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Ethics and Emergencies

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Submitted By mchjr14
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Ayn Rand was a prolific and very popular author. Her engaging philosophy has captured the minds of many students and professionals. Because Rand has written both fiction and philosophical essays, her influence has been felt in very different ways. For some she has provided an inspiring vision of a society of liberty and individualism through her fiction, particularly Atlas Shrugged. For others she has provided the main thrust of a philosophical justification for the advocacy of liberty and individualism. (1) Many readers are shocked to find a twentieth-century author who advocates moral absolutes with the vigor Rand does. She stands in sharp contrast to our culture of relativism. She opposes the ethical nihilist. She ridicules the subjectivist.
According to Rand, altruism is found in various forms. The mystic theory of ethics, or any ethics based upon alleged revelation from God, offers humans meaning only beyond this life. As such, it is an ethics of death. The social theory of ethics locates the value of human life in society or the collective. As such, it is an ethics of death for the individual. The "subjectivist theory of ethics" is really a negation of ethics. It can supply no real guidance for life, and is the ethics of death. Altruism, in whatever form, is the morality of the past. It has lead humans only toward death rather than promoting life. What we need to live is not a return to this old morality, which is essentially irrational, but to discover a rational ethics and chose to adopt it and live by it. There are certain preconditions for values to exist: one precondition is the existence of alternatives; the other precondition is the ability to choose. But there is a primary precondition to values that cannot be overlooked: life. Non-living entities do not have values, for they do not have life, neither do they have rationality or consciousness or

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