The possibility of altruism as presented by Ayn Rand presents a difficult challenge even for the intellectuals she refers to. In fact Ayn Rand states in her interview with Mike Wallace; “Aristotle is the only philosopher who ever influenced me”. When we think about this is quite the statement. Aristotle was born in and died in the 3rd century B.C. Two thousand years had passed, give or take, before Ayn Rand was born (in Russia, in 1905) and she is asking us to accept that she found nothing else that could influence her in the intervening time period?
I suppose this tells us if nothing else that for Ayn Rand the altruistic mind is a pretty stubborn one and spartan at that. It is hard to see how Ayn Rand's version of altruism can really be possible, as what she proposes is something of a contradiction in terms, a kind of selflessness for selfish reasons. Selflessness for selfless reasons is characterized as being stupid at best, and at worst as evil, and we can see that idea repeated in the quotation at the start
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She turns the normal understanding of Judeo – Christian or even humanitarian principles on its head when she says that “man has a moral right to happiness” and that “virtue is a currency” When we wonder what this approach will do to our moral obligations to other human beings, the conclusion is that it would result in an every man for himself situation where no consideration is given to the rights of other people and everyone is simply concerned with their own happiness and don't really think about how that impacts on the happiness of other people. I can't really see how that would work without ending in conflict and everyone being unhappy. That is not to say that there is no value to Ayn Rand's ideas. She is probably right about a lot of things because you can certainly go too far the other way and have some people impacting on the happiness of others because they think there is an obligation on those people to sacrifice their own happiness for someone