In a sense, my discussion of PDism up to this point has been largely concerned with what I think [are] side issues. I have gone into them at length because they were the issues that my most enthusiastic critics were pressing, and I did not want to seem to be running away from the argument. But I believe that the difficulties with PDism are more fundamental.

Let all the claims of the PDists be granted. Let us suppose that, in response to the pressures of the struggle for survival, we have developed (or our ancestors have developed) minds that think usefully, and therefore minds competent to think rationally and accurately, about all aspects of reality whatever. There remains a problem. According to PDism, we do not think certain thoughts because they are true, or reason in certain ways because they are valid or rational. We think that way because it is useful to do so. Truth is a bonus, an afterthought. Truth is not a free-born citizen of the realm of our minds, but a resident alien, permitted to remain only as long as her cousin, Utility, continues to sponsor her. Our confidence that they will continue to remain on good terms does not alter the difference in their status.

The PDist approach fails in that it seeks to reverse cause and effect. [26] The PDist observes that rationality is in fact conducive to survival. [27] He then tries to make survival value the criterion, the justification, and the cause of rationality. It is the same trap that ensnared some of the early defenders of capitalism, such as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. [28] They saws that laissez-faire benefits not only the capitalist but also his neighbors. They undertook to defend capitalism on utilitarian grounds. Presumably they meant well. But they were not the sort of friends, nor their writings the sort of defense, that capitalism needs or deserves. And PDism is not the sort of defense that man’s mind needs or deserves.

The PDist, in short, is a radical pragmatist. [29] He agrees with William James:

“The true,” to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as “the right” is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. [30]

Professor Peikoff (an Objectivist spokesman, from whom we shall hear more later) thinks this position incompatible with Objectivism. [31] So do I.

(07h) PDism is Altruist and Racist

Perhaps the issue is clearest when stated in terms of one aspect of reason: making moral judgements. I take it as agreed that moral judgements are judgements about an objective reality, and that our minds are suitable for making moral judgements. [32] The PDist says that they have become suitable by Natural Selection, in that beings with sound moral judgements are more likely than others to survive. Now in any situation with alternatives, we define the Darwinian choice to be the one most favorable to the biological propagation of the chooser’s genes. We ask whether the correct moral choice and the Darwinian choice are always identical. The PDist must maintain that they are, or that if the moral choice is ever different, the human mind is not suited to identifying it in that case. Is this conclusion compatible with Objectivism?

A number of books have appeared recently [33] emphasizing the fact that in evolutionary theory, “survival of the fittest” must mean not survival of the fittest individual (in most species, no individual, regardless of fitness, survives more than a few decades, an insignificant interval on an evolutionary scale) but survival of the fittest gene. They discuss the sort of behavior that it is to the advantage of a gene to encourage in an individual carrying it. For example, since my brother carries, on the average, half of the same genes I do, it is Darwinian behavior (conducive to the maximum propagation of my genes) for me to save his life if an only if the chance of losing my life is less than half the chance of saving his. The same odds apply to a sister, a parent, or an offspring, while with a cousin they are reduced to one-eighth. The Darwinian commandment is, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself if and only if thy neighbor is thine identical twin!” Of course, I must also take into account the number of (additional) children that I and a candidate for rescue respectively are likely to have if surviving. A kinsman known to be sterile is entitled to no consideration whatever, unless his future usefulness to the family, as baby-sitter, food-provider, or the like, justifies keeping him around.

The subject is interesting in its own right, and I suggest that the reader have a go at at least one book on it. The Selfish Gene is short, cheap, and readable. In the reading, conflicts will be obvious in particular cases between the Darwinian ethic and the Objectivist ethic. The authors themselves often pause to assure the reader that they do not approve the behavior they are describing. But particular cases are not the heart of the difficulty.

The problem is not whether we can always analyze particular choices in terms of the effect on the propagation of our genes, in such a way as to show that the Darwinian choice coincides with the Objectivist choice this time. The problem is that the two approaches are incompatible by nature.

Natural Selection values the individual, so to speak, only as a custodian of genetic material. By Darwinian standards, the salmon becomes irrelevant once it has finished spawning, and indeed, when an animal ceases to contribute to the next generation as reproducer, or baby-tender, or repository of tribal wisdom, it normally dies. Now very possibly a man’s failure to curl up and die the minute his children leave home can be justified on PDist grounds. The point is that the justification will be in terms of his continued contribution to the survival of his family. He is strictly a means to an end. So, ultimately, is every individual. And this is not an Objectivist view. Dr. Branden explicitly denies that morality is reducible to preserving one’s life at all costs. [34] What would he say to the view that it reduces to preserving one’s chromosomes at all costs?

(07i) The Real Point of Rationality

As we have seen, to say that men have rational minds in order to survive is analogous to saying that firemen wear red suspenders to hold their pants up. Gray suspenders hold up pants just as well as red ones; and similarly, reflex (or systematic error) will promote survival just as effectively as knowledge. Again, most pants are in fact held up by some means other than red suspenders; and similarly, most organisms do in fact survive by means other than reason. But there is a point where the parallel breaks down. Suppose that red suspenders had the unique property of sometimes working against their proper function. Suppose that sometimes, unlike belts and other suspenders, they acted to pull the pants down rather than up. This would make the answer, “To hold their pants up,” even more unreasonable than it already is. But the mind is unique among tools of survival in that it does not always automatically act to promote survival. A man’s genes presumably determine that he will possess the faculty of reason. But you cannot, by Natural Selection or any other way, breed a race of men whose genes determine that they will always, or usually, freely choose to think clearly. You cannot determine anyone to do anything freely. [35] Man, the only species capable of rationality, is also the only species capable of irrationality, of working against his own survival. [36] And thus PDism accomplishes the not-so-easy task of making the Red Suspender Fallacy look reasonable.

If firemen do in fact wear red suspenders rather than gray ones, the reason must be quite different from the given one. Perhaps it is a matter of higher visibility under certain circumstances, but I suspect that it is a matter of aesthetics, of what looks good for inspections and parades, of custom and tradition, of pride, and ultimately of free will. They wear red suspenders because they want to. In short, the reasons lie not in physics, but in human nature.

What distinguishes men from cockroaches, Galapagos turtles, and bristle-cone pines is not that we are better equipped to survive than they, or that we surpass them in numbers, or longevity of the species or the individual, but that we have a certain kind of existence — a conscious, rational existence. Men’s minds function (to use Aristotle’s distinction, [37] not to enable men to live, but en enable them to live well.

But this is Aristotle’s distinction, not Nature’s. Natural Selection is not concerned with whether an organism lives well, or nobly, or virtuously, or rationally, or happily, or in the manner appropriate to its nature, or even for a long time. The only question a population geneticist, in his professional capacity, would ask about Aristotle is, “How many living descendants does he have?” And as Psychological Darwinist would say that Aristotle’s mind, if any, existed in order to give him (or rather, his genes) survival, and that if it also gave him truth, this was a pleasant by-product, but not really relevant.

Anyone who accepts Psychological Darwinism is saying in effect:

The only important, the only significant characteristic of true thoughts, as opposed to false ones, is that they lead to actions that are conducive to survival. A monkey that gets out of the way of a tiger, a monkey that survives, has passed the only intelligence test that matters. As for the suggestion that his thoughts may be erroneous even though his actions are useful, such worries are either meaningless or irrelevant.

To this I reply in the words of Dr. Branden, already quoted:

When a person puts forth a doctrine which amounts to the assertion either that he is not conscious or that it makes no difference to him (and should make no difference to others) whether he is conscious or not — the irresistible temptation is to agree with him.

Objection:
  The preceding discussion identifies the theory of evolution with one particular hypothesis (Natural Selection) about the mechanism of evolution. Anyone who really wishes to understand how consciousness has evolved ought to begin by reading The Organization of Behavior, by D.O. Hebb, The Sensory Order, by F.A. Hayek, and the first two volumes of Mind: An Essay in Human Feeling, by Suzanne K. Langer. These, of course, only scratch the surface.

Reply:
  If (as the critic seems to suggest) reading the tomes he has listed is only the first step in understanding his dissatisfaction with my argument, then the reader will form his own estimate of how thick the work he is now holding would be if I were to read the listed works (plus the others the critic would recommend when I had finished my first homework assignment) and were to reproduce on these pages the gist of their arguments (which the critic did not feel himself able to adequately condense, or even hint at, in the space available to him), together with my analysis thereof. Not that this would complete my task, for I have no doubt that there are other theories of the evolution of consciousness, with many books to expound the theories, and many critics to recommend the books.

Fortunately, there is a shorter approach. One thing that all such theories, including Psychological Darwinism, have in common, is that they are attempts to show how purely physical, material, non-conscious entities could give rise to consciousness, volition, and rationality. And this is in principle impossible. Consciousness, like existence itself, is an irreducible primary, and it makes no more sense to offer the explanation of consciousness in terms of unconsciousness than to try to explain existence in terms of non-existence or nothingness. [38]

(07k) The Parallel with Dr. Branden’s Argument: A Reprise

All of the objections that we have thus far considered have one property in common. If they are valid against my argument for theism, they are equally valid against Dr. Branden’s argument for free will. Accordingly, they cannot be consistently used by anyone who accepts Dr. Branden’s argument as valid. Since this paper may fall into the hands of someone who does not accept Dr. Branden’s argument, I have tried to offer a reply to each objection that stands on its own feet without reference to the Free Will Argument. But I have also referred repeatedly to the parallel. Some readers may think that I have been too repetitious. But I have reason to be. When the rough draft of this paper was circulated, two critics that I know of studied it with particular thoroughness. One of them later said to me, “You know, I read your paper at least a dozen times over the course of a year before I realized that you were claiming that your argument and the Free Will Argument were analogous, and that therefore I had no right to accept the Free Will Argument (which I do) and reject yours.” As for the other critic, no comment from him has thus far so much as acknowledged the existence of the Free Will Argument. I gather that he has not yet realized that I claim that the two arguments are analogous, and that therefore ... I am hoping that no reader of this draft will overlook that claim.

It is impossible for me to anticipate and answer every argument that any critic might have, and the reader will perhaps have thought of one not on my list. If so, the first question I have for him is: “Do you accept as sound Dr. Branden’s analysis of the epistemological self-contradictions of determinism? If you do, please re-read his analysis and explain to me how your position escapes being vulnerable to a parallel analysis — how your rebuttal of my argument does not constitute a rebuttal of his.” If you believe that your objection destroys the Designer Argument while leaving the Free Will Argument untouched, tell me about it. If you reject the Free Will Argument, tell Dr. Branden about it. 

References
[Editor’s notes are in blue. Readers who prefer to ignore the links in the text and follow the notes on a separate page, may open a separate page with the references here.]

* The title refers to Nathaniel Branden’s lecture “The Concept of God,” from his lecture series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism.” That lecture is fully transcribed in his book The Vision of Ayn Rand: The Basic Principles of Objectivism (Gilbert, Ariz.: Cobden Press, 2009), chapter 4. Partial and perhaps complete audios seem to be available throughout the Internet, especially here. See also R.A. Childs, “The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” Note 19.

[26] AS [Atlas Shrugged] 388bb-dd, 460m-r [paperback] (411hhj-kk, 489dd-ii) [hardback].

[27] AS 938ss-939a [paperback] (1012o-v) [hardback].

[28] WIAR [Nathaniel and Barbara Branden, Who Is Ayn Rand? (Paperback Library, 1964) 18 (16-17) [hardback; (New York: Random House, 1962)].
  What answers were given to these criticisms by the defenders of capitalism? Consider the statements of two of its most famous advocates, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer.
  Mill’s essay On Liberty is generally regarded as one of the classic defenses of the rights of the individual. But individual rights is precisely the concept that Mill does not support. His ethical standpoint is that of Utilitarianism. In On Liberty, he argues that society should leave men free. But as justification for his position, he projects an essentially collectivist premise: the premise that the group should permit the individual to be free because that will allow him best to serve its interests — thus implying that man does not in fact have the right to freedom, but is, morally, the property of the collective. Not astonishingly, Mill ended his life as a socialist.
  Spencer defended capitalism by means of spurious analogies to animals in a jungle and “the survival of he fittest” — which implied a complete misrepresentation of the nature of capitalism, one that was thoroughly in accord with the views of its enemies. An animal’s method of survival is not man’s; men do not survive by fighting over a static quantity of meat (or wealth); their rational interests are not at war; they do not prosper at one another’s expense and sacrifice; men survive by producing the values, the goods, their life requires. What was Spencer’s ultimate moral justification for a free-market economy? Not the rights of the individual — but the purification of the race; the “weeding out of the unfit” in alleged accordance with the principles of evolution; that is, the good of the collective, of the human species.

FNI 37 [For the New Intellectual (New York: Signet, 1961)].
  Herbert Spencer, another champion of capitalism, chose to decide that the theory of evolution and of adaptation to the environment was the key to man’s Morality — and declared that the moral justification of capitalism was the survival of the species, of the human race; that whoever was of no value to the race had to perish....

[29] L. [Leonard] Peikoff, “Dogmatism, Pragmatism and Nazism” 9/5/4g-5f, 7d. [References of this form refer to The Objectivist Newsletter, so that volume 9, number 5 would be May 1970. After volume 4, the name of the publication was The Objectivist. The page numbers for the latter are those of the original format, not those in the bound volume.]
  Pragmatism is the form of voluntarist anti-intellectualism, which declares ... thought is strictly an action-oriented function to be measured by it “practical” results.... [An] idea is defined as “true” if and to the extent that it “works,” i.e., enables men to achieve in practice whatever goals they have.... “‘The true,’ [says William James,] to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving.” ...
  Knowing their ideological background and context, one would expect the Fascists and Nazis to embrace the pragmatist philosophy eagerly. And so they did....
  ... Mussolini ... made a point of giving James part of the credit for the development of Fascism....
  As Goebbels put it: “Important is not what is right but what wins.”

L. Peikoff, “Nazism versus Reason” 8/11/3f [November 1999].
  Thus, for instance, Nietzsche on truth: “The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it.... The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing....

[30] William James, “Pragmatism’s Concept of Truth ” (lecture VI of Pragmatism, reprinted in Essays in Pragmatism, page 170, [The essay is available on-line from The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, vol. 4, No. 6 (Mar. 14, 1907), the quoted passage being on page 150.]

[31] L. Peikoff, “Dogmatism, Pragmatism and Nazism” 9/4,5 [April and May 1970].

[32] A. Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” 4/12/55ff [December 1965; the page number refers to the bound volume of The Objectivist Newsletter, unlike other page references] & CUI 23 [Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York: New American Library, 1946-1966); the hardback page reference is page 14].
  The objective theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of #&147;things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of value. (Rational, in this context means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.)

A. Rand, “What Is Capitalism?” 4/12/56e & CUI 23 [See above Note. The page reference for the hardback page reference for Capitalism is page 15].

[33] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford UP, 1976; paperback 1978).
  Michael Gregory and Anita Silvers, eds., Sociobiology and Human Nature: an interdisciplinary critique and defense (Jossey Bass, 1978).
  Arthur L. Caplan, ed., The Sociobiology Debate (Harper & Row, 1978; hardback and paperback).

[34] N. Branden, “IAD: The moral meaning of risking one’s life” 3/4/15 dd, gg, kk [April 1964; the title James has used is the title that appears in the table of contents for The Objectivist Newsletter. The item itself carries the title “In the context of Objectivist ethics, what is the justification for knowingly risking one’s life?”].
  The Objectivist ethics holds “man’s life” or “the life appropriate to a rational being” as its standard of value. But this does not mean that, in any value choice, one’s only or foremost concern should be immediate, physical self-preservation. Such a policy would be incompatible with the standard of man’s life.
  ... It is in the name of the life proper to man that a rational person may be willing to die — not as treason to his life, but as the only act of loyalty possible to him....
  The man who, in any and all circumstances, would place his physical self-preservation above any other value, is not a lover of life, but an abject traitor to life — to the human mode of life — who sees no difference between the life proper to a rational being and the life of a mindless vegetable. His treason is not that he values his life too much, but that he values it too little.

AS 940bb-hh (1014c-8 [hardback].
  All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good. all that which destroys it is the evil. Man’s life, as required by his nature, is not the life of a mindless brute, but the life of a thinking being — not life by means of force or fraud, since there’s only one price that pays for man’s survival: reason.

[35] N. Branden, “IAD: Demonstration and irrationality” 2/7/27c [July 1963; James has used the page number and the title from the Objectivist Newsletter bound volume table of contents. The title in the issue is “How does one persuade a person who refuses to accept reason or logical demonstration?”].
  ... that man is a being of volitional consciousness and, therefore, that one cannot compel man to think or to be rational.

N. Branden, “The Objectivist Theory of Volition,” 5/1/9e [January 1966; there is a parallel passage in Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem (New York; Bantam, 1969); page 39].
  Man is not rational automatically; he is aware of the fact that his mental processes may be appropriate or inappropriate to the task of correctly perceiving reality....

N. Branden, “The Objectivist Theory of Volition,” 5/1/10 [January 1966; there is a parallel passage in Self-Esteem, page 40].
  The capacity of conceptual functioning is innate; but the exercise of this capacity is volitional.

[36] N. Branden, “Emotions and Values,” 5/5/3d [May 1966; there is a parallel passage in Self-Esteem, page 67].
  Like rationality, ir rationality is a concept that is not applicable to animals; it is applicable only to man.

A. Rand, “Intro. to Obj. Epistemology,” 5/10/5b [October 1966] and IOE 58 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (monograph published by The Objectivist Inc., 1966, 1967; page 43); parallel passage in the Second Expanded edition (New York; Mentor 1979), page 44].
  “Rational,” in this context [defining man as a rational animal], does not mean “acting invariably in accordance with reason” it means “possessing the faculty of reason.”

N. Branden, “Self-Esteem, ” 6/3/2h [March 1967; parallel text in Self-Esteem, page 112].
  Man is the one living species who is able to reject, sabotage and betray his own means of survival, his mind.

A. Rand, VOS 22e [The Virtue of Selfishness (New York: Signet, 1964), page 22].
  Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer — and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.

AS 923n-t, gg-jj (994ff-ll, 995d-g [hardback]).
  He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly — yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think....
  Men would shudder, the thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing him out of the nest to struggle for survival — yet that was what they did to their children.

AS 939ff-940o (1031f-ll [hardback]).
  A plant must feed itself in order to live.... But a plant has no choice of action ...: it acts automatically to further its life; it cannot act for its own destruction.
  An animal is equipped for sustaining its life ... with automatic safety and no power of choice, it is unable to ignore its own good, unable to decide to choose the evil and act as it own destroyer.
  Man has no automatic code of survival.... An instinct of self-preservation is precisely what man does not possess.... A desire is not an instinct.... And even man’s desire to live is not automatic.... Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer — and that is the way he has acted throughout most of his history.
  A living entity that regarded its means of survival as evil, would not survival. A plant that struggled to mangle its roots, a bird that fought to break its wings would not remain for long in the existence they affronted. But the history of man has been a struggle to deny and to destroy his mind.

[37] Aristotle, Politics I, 1252b 30.

[38] A. Rand, “Intro. to Objectivist Epistemology,” 5/12/2f [December 1966] & IOE 73-74 [Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (monograph published by The Objectivist Inc., 1966, 1967; page 52); parallel passage in the Second Expanded edition (New York; Mentor 1979), page 55].
  One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to prove them is self-contradictory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of non-existence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness.