The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

Rand's central argument is that selfishness—properly understood as concern with one's own interests—is a virtue, and that altruism, the doctrine that self-sacrifice is moral, is incompatible with man's nature as a rational being. The book's lead essay, "The Objectivist Ethics," grounds this claim in the choice to live: man must survive by his own mind and effort, so a code of values is necessary for survival, and the standard of moral judgment is the requirements of human life. From this, Rand derives rationality, independence, productivity, integrity, honesty, justice, and pride as cardinal virtues.

The book introduced Rand's full statement of Objectivist ethics, including her definition of 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." It also solidified the concept of rational egoism as distinct from conventional selfishness: Rand acknowledged that the word "selfishness" was used as a synonym for evil but insisted her usage was precise and consistent with "concern with one's own interests" [citation:3]. She rejected both sacrificing others to oneself and sacrificing oneself to others as forms of selflessness [citation:3].

Rand explicitly rejects the popular conflation of selfishness with predation or greed. She argues that the common image—"a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends"—is not selfishness but a form of selflessness, because it involves sacrificing others rather than pursuing rational values [citation:3]. Her concept of selfishness means "concern with one's own interests" and does not include a moral evaluation; the task of ethics is to determine what one's actual interests are. Rand holds that a rational egoist has no reason to exploit others, because self-esteem derives from productive achievement, not from seizing what others produce.

The book contains 19 essays, 14 by Rand and five by Nathaniel Branden, plus an introduction by Rand. Most essays originally appeared in The Objectivist Newsletter, which Rand and Branden launched in 1962. The exception is the first essay, "The Objectivist Ethics," which Rand delivered as a paper at the University of Wisconsin symposium on "Ethics in Our Time" in 1961 [citation:8][citation:12]. Branden's essays, including "Counterfeit Individualism" and "The Psychology of Pleasure," present a more psychology-focused view of morality [citation:8].

The book is a philosophical elaboration of the ethical themes dramatized in Rand's fiction. The essay "The Objectivist Ethics" explicitly references John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged, using his statement that every individual has a basic moral choice between thinking and non-thinking as the foundation for her discussion of volition [citation:5]. Rand wrote that the nonfiction essays were intended to provide the philosophical grounding for the abstractions presented in the novels, making explicit the ethics that her fictional heroes embody through their actions.

Contemporary reviews were mixed. A review in The Review of Metaphysics (1967) found the essays readable but argued that Rand's ethics "collapses when it is applied to a populous society whose environment is either agriculturally poor or highly mechanized," because under such conditions, interests would necessarily conflict [citation:16]. Rand herself was notoriously dismissive of reviews, saying she expected "superlatives, or nothing" and wanted praise that would "rave about the right things, not merely pay compliments" [citation:4]. Despite critical dismissal, the book became one of her best-selling nonfiction works, selling over 400,000 copies in its first four months [citation:18].