Ayn Rand

I feel that an unfortunate number of people my generation has been unduly influenced by Ayn Rand, who wrote The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Wikipedia notes that "her ideas have attracted both enthusiastic admiration and scathing denunciation." I will confess, I am of the latter party.

Her ethical stance is what bothers me the most. She claims, "Man - every man - is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others...The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life." In objectivism, the ideal person is completely and fundamentally selfish; you do only what makes you happy. She considers happiness a way of measuring how good you are doing at life; it's a barometer the body evolved to determine how successful one is. She does protect her philosophy against hedonism; it is instead rational egoism.

The problem is that objectivism rejects as immoral any action taken for some ultimate purpose external to oneself; it denies altruism. You cannot justify your existence by service to others. There are interpretations which argue that mutual helpfulness and mutual aid between human beings is compatible with objectivism. But still, I find it very difficult to reconcile objectivist ethics with being a doctor. As a physician, your primary aims are those of your patient, not those of yourself. Your role is completely selfless; you should not exploit patients for your own gain. Modern medical ethics centers itself around values like beneficence, autonomy, non-maleficence, and justice. These are simply not compatible with objectivist ideas. Ayn Rand may be a moving writer. But her philosophy, as such, should not be blindly adopted, especially in the context of medicine.