Comments Elsewhere

Richard,

Sorry it’s taken me a while to come back to this.

As a side note, the book that the anonymous poster is quoting from is by Leonard Peikoff, not by Ayn Rand. (It’s an attempt at a comprehensive, exegetical presentation of Rand’s philosophical thought.) As far as I know it doesn’t particularly misrepresent Rand’s own view on this point, but the stuff quoted from OPAR should be attributed to Peikoff, not directly to Rand.

Anyway.

I know that you’ve addressed the Nozickian line of argument before. But I don’t think you’ve understood Nozick’s point well enough to mount a successful critique of it. As I tried (probably unclearly) to stress in my comments above, the issue here isn’t that utilitarian calculators think they are pro-individual and Nozickian individualists just ignore it. The issue is that Nozickian individualists have a substantive disagreement with utilitarians over what constitutes respecting an individual person. The disagreement has to do with whether respecting individual people has mainly to do with maximizing pleasure (or happiness or whatever) for her, or whether it has mainly to do with respecting her wishes.

If you’re working on the latter notion, then it makes perfect sense to suggest that there’s a pretty strong link between individualism and a non-instrumentalist account of rights. Violating the rights of one individual person—even if it, in some sense or another, serves some other individual person’s “interests,” will be seen as treating the victim as less than an individual person with a life of her own, as a mere tool or plaything for others’ use. If you think that respecting individuals is mainly about respecting their wishes rather than promoting their interests, then the standard sacrifice cases are pretty easily understood as failures to be appropriately individualistic in your moral deliberations.

Now, whether it’s appropriate to label this particular failure-to-be-appropriately-individualistic as “collectivism” is a separate question. Maybe it’s not; in that case the question is not individualism as against collectivism but rather respect for individual people as against willingness to sacrifice one individual people for one or more other individual people. (I’m tempted to draw the distinction in terms of “individualism” as against “altruism,” but on balance I think that would be an unhappy way of putting it, Ayn Rand’s bluster notwithstanding.)

But I don’t think the book is shut on calling it “collectivism,” either—because I think that the sort of “respect” for individual people that utilitarianism claims to offer is, in an important sense, dehumanizing and anonymizing. Whether I’m right about that would take us pretty far afield from the discussion; but again, I think that at least the position is more sophisticated than you’re giving it credit for.

As for my remarks under (ii), I agree that there is a debate to be had about whether or not a given moral agent ought to incorporate considerations about her own definite individuality as a moral agent into her moral deliberation. But I think you’ve mischaracterized the terrain of the debate, as I remarked above; it’s not that the position I sketched requires you to think only about your own definite individuality when making moral decisions, but rather that utilitarianism systematically rules out thinking about such things at all. And yeah, that does have something to do with individualism as against collectivism. And I think your suggestion that utilitarian calculation subordinates considerations about the moral agent’s definite individuality to generic concerns for “the individual” unintentionally makes my point for me.