Objectivism 101

Lesson 5: Living in Society

The egoist in society (part 2)

The trader principle states how we should deal with people - that we should not feel a moral obligation to give what is unowned. The principle of benevolence states that when our interest coincide, we should cooperate with other people.
But how should we act if we are confronted with hostile interests ?

This leads us to the final principle, the non-initiation of force.

Force is a denial of reason. Using the sword or the gun nullifies all thinking - man's intelligence and rationality is impotent when one's brain has been blown up. As I mentioned before, force is also the consequence of rejecting reason. If we cannot convince each other by objective reasoning, the only option left is violence - either to threaten, or to use the force of arms.
The initiation of war is the ultimate example of this, and it is not a coincidence that most wars involve emotion-based issues such as religion and patriotism. No one has ever initiated war for rational reasons.

This is not to say that self-defense is forbidden. The principle does not condemn defensive retaliation, but rather the initiation of force. You are not morally justified to hold someone at gunpoint to relieve him of his money, but you are morally justified to defend yourself against such aggression with violence.

By either believing in an afterlife, or eschewing the path of rational value exchange, irrational moral systems have erected force - either by the sword, by prison, by intellectual intimidation, or other means - as the standard of value.

Objectivism rejects force as an anti-reason, anti-man way of dealing with each other. For more information on the principle of non-initiation of force, see p318-320 in O:PAR.

Justice is a virtue in Objectivist ethics, as we have seen. Because we need to understand who can be valuable to us and who is a destroyer, as the trader principle indicates to us, we need to judge men's character, ideas and conduct. As Rand said, "judge, and be prepared to be judged".

Judging actions consists simply of using value-judgments on the other person's actions. Judging character is much the same way, as a generalized prediction of that person's behavior.

But judging someone's ideas is much more complicated. Most people do not hold false ideas out of sheer irrationality, but simply do not understand the issues at hand, or simply believe out of habit. By extension, some people may think they are doing a good thing, but are hurting others.

This is where the concepts of evasion and tolerance come in. We will study these concepts in the next section.

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