science, many of the facts to be demonstrated are already known on the basis of experience, so too in ethics, decent and experienced people may already possess and live by moral knowledge, before they come to understand the basis of this knowledge in the requirements of Man’s Life. Thus, one of the minor heroes of Atlas Shrugged says that the character who taught him this moral code has “merely named what I had lived by, what every man lives by — at and to the extent of such time as he doesn’t spend destroying himself” (Atlas 447).

The moral code (or explicit moral theory) formulates the relevant truths explicitly and identifies them as parts of the human survival process. In this way it helps an individual who already knew and lived by some of these truths in an inarticulate manner to integrate his pursuits into a self-sustaining whole (a life). The process of integration is error correcting in that conflicts among one’s values (including between one’s concrete values and one’s moral code) are evidence that some of the values (or moral beliefs) are mistaken and must be revised.⁴⁷

What are these ethical facts that form part of Rand’s moral theory but can initially be grasped and applied experientially? One is the value of the spiritual qualities (such as passion, independence, and creativity) that the early Rand extolled. Another is the recognition that the values on which one’s life depends need to be produced by reason-directed human effort so that (if one is not to be a parasite, which is self-defeating in innumerable ways) one must live productively. Other parts of Rand’s code include the virtue of honesty (which she conceptualizes as the recognition that the unreal is unreal and can have no value), the virtue of independence (the recognition that thinking is not an activity one person can perform for another), the virtue of justice (the recognition that one must be objective in assessing the characters of others and that one must treat them accordingly), and the “trader principle” (which states that one must deal with others only voluntarily, to mutual benefit by mutual consent, rather than treating people as prey or as objects of charity). The validation of these virtues is too large a topic to take up here.⁴⁸ I mention them just to give a sense of the sort of content included in the moral code and to indicate the role Rand thinks it plays in human life.

Notice that these virtues are more abstract and more absolute than the content of Aristotelian ethics. Earlier I noted that, for Rand, an individual must compose his life using the standard of Man’s Life as an abstract guide in the process; the content of Rand’s ethics can be seen as principles of composition for a life analogous to principles of literary composition. The moral principles specify the broad values that a human life requires, and the broad sorts of actions by which those values can be pursued in a coherent and self-sustaining manner.

The putatively biological fact about human beings that neo-Aristotelian ethicists most often appeal to is that man is a social animal. I take it that the point of describing man as a social animal and of comparing human beings in this respect to bees, ants, and herd animals (rather than simply just pointing out that human beings live in societies) is to draw on biology in something like the way I recommended earlier. We don’t simply catalogue the ways people conduct their lives and claim that this constitutes a human way of life, which is our function. Instead, we recognize our form of life as one that is rooted in our nature and that can be illuminated by comparisons to the lives of animals with relevantly similar natures.

But such comparisons with other animals that live in groups cannot be illuminating unless they are drawn with due attention to the characteristics that differentiate us from all other animals. The essence of humanity — our fundamental distinguishing characteristic — is rationality, and rationality makes a profound difference in every aspect of life that we engage in consciously (as opposed to the physiological activities of what Aristotle calls the nutritive soul). We should, therefore, expect it to make a profound difference in the nature of our sociality. This is Rand’s view, at any rate. “Man,” one of her protagonists says, “is a social being, but not in the way the looters preach” (Atlas 747). The “looters” in question are those who think that we should live in a collectivistic, rather than an individualistic, society. In a later essay, she elaborates on how the faculty of reason (here described as “a conceptual consciousness”) requires a distinctive form of social existence:

Individual rights is the only proper principle of human coexistence, because it rests on man’s nature, i.e., the nature and requirements of a conceptual consciousness. Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men; living in a human society is his proper way of life — but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreements they entered). (“A Nation’s Unity,” ARL 2:2, 127)

The idea that rationality makes human beings very different from other animals, even with respect to functions or faculties that we share with them at a generic level, brings me to a point mentioned earlier in connection with the worry about inferring ethical conclusions from (putatively) biological knowledge about a human function. Sexuality is one area in which many such inferences have been drawn that may strike us as misguided. It is obvious that reproduction is the — or at least a — “natural” function of our sex organs, and this has sometimes been thought to justify condemnations of various nonreproductive forms of sex as unnatural and (therefore) improper. But human beings are essentially rational animals, and part of reason’s role in human life is to enable each human being to compose for himself an individual life made up of specific values and practices that cohere into a self-sustaining whole. As the faculty that directs and organizes human life, reason replaces (or supersedes) the physiological or psychological mechanisms by which the activities of other organisms are organized into self-sustaining lives. Reason is free to find new uses for any of our faculties — uses for which they may not have evolved and for which they may not be employed in other species. Reason is likewise free to discover ways to alter these faculties (e.g., via birth control pills, vasectomies, or abortions) to better suit them to these chosen purposes.

In the process of natural selection organs often come to serve purposes other than those for which they initially evolved. There is nothing to prevent reason from similarly repurposing faculties within the span of any individual’s life. New, life-sustaining uses for faculties can be discovered and promulgated through the culture. This is what has happened with the many nonprocreative uses of our sexual faculties by which we pursue pleasure and celebrate spiritual values. Likewise, reason is free to find new ways to achieve the values played by reproduction in individual human lives. Reproduction serves such material values as ensuring that there are young people to assist in one’s dotage, and it serves spiritual values such as having progeny to whom to pass on one’s way of life (which, for a human being, crucially includes one’s ideas and values). All the ways discovered thus far to achieve these values require that some people reproduce; but a given individual needn’t have offspring himself to share in these values. In some social animals (e.g., bees), a small subset of the community specializes in reproduction, and the rest of the community is sterile. So, we cannot infer that every human being should seek to reproduce from the facts that everyone has reproductive organs and that reproduction is a part of life. Fundamentally, what ethics has to say about sex is simply that one should be rational about it; this rationality includes creativity in the formation of values that can meet our physiological and psychological needs and can be achieved through the use of our faculties.

There are many more detailed questions, of course, about what sorts of sex lives can be good for us. Some of these questions (e.g., those involving issues of consent) are straightforwardly ethical and come under some of the moral principles alluded to earlier. But others lie near the border that separates ethics from psychology and they require the empirical research methods of that field. There are many such questions concerning sexual practices that have been derided (by various parties) as “unnatural”: homosexuality, polyamory, polygamy, monogamy, masturbation, incest, relationships between (consenting) people distant in age, fantasizing about abusive forms of sex. Most of us think that at least some of these practices are bad for us, and few of us think that all are. If any one of these practices is bad for us, it must be because it runs contrary to human nature in some way other than its merely being atypical or different from the function that our sexual capacity evolved to serve. This could be because the practice stems from and reinforces a psychological state, such as low self-esteem, which saps our ability and motivation to engage in other vital activities. Or it could be because the sexual practice is incompatible with our using our sexual faculties to satisfy some crucial (physiological or psychological need) that we cannot otherwise meet.

Rand thought that promiscuity and homosexuality were immoral for reasons of the two sorts indicated above.⁴⁹ I think she was wrong about homosexuality and right about promiscuity. Settling either question would take us beyond the scope of this paper; I mention them here to indicate how Rand’s conception of Man’s Life sets up a standard by which such practices could be established as moral or immoral. The application of this standard will require identifying the actual causal relations in which these practices stand to the essential activities by which human beings sustain ourselves.

This takes us back to the general issue of the objectivity of the moral standard and of how we can differentiate between ways of living that are second nature to us simply because we’re accustomed to them and those that are grounded in our biological nature. A given practice or norm could turn out to be required by the standard of Man’s Life, or to represent one possible way (among others) of satisfying this standard, or to be contrary to this standard (and, therefore, immoral). Aristotelian ethics is not objective, because it lacks the means to distinguish among these three categories; and it is the integration with biological fact that enables Rand’s ethics to do so.

In some cases, the data we need to establish the relevant biological facts are available in ordinary experience. I have in mind facts such as that reason is our means of survival. This fact is biological in the broad sense that it is a fact about living things and how they live. But our knowledge of it doesn’t depend on the science of biology. For it doesn’t require the specialized methods of collecting and analyzing data that distinguish natural science from ordinary rational thinking and from philosophy. Indeed, it is only on the basis of a great deal of such nonspecialized knowledge about various types of living things that a science of biology could get off the ground.

But to settle the sorts of questions of sexual ethics we were just discussing, we need additional knowledge about human nature — and especially about the nature of the human mind. The same is true for a host of other questions pertaining to whether and when one should or can change or resist various desires or emotions — for example, questions concerning addiction (or putative addiction) or concerning states that may be mental illnesses. Most of our moral opinions on issues of these sorts reflect assumptions about these psychological questions. These assumptions are generally informed by our experience, which we can (and sometimes should) critically evaluate and work to enlarge. But they are assumptions of the sort that could be (and, in some cases, have been) confirmed, refuted, or modified by empirical research in psychology and allied fields.

The straightforwardly moral questions — the ones belonging to philosophy — are those that can be answered well without reliance on this specialized research. I think of questions that require research as involving distinguishable philosophical and scientific components. But even if this perspective on these issues is correct, the interplay of philosophical and scientific matters is complex and there are many borderline cases. Much of the subject matter of Aristotelian ethics — or at least of many of the characterological virtues — falls in this complex area at the border of philosophy and psychology. Rand had things to say about such questions as well. Indeed, as a novelist, she couldn’t have avoided issues of psychology (as well as issues on the borderline between it and philosophy), since novel-writing requires projecting characters with complete personalities. But the issues she emphasizes when writing as a moral philosopher are more abstract and structural, and I can find few parallels to them in Aristotle’s ethics.

When she writes about virtues, for example, she focuses not on characterological states but on abstract principles that she argues one must recognize in order to live as a human being — for example, the principle that the unreal is unreal and can be of no value. Of course, to recognize such principles in one’s thinking and conduct, one must apply them contextually, and they must factor centrally into one’s motivation. For this to happen over time, recognition of the principles must be automatized into a perspective on the world and a characteristic form of motivation that we can think of as a characterological virtue. But, for Rand, the concept “virtue” primarily refers to the abstract principle rather than to the form it takes in an individual’s psychology. There is much to explore about how such principles are realized psychologically. Rand addresses some of these in various contexts, and comparison to Aristotle’s accounts of characterological virtue and phronēsis might be illuminating in exploring her views.⁵⁰ But I see such comparisons as matters of detail when relating Rand’s ethics to Aristotle’s.

The central point of comparison is that each philosopher is recommending to us a certain way of living on the grounds that it is the one for which we are naturally suited as human beings — as rational animals. Each urges us to take Man’s Life as our standard of value, but they differ in their understanding of this life and of how it can serve as a standard. For Aristotle, Man’s Life is the distinctive manner of functioning that is characteristic of human beings and enabled by human nature. Rand adds that it is the process by which human beings survive. This means that, on Rand’s view, to qualify as part of Man’s Life, something must make a vital contribution to that process by which a human being sustains his existence across a human life span.

The moral content that follows from Rand’s conception of Man’s Life is more abstract than the subject matter of the Aristotelian virtues, and because of this, the moral guidance she offers can be objective and precise. For, as Aristotle noted, “the universal is honorable because it reveals the cause” (APo. 88a5–6). Because Rand’s ethics identifies Man’s Life at the right level of abstraction, this ethics can reveal to an individual the causal role played in his own life by each of his chosen values. Thus it enables him to harmonize these values into a life by which he can sustain himself without compromise and experience the profound, “non-contradictory joy” (Atlas 1022) that is the concomitant of living rationally, “in accordance with virtue” (EN 1098a17).

“Chapter 7: ““Man’s Life” as the Standard of Value in the Ethics of Aristotle and Ayn Rand” by Greg Salmieri from Two Philosophers: Aristotle and Ayn Rand by James G. Lennox and Gregor Salmieri, © 2026. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

1. Her two expositions of the moral philosophy as a systematic whole occur in John Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged (starting with this sentence at Atlas 1014), and in her essay “The Objectivist Ethics” (VOS, ch. 1).

2. I will use the phrase “Man’s Life” (with capitals) to refer to the specifically human form of life, when discussing Rand and Aristotle’s respective views of it. The phrase itself comes from Rand, but (as I have indicated) captures an idea of Aristotle’s. “Man” as Rand used the word in this and related locutions is (of course) intended to refer generically to all members of the human species. Such gender-neutral usages of the word “man” are now widely disfavored, because they treat adult males as the paradigms of the human species (see Miller and Swift 1976, Moulton 1981, and Warren 1986).

Aristotle himself certainly treated adult males as paradigms. His view of males as the paradigmatic members of a species stems from his view of male superiority (on which see note 12, below), and he views adults as paradigmatic because actuality is explanatorily prior to potentiality, so that children’s distinctive features are to be understood in terms of their role in the developmental process that culminates in adulthood. Rand likely would have accepted this view of the paradigmatic status of adults (as I do). She differs sharply from Aristotle in holding that women are equal to men in all the distinctively human abilities, but I doubt she would have been sympathetic to the idea that treating men as paradigmatic is somehow unjust to women, for she subscribed to an asymmetric view of sexual psychology according to which femininity is to be understood in relation to masculinity. (On this aspect of Rands’ thought, see “About a Woman President” [VOR], Answers 106. See also Lewis and Salmieri 2016, 372–73, 395n83, and the additional sources cited therein.) We can think of this as licensing a symbolic or aesthetic reason for preferring gender-neutral masculine language.

In any case, for most purposes, a gender-neutral alternative to “Man’s Life” would be preferable, but the alternative formulations have their own problems: “the human form of life” is too wordy; “human life” is ambiguous between singular and plural; and “Human’s Life” isn’t idiomatic English. So, for the purposes of this paper, I use “Man’s Life,” capitalizing it to reflect the quote that serves as our epigraph and to indicate that the term is being used in a specialized sense

3. The precise relation between these two best sorts of human life and the extent to which the activity that characterizes each is involved in the other are matters of some scholarly controversy. I am most persuaded by the accounts given in Lear 2004 and Cooper 2012.

4. The Greek noun chrēma can refer to a thing, to business, or specifically to money. The suffix –istēs designates a person involved with something, and –istikē designates the activity or discipline practiced by such a person. So a chrēmatistēs is someone involved with business or money — a businessman, tradesman, or moneymaker. (Note, however, that the word is not built from verbs for producing or exchanging.) And chrematistikē, which Aristotle discusses in Pol. I.8–11, would be the art or discipline of commerce (or trade, or moneymaking, etc.). In the present passage from EN I.5 Aristotle contrasts the life of the chrēmatistēs to three other lives that he thinks are “most favored” and from which people draw their conceptions of the good. These are the life of gratification (apolaustikon) and the lives of the statesman (politikos) and contemplator (theorētikos) (1095b14–19). He rejects the life of gratification as one “for grazing animals,” and (eventually) concludes that the other two lives do embody the human good, though not equally so.

5. The quote is from a speech by Francisco d’Anconia. That he is speaking here for Rand is confirmed by her inclusion of this speech in her book For the New Intellectual, under the title “The Meaning of Money.” Immediately before the quoted passage, Francisco credits Americans with coining the phrase “to make money”: “No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity — to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.” Rand doesn’t give a source for Francisco’s claim about the origins of the phrase, and taken literally, the claim is untrue. The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest attestation of the phrase “to make money” predates Columbus’s 1492 voyage (see usage P.2.a.i. in the OED’s entry on “money”), and Cicero wrote of “making wealth” (pecuniam facere) (Cicero, De Divinatione 1.49.111, cited in this connection by Liberman 2006). However (an n-gram search on “make money” and related phrases in Google’s English 2019 corpus reveals that) the phrase only started appearing regularly in print around the turn of the nineteenth century and was more prevalent in American than British publications. This reflects the unprecedented embrace of commerce in the early United States (on which see Wood 1991, 325–47) and so supports the spirit if not the letter of Francisco’s claim.

The claim itself had enough curreny in the nineteenth century that the author of a book on Americanisms found it necessary to refute it: “It is equally unjust to charge Americans with the invention of the phrase, to make money, much as they may be addicted to the practice. Dr. Johnson already rebuked Boswell sharply for using it, and said: ‘Don’t you see the impropriety of it? To make money is to coin it; you should say, to get money’” (de Vere 1871, 296; cited by Freeman 2011). Notice that Johnson’s rebuke reflects the attitude that Francisco says Americans displaced. Interestingly, just prior to this passage, de Vare addresses the claim, also considered in Atlas Shrugged (683), that the dollar sign is based on the initials of the United States. It’s unlikely that da Vare is Rand’s source for these two philological claims (since he refutes the claim Franciso endorses), but it may be that he’s responding to some earlier source that she also read.

6. I borrow the phrase “leisurely ideal” from “Aristotelian Practical Wisdom as a Leisurely Ideal,” a talk that Gabriel Richardson Lear presented at several conferences in the 2010s.

7. The word I’m translating as “characterological” is ēthikē. It is sometimes translated as “moral” or with the phrase “of character.” I prefer “characterological” because it avoids some potentially misleading connotations of “moral” and preserves the link to the noun ēthos (character), while being a single adjective (rather than a propositional phrase)

8. I will leave sophia and phronēsis untranslated throughout. The traditional translations are “wisdom” and “prudence,” respectively. This is somewhat unfortunate as “wisdom” in contemporary English is more naturally associated with what Aristotle means by phronēsis than what he means by sophia. Some translators have thus used wisdom for phronēsis, and found another word for sophia, but there’s no obvious alternative, and the presence of “sophia” as a root in the word “philosophy,” which is well-known to mean the “love of wisdom,” makes translating it differently awkward. Sometimes the distinction between the two words is marked by translating them “theoretical wisdom” and “practical wisdom.” This plausibly captures their meanings, but it creates the false impression that Aristotle regards them as two variants of a single thing, wisdom.

9. The contemplative life, too, will presumably include some exercise of phronēsis and the characterological virtues, since they’re needed to arrange one’s life to make contemplation possible. However, the contemplator will exercise these virtues primarily within the scope of his personal life and in the management of his own estate. He may exercise them also on a civic scale as a voter or in discharging some other temporary office, which he deems it prudent for him to accept, but this will not be his central occupation (or else he would be living the life of a statesman).

10. For the tradition that extolls the technai as virtues, see Nederman 2008, 25–26. Aristotle is particularly critical of the banausoi (or, “vulgar craftsmen”) whose lives he sees as improperly focused on work for trade. For instance, see Pol. VIII.2 1337b5–15, where Aristotle writes that “any work, art, or learning should be considered banauson if it renders the body or mind of free people useless for the practices and activities of virtue. That is why the arts that put the body into a worse condition and work done for wages are called banauson, for they debase the mind and deprive it of leisure.” Although the banausoi perform work that is necessary such as farming, building, weaving, and such, they are likened by Aristotle to slaves (Pol. I.12 1259b41, III.5 1278a13).

11. See Pol. III.4 1277b3, III.5 1277b34–36, 1278a7, VII.9 1328b39, VIII.2 1337b8–13.

12. Aristotle’s devaluing of production is also a motivation for his view of women as inferior to men. Reproduction is a plantlike function, and animals are divided into sexes in order to concentrate as much as is possible of this lower activity in the inferior members of the species, thereby freeing their superiors for the higher activities that are distinctive to the species. On this view, females are nature’s equivalent of factory seconds, which have been segregated early in the reproductive process and adapted to perform a lower function.

13. On Aristotle’s God, see especially Met. Λ.6–10.

14. Gross 2018 is a fanciful interview in which “Aristotle’s ghost” makes this point.

15. See Øversveen 2022 for a summary of the revival of Marx’s critique on the basis of alienation. See Deci 1995, 135, 204, for a critique of the way in which society imposes an instrumental motivation on us through capitalism. Other critiques come from egalitarian (e.g., Sandel 2013), feminist (Fraser 2013), and black studies (Robinson 2019) perspectives. For a recent, related defense of the ideal of the contemplative life, see Hitz 2020.

16. See Huemer 1996, §5; 2002; 2019.

17. For example, Rasmussen (2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b) interprets Rand as holding what amounts to the eudaimonist position. Mack (1984, 2003), Badhwar (1999), and Long (2000, 2010, 2016, 2020) interpret her view as ambiguous between a survival-focused consequentialism (which they find implausible) and a value-infused eudaimonism (which they regard as preferable). For reasons that these interpretations are untenable, see Gotthelf 2016, 78–79; Salmieri 2016b, 134–36, and 2019, 168–76.

18. On this distinction in Rand’s early work, see Wright 2005 and Salmieri 2016a, 49–53.

19. The translation is misleading, however. The passage in Hugo’s (1864a) French begins “C’est par le réel qu’on vit; c’est par l’idéal qu’on existe” (397). Throughout the translator used “live” for Hugo’s “existe” and “exist” for Hugo’s “vit,” effectively reversing his terminology. A second nineteenth-century translator who made the same curious choice adds: “Perhaps it should be noted that, in the original, existence is made the higher, more absolute mode of being; e.g., ‘Les animaux vivent, l’homme existe’” (Hugo 1887, 295). That similar distinctions could be made in opposite language shows that there is terminological optionality here (as is generally the case when distinctions are drawn), but the fact that two early English translators chose to reverse Hugo’s words suggests that it was more natural in English to use “living” for (what the latter translator calls) “the higher, more absolute mode of being.” This is the English usage we see in the (later) passages by Wilde, Burnett, and Lewis.

20. These sentences come from what is sometimes called London’s Credo: “I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than that it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to LIVE, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

The Credo seems to have first been published by Ernest J. Hopkins in the San Francisco Bulletin on December 2, 1916. Hopkins describes it as a “striking summary of his personal philosophy” that London enunciated “not two months before his death, to a group of friends,” by whom it was “recalled with emotion” when London died. Hopkins may himself have been among those friends. In an article in the November 23 issue of the same paper, he describes how he had visited London at the Glen Ellen Ranch a week earlier and mentions a prior visit during which London discussed “his view of life.”

Hopkins published London’s Credo as a quotation in a prefatory blurb for the Bulletin’s reprinting of London’s 1905 essay “What Life Means to Me.” In the essay, London writes that many in the upper classes are “not alive” but “merely the unburied dead,” and that, of those who were alive, most were “alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life” (London 2015, 6492). He looks forward to a day when a worker’s revolution will “topple over” the current order “with all its rotten life and unburied dead” and build a “new habitation for mankind” in which “the air that is breathed will be clean, noble, and alive.” In this future society, “man shall progress upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of today, which is the incentive of the stomach” (6493).

The Credo later appeared as an epigraph to Irving Shepard’s introduction to Jack London’s Tales of Adventure, where it is followed by the sentence “Only the brilliant, restless personality who was Jack London could have conceived of such a dynamic and challenging credo as this” (London 1956, vii). Shepard was the son of London’s stepsister and was raised on Glen Ellen Ranch, so he may have had firsthand knowledge of the occasion on which Hopkins reports that London spoke the Credo. However, apart from its opening sentence, no copy of the Credo survives in London’s published work or in his handwriting, so scholars are skeptical about whether and in what form he authored it (cf. Stasz 1999).

21. I quote (here and below) from the first edition of the novel, published in 1936, and provide references to the corresponding text in the revised 1959 edition. On the nature of Rand’s revisions, see Mayhew 2004.

22. On the development in Rand’s thinking on these issues, see Wright 2005 and 2009 and Salmieri 2016a.

23. Timoshenko twice says that he and Tagonov “made a revolution” (WTL36 391, 455; WTL 304, 352). In both cases he speaks of their motivations in exalted spiritual terms and extols the will with which they acted but bemoans the sordid horror of the world that resulted. Tagonov tells Kira that his goal is “to bring [most men] up to my level” (WTL36, 94; WTL 74) and “to raise men to our own level” (WTL36, 408; WTL, 316).

24. This at least is the impression conveyed in Metaphysics A.1, and the passages from the Politics mentioned earlier.

25. On Rand’s theory, see Ghate 2016, 107–14; Rheins 2016, 260–65; Binswanger 2014, 321–61; and Peikoff 1991, 55–72.

26. Rand evoked the same Aristotelian idea (in a different translation) by titling Part I, Chapter IV of Atlas Shrugged “The Immovable Movers.” On the significance of that title, see Ghate 2009 7–9, and on the novel’s use of the immovable mover imagery, see Salmieri 2007, Lecture 1 0:55:00–1:00:30.

27. In the scene where Roark first explains that he seeks clients in order to build, rather than the reverse, he explains that “nothing can be reasonable or beautiful” unless it’s integrated around a single central idea and that the central idea for a building is the solution devised by the architect to a unique problem set by the building’s purpose, site, and materials (Fountainhead 12). The purpose is determined by the client’s needs. Thus Roark needs clients to build not only because he’d lack the material resources to build without them but because their needs create the context for the work itself. Thus he comments: “I need people to give me work. I’m not building mausoleums” (158). Later, explaining the difference between himself and a friend who is a sculptor, he observes: “He can work without clients. I can’t” (399).

28. On the progression of this character’s thoughts, see Salmieri 2005. It is true that early on, he thinks that great inventions (such as the candle) can come from “the science of things,” but the goal of creating such inventions is no part of his motive when he begins his clandestine research.

29. Hardie (1965) introduced this idea into the literature. See Ackrill 1974 and Kenny 1977 for some of the early debate about whether Aristotle regards eudaimonia as an “inclusive” end. And see Lear 2004, 2–3 (esp. 3n2) for a useful summary of the positions taken in this literature.

30. On whether even the ultimate value of life is “intrinsic,” see Letters 561, where Rand (writing in 1961) comments to John Hospers on the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic values. Provisionally accepting the distinction as Hospers (1961, 104–38) draws it, she says that only life is an intrinsic value. But she calls doubt on the distinction. In “What Is Capitalism” (CUI 13–15) from 1965, she rejects the idea of “intrinsic” goods altogether. The sense in which she uses the term here is broader than that in which intrinsic goods (or values) are generally contrasted with instrumental ones, but it includes this sense (though she doesn’t say so in as many words). On this issue, see Salmieri 2016b, 135–36.

31. Notice that Aristotle’s advice is directed specifically to those “who are able to live by their own choice.” This category clearly excludes young children, whose reason is not yet developed, and enslaved persons, who aren’t at liberty to live by their own choice. Aristotle likely also means it to exclude people without enough wealth to live leisured lives, and those people (such as women and “natural slaves”) whom he thought were congenitally incapable of directing their lives by their own reasoning.

32. Reputation and wealth are rejected as the constituents of “living well” a few Bekker pages later (1215a20–33). Honor and reputation approximate to virtue and contemplation, respectively, but these are only valuable assuming those conferring honor and reputation themselves have virtue and practical wisdom; since otherwise the human good is not up to oneself and can easily be taken away by another (1095b28–37).

33. Or, perhaps, Rough Collie’s Life, if what is good for dogs varies with their breed.

34. In a discussion of nonfiction writing (AON 48, 163), Rand discusses how authors are sometimes stultified by a “Platonic” view of writing along the lines of the view from which I’ve differentiated our poet’s task.

35. On the concept of a “central idea” or “core combination” in art and Rand’s concept of “plot-theme” (which is the version of this idea specific to literature), see Fountainhead 12–13; “Basic Principles of Literature” (RM 84); AOF 17; Boeckmann (2007a, 123–24; 2008; 2016, 438–40); and Salmieri 2016a, 55–59.

36. Indeed, even in the Rhetoric and Poetics, which are about literary composition, there is less emphasis on individual creativity than one might expect.

37. On the relation between Romantism’s method of literary integration and its projection of personal values, see Boeckman 2016, 440–47.

38. See “Philosophy and Sense of Life” and “Art and Sense of Life” (both in RM). Rand describes art and romantic love as the “two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life” (RM 21).

39. God’s life qualifies as a paradigm instance of Man’s Life insofar as a man is most of all his reason and God’s life is just the life of reason.

40. In Atlas (517, 633–37, 640–41, 812), Francisco and Dagny sometimes describe their dedication to ideals in terms of their “serving” Galt. Francisco does this thinking of Galt concretely; Dagny initially thinks of an idealized image of a man at the end of the railroad tracks, and then of the inventor of the motor she discovers, but she comes to identify both figures with Galt. Rand’s early notes on what Galt represents for several other characters (Journals 505) also connect him to their ultimate motivations.

41. Thus, at the beginning of Roark’s career, his mentor, Henry Cameron, praises him as follows: “What you’re doing — it’s yours, not mine, I can only teach you to do it better. I can give you the means, but the aim — the aim’s your own. You won’t be a little disciple putting up anemic little things in early Jacobean or late Cameron” (Fountainhead 68).

42. Importantly, for Rand, each of these virtues is a principle — that is, a recognition of a fact that can be formulated abstractly, rather than a characterological disposition that can only be elucidated by reference to how paradigmatically virtuous individuals would behave in various situations. The respective facts recognized by independence and integrity are (1) that “nothing can help you escape” “the responsibility of judgment” and (2) that “you cannot fake your own consciousness” (Atlas 1019, cf. VOS 28). For elaboration, see Peikoff 1991, 251–67; Gotthelf 2016, 92–94; and Smith 2006, 106–13, 176–83.

43. See de Liège 2023 for an argument that Foot’s framework cannot realize this promise.

44. In this, these ethicists are following an interpretation advanced most influentially by John McDowell (1980 and 1998).

45. For instance, Broadie (1991, 212) argues that it is a mistake to think the phronimos model offers us an “explicit, comprehensive, substantial vision” of the human good. Moss (2011) argues that characterological virtues are wholly nonintellectual.

46. Moosavi (2019) voices this concern. To foreclose it, she suggests that we adopt an irreducibly normative understanding of human biological functioning, which conception would include much of what we antecedently suppose to be the content of ethics.

47. In Atlas Shrugged, Francisco D’Anconia tells Dagny Taggart: “Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong” (199). Rand’s advice to “check one’s premises” was a recurring appeal to epistemic integration that she would offer in discussions with friends and students.

48. For discussion of them, see Gotthelf 2016, 81–96; Smith 2006; and Peikoff 1991, 1998.

49. On promiscuity, see Rand Atlas 489–91. On homosexuality, see Lewis and Salmieri 2016, 396n87 and the sources cited therein.

50. Some of these issues concerning character are explored by Neera Badhwar and Ben Bayer in their chapters in this volume.