The Choice to Live

"The Choice To Live" by Dennis C. Hardin

“The whole process of living,” states Ayn Rand, “consists of the achievement of values.”1 Moral values, in particular, consist of those specific things (the three basic ones being reason, purpose, self-esteem) which man must choose to pursue to sustain the life proper to a rational being. To live by the principles required to achieve these values is to earn the medal of moral virtue.

The pursuit of such particular values, however, presupposes an ultimate value: Life. Since the honoring of this ultimate value is also an act of choice, it has become a significant point of contention among Objectivists as to whether this ultimate act of choice is itself something for which one can be judged. Since morality—the rules for successful living—only applies once the choice to live has been made, how, it is asked, can one be judged for this choice? Logically, the argument continues, one can only be held accountable if one, in effect, buys into the game. Those who opt out of life should properly be exempt from condemnation for such forfeiture.

To begin with, we need to ask: what does the ‘choice to live’ entail? I would argue that it entails two essential aspects: (1) the recognition that one’s life is of value, and (2) the willingness to do whatever is required to achieve that value.

For the purposes of this article, let us identify the argument under discussion as the ‘pro-choice’ viewpoint, and its counter-argument—that the premoral commitment to life is itself a choice subject to praise or condemnation—as that of ‘pro-life.’

Advocates on either side of this argument acknowledge that there are specific circumstances, such as terminal illness or political slavery, where one might legitimately conclude that the value of one’s life cannot be properly enjoyed and that, therefore, suicide may be contextually valid. The disagreement pertains to the validity of the option to perish given a normal state of health and reasonable external potential for achieving a successful life.

A secondary issue directly related to this question is the role of morality in human life. In Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff describes morality as “man’s motive power.”2 But if morality is simply a means to the end of successful living, the pro-choice argument goes, it is rationalism to elevate moral principles to the status of a primary motivating factor in one’s choices and actions. This is, say the proponents of this view, context-dropping. Conformity to principle can never be invoked as a direct source of motivation. Our motivation must always come, not from the principles, but from their source: our passion to live.

While those who espouse the pro-choice view are asking important questions that are much deserving of attention, the fact remains that their position has problematic implications for Objectivism. By leaving open the subjective possibility that a given individual may legitimately treat his own life as of no value, direct damage is done to the ‘is-ought” connection between the metaphysical facts of man’s nature and what this portends for what he ought to do.

Peikoff states that Objectivism “holds that facts—certain definite facts—do lead logically to values. What ‘ought to be’ can be validated objectively.”3 And once validated in this way, what ‘ought to be’ is what man should do. To hold that the category of what ‘ought to be’ for man includes the option to self-destruct, leaves the entire edifice of the Objectivist ethics dependent on the whim of the individual, and throws it into the realm of the arbitrary.

Morality is a specific application of the Objectivist value theory to the problem of human survival. Values are the key to the survival of all living things, human or otherwise. “An organism’s life is its standard of value,” states Rand. “That which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.”4 Only then does she go on to say (quoting her own fictional hero, John Galt): “Man has to be man—by choice; he has to hold his life as a value—by choice; he has to learn to sustain it—by choice; He has to discover the values it requires and practice its virtues—by choice. A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality…”5

“The standard of value of the Objectivist ethics [she adds]—the standard by which one judges what is good or evil—is man’s life…”6

Since morality amounts to the mechanics of implementing the value of life, any choice that “preceded” such implementation would not, plainly, lend itself to evaluation as moral or immoral. Such a choice could, however, be evaluated as good or evil by the more fundamental standard of the Objectivist ethics: man’s life. Evil is the more fundamental concept, immoral the derivative concept. Given Rand’s statements above, the choice to reject life would be condemned as evil rather than immoral.

Indeed, the reason the term immoral would not apply is because the outright rejection of life as such would not entail any detailed analysis by reference to derivative principles—it is evil on its face. Morality consists of detailed rules by which one can assess the extent to which one’s behavior is consistent with the requirements of life. The direct, immediate choice of life or death, good or evil, has no need of complex evaluation. The choice of life is good; the choice of death, evil. At this level of evaluation, ethics is pointless.

Morality tells us which choice we are making, by direct or indirect consequence, when we choose productivity over theft, or honesty over deceit. It applies on the level of concretes and details. Direct decisions for or against life do not require such a guide. They are, nonetheless, subject to evaluation as good or evil by the same standard.

In her article, “Causality versus Duty,” Ayn Rand makes the statement that “to live is [man’s] basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.”7 The advocates of the view that the choice to live or not is somehow beyond judgment interpret this passage to mean that Objectivism should properly only apply its evaluative criteria to those who satisfy her precondition. But in no way is this implied by Rand, because, as already indicated, the Objectivist ethics is an application and development of the fundamental standard of good and evil. Ethics has no relevance to the direct acceptance or rejection of life as such, which can be evaluated without reference to derivative rules and principles.

In the passage cited, Ayn Rand is simply stating that if one, in effect, chooses goodness (i.e., life), then this guide is needed and should be followed. If evil and death are your choice, you don’t need a guide. They will find you in due time. There is no basis for claiming, as the pro-choice advocates seem to, that the existence of human volition in any way alters the good or evil represented by the two alternatives.

Further, to the extent to which a man chooses not to follow the guide that ethics gives him, he is acting as though he had chosen evil in the first place: he is acting as though he had no need of a guide. From the Objectivist perspective, when a man chooses to be moral, he is in that act choosing life; when he chooses immorality, he is, consciously or unconsciously, choosing death.

In view of the degree of the rampant discord on this issue, one has to wonder if, when the issue is brought up, one is hearing the real question. Given the crucial importance of the standard of life for the Objectivist ethics, it is hard to see why so many questions would be raised about the goodness or evil of the choice to live, in itself. It seems a likely hypothesis that some other question may well be at the root of this controversy. I will return to this issue.

Another aspect of the pro-choice argument is that it seems to rely heavily on a totally unrealistic view of what is really going on psychologically. The suggestion seems to be that this is a choice one makes at some early stage and from that day forward holds to obediently as if it were a self-imposed, binding, lifetime contract. Taking into account the second half of the breakdown described earlier, the decision to forfeit one’s life would need to be made by an omniscient infant with the ability to weigh the alternative of dying against the price of the effort put forth and suffering endured across a lifetime.

Since we do not happen to be omniscient, either as infants or at any other time in our lives, what is it, exactly, that does happen? To get an idea of how Ayn Rand would answer this question, consider this additional quote from “The Objectivist Ethics”:

“Psychologically, the choice ‘to think or not’ is the choice ‘to focus or not.’ Existentially, the choice ‘to focus or not’ is the choice ‘to be conscious or not.’ Metaphysically, the choice ‘to be conscious or not’ is the choice of life or death.”8 This implies that, for Ayn Rand, the choice to live is one that is made and reaffirmed constantly, in any hour or moment of one’s life, as one chooses to be aware on the human level, or to default on that responsibility.

In “Philosophy and Sense of Life,” Rand argues that a child first deals with issues of life and death in terms of what she calls ‘metaphysical value-judgments’—emotional evaluations of what the child sees as being ‘important’—as he develops the preconceptual equivalent of metaphysics, a “sense of life.” These judgments involve the answers to such questions as “whether the universe is knowable or not, whether man has the power of choice or not, whether he can achieve his goals in life or not. The answers to such questions are ‘metaphysical value-judgments,’ since they form the base of ethics.”9

One of the things that a rational, mentally active child will naturally come to see as important is, of course, his own life:

“ ‘It is important to understand things’—‘It is important to obey my parents’—‘It is important to act on my own’—‘It is important to please other people’—‘It is important to fight for what I want’—‘It is important not to make enemies’—‘My life is important’—‘Who am I to stick my neck out?’ Man is a being of self-made soul—and it is of such conclusions that the stuff of his soul is made.”10

“To the extent to which a man is mentally active, i.e., motivated by the desire to know, to understand, his mind works as the programmer of his emotional computer—and his sense of life develops into a bright counterpart of a rational philosophy.”11 There will always be vast differences of degree, of course, but the principle involved is, in effect, the more he strives to focus and to be aware, the greater the natural intensity the child will come to attach to his own life.

Such is the reality of how the choice to live or not is made—in the choice to think, to focus, to be aware—whether one is a child, a teenager or an adult. Thus, the more fundamental choice of life or death is actually made in the form of an action that is, clearly, subject to moral evaluation—namely, the choice to think or to evade that responsibility.

In explaining her theory of the nature of sense of life, Rand states that the origin of the particular value-judgments a child makes and the emotions attached to each “lies in an individual’s view of himself and his own existence.”12 The source of the emotional impact of sense of life—like its adult counterpart, morality—derives from what Rand describes as the “enormously powerful integrating mechanism of man’s consciousness.”13

“The transition from guidance by sense of life to guidance by conscious philosophy takes many forms.”14 Properly, the emotional power of sense of life is, as an adult, translated into an explicit philosophy—including ethics—and the two work in harmony, since the one never actually replaces the other. With or without such harmony, however, sense of life and ethics both play the role of powerful motivators within the human mind.

And this is where the criticism of morality as a prime source of human motivation goes wrong. The point is not whether morality should serve the role of prime motivator, but that it does, and irrevocably so. In her article on “Leading A Rational Life in an irrational Society,” Ayn Rand states that “Moral values are the motive power of a man’s actions.”15 By this, Rand is not implying that moral rules acquire some sort of intrinsic importance, independent of the life they are supposed to serve. Rather, she means that morality has a crucial psychological-emotional role to play in human action.

The motivating power of morality was, largely, Ayn Rand’s explanation for the present state of the world. In choosing altruism as his ethical guide, man has turned the power of morality against himself. To achieve the end of human happiness, morality must serve the goal of life. This is in the nature of the biological utility of a code of morality for man. One can, however, set the mechanism against life, and turn idealism into a self-destructive path.

Man’s unique awareness of his own mortality may be directly related to the power of morality over human behavior. This writer would argue that morality serves as the form in which man experiences the significance of his daily choices for the alternative of life or death—that such is the source of its influence on mankind throughout human history. It is not only a means to the end of life but also an inestimably powerful motivational tool for getting there.

If questioning the good or evil inherent in the choice to live does not seem plausible, given Rand’s clearly enunciated standard, perhaps another question is at the root of all this confusion, even to the point of eluding some Objectivists that it is there at all. Consider a somewhat different phrasing of the same basic question: ‘Why should one live?’

In The Psychology of Self-Esteem, Nathaniel Branden states that “the value of life is not to be justified by a value beyond itself; to demand such justification--to ask: why should man choose to live?—is to have dropped the meaning, context and source of one’s concepts. ‘Should’ is a concept that can have no intelligible meaning, if divorced from the concept and value of life.”16

But there are two possible perspectives to that question, and Branden has really addressed only one of them. The fact that one can grasp, theoretically, that life cannot be subject to evaluation by any other standard, must not be confused with the very different internal perspective of each living individual. In the act of becoming fully conscious on the human level, one is making the choice to hold one’s life as one’s own personal standard of value, and one is meeting the requirements described before for ‘choosing to live’: acknowledging the value of one’s life and acting to achieve it.

So the same question can be asked a different way, and with complete legitimacy: Why should I live? Since effort is required to produce the values required for survival, why do it? Such an internal perspective is valid in a way that the theoretical is not, because the internal perspective is, tacitly, assumed for the purposes of the theoretical. Value theorists begin with the assumption that ‘the living like living.’ Problems arise when they proceed to analyze ‘living’ in the abstract, while paying scant attention to the experience of being alive.

Peikoff, the foremost advocate of the pro-life perspective, implies in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand that the logical basis of the choice to live consists of the obligation of things in reality to remain in it.17 This is, however, inconsistent with Peikoff’s willingnness to make exception for those suffering under tyranny or from painful disease. An obligation to sustain one’s existence for the sake of existence would require that this be done regardless of one’s internal experience of existence as positive or negative. But no value is intrinsic, including life. Peikoff’s willingness to allow for unfortunate exceptions implies that there is another relevant criterion—namely, that one’s experience of life be profoundly positive.

The perspective ignored by Peikoff and many other commentators on various aspects of this issue is the internal one: the immediate, tacit awareness of life as the supreme value, validated through direct experience and confirmed by observation of others. That is the only answer to the question: Why should I live? If I am alive, and I am not ravaged by disease or bound in political chains, I am acutely aware of the value of being alive. It is an indisputable fact, but also a fact which cannot be “proven” by arranging a series of hierarchically dependent premises leading to this as the conclusion.

But though, like an axiom, it cannot be proven, there is an objective fact each of us can point to which will establish its truth: our internal experience of being alive. The act of pointing internally no more renders this a subjective judgment than is the entire epistemological category of emotions and introspective concepts inherently subjective. Reality simply leaves us no other means of verification other than introspection and corroboration.

This, however, only addresses the first of the two aspects of the choice to live discussed earlier—one’s recognition of the value of life. Given a normal state of biological health, this is simply not open to reasoned debate. On a moment’s reflection and simple honesty, the deliberation either ends or dissipates into nonsense. It is the second aspect—the willingness to pay the price of achieving the value of one’s life—which the pro-choice advocates appear to be asking us to leave to the whim of the individual. If a man decides he has neither the strength nor the courage to live, according to the pro-choice perspective, he should be beyond criticism by those who do.

Yet it is precisely effort and courage which are the essence of moral responsibility. Those who default are not to be exonerated for their weakness and cowardice. They do not earn innocence by their candor. They are evil. It is that simple.

It may be the abstract philosopher’s natural fear of the introspective question that makes him fall back on the theoretical one—and get lost in so doing. But if one sidesteps the internal experience of life as good, one is left with either Peikoff’s intrinsicism or a borderline subjectivism, tied to a whim—a viewpoint which faults a man for an isolated fraction of the rules, but sanctions with its silence the man who would cast his entire life into the garbage pail.

The argument could be made that, in holding individuals accountable for the “evil” of choosing death over life, an important distinction between two senses of the word “evil” is being blurred. Certain things which are destructive to life—such as earthquakes—can be “evil,” without implying culpability on the part of its victims. In general, for evil to justify condemnation, the responsibility of the acting agent must be demonstrated, and this only occurs where evil is coextensive with immorality.

The specific evaluation of immorality has already been shown to be inapplicable here. And since any given individual’s awareness of the value of life cannot be proven to the satisfaction of doubters, the pro-choice argument implies, culpability at the level of the fundamental choice to live cannot be warranted.

This argument, however, fails on two levels. The first is that, as indicated above, the demand for proof in this context is totally invalid and, in itself, nonobjective. The second is that, having granted legitimacy to the premise that the value of life is somehow subjective (i.e., left to the option of the individual), there is no way to reinject objectivity into the ethical equation. All effort, all achievement, all virtue, are reduced to the metaphysical equivalent of a coin-flip.

The laudable intent of Objectivists subscribing to the pro-choice view may well be, in part, that of liberating the moral agent from responsibility for what cannot be ‘objectively established.’ Once the end is established, they would argue, one can show a direct causal link to that which is required to achieve it, and we can take the guesswork out of the deal. In fact, however, what is set free is morality from objectivity. Further, pro-choice advocates are engaging in the exact same rationalism as those metaphysical idealists at the turn of the century who insisted on “proof” of existence. In the spirit of G.E. Moore holding up two hands, the best one can give to such an advocate is: Pause a moment, and open your eyes to what is staring you in the face.

Without the appeal to internal experience, one has no way of answering the personal perspective on the question—Why should one live? The answer is neither intrinsicism nor subjectivism but two simple words: Look within.

Yes, the choice to live is a crucially important choice, but it is not a choice between two neutral alternatives. All other things being equal, it is a choice between good and evil. The choice to live is, further, the rational choice—the only one in keeping with human nature.

When this choice becomes integrated with a pro-life morality, man places his emotions in the service of his life and happiness, and the result is not a stoical, joyless rigidity, but a profoundly passionate, egoistic idealism.



Footnotes:
1. Ayn Rand, The PLAYBOY Interview
2. Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (new York, Dutton, 1991), p. 284.
3. Ibid., p. 207.
4. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet Books, 1964), p.17.
5. Ibid., p. 23.
6. Ibid.
7. Ayn Rand, “Causality vs. Duty,” in Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: Signet Books, 1984), p.99.
8. Ibid., “The Objectivist Ethics,” p. 21.
9. Ayn Rand, “Philosophy and Sense of Life,” in The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Signet Books, 1971), p. 28.
10. Ibid., p. 28.
11. Ibid., p. 26.
12. Ibid., p. 28.
13. Ibid., p. 27.
14. Ibid., p. 29.
15. Ayn Rand, “How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?,” in The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet Books, 1964), p. 73.
16. Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), p. 236.
17. Peikoff, ibid., pp. 211-212.

Dennis C. Hardin has a Ph.D. in psychology and is a licensed psychotherapist in California. From 1986 to 1995, he ran a discussion group in Los Angeles, the Forum for the New Intellectual.

NOTE: This article was first published in the December, 1992 edition of Full Context, the newsletter of the Objectivist Club of Michigan.