Rand is making three highly significant points here, two absolutely necessary to liberty, the third possibly fatal. The first point is that rights are claims to take certain actions without interference rather than to be given things. They are claims to liberty of action, not to whatever I might need or think I need—even if I need it for acting. This is entailed by the very concept of negative rights. For example, to earn a living I might need a car, and I have a right to acquire a car in a peaceful exchange with someone who wants to sell me a car. If I can’t find anyone who wants to sell me one I can afford, I can try to borrow money or beg for a free car. If I’m lucky, I’ll succeed in one of these attempts. But if I don’t, it’s too bad. I have no “positive” right to a car just because I need one.

An individual’s right is an enforceable claim against others—a claim that the government is obligated to enforce. The view that I have a positive right to a car implies that the government ought to coerce others into providing me with a car. But such coercion, even if it is indirect, through taxation, violates others’ negative rights to be left alone so long as they are not aggressing or committing fraud against me. Positive rights are incompatible with negative rights. Hence, I don’t have a right to a car, only to take the (rights‐​respecting) actions necessary for acquiring one.

The second point Rand is making about rights is that rights are held by individuals, because their function is the protection of the individual’s freedom from interference by other individuals, groups, or government. So‐​called collective or group rights are a negation of individual rights, because they are nothing more than some individuals’ power to force other individuals to obey their edicts. Individual rights are held against the collective—“the expression ‘collective rights’ is a contradiction in terms.” 16 Indeed, the “principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.” 17

The third point Rand is making is that all rights are rights to actions that we need to take, as rational beings, for our own life and happiness. This is the problematic claim, for it entails that we have no right to take actions that are inimical to our life and happiness. 18 And if we have no such rights, then we may be forcibly prevented from doing things that are bad for us. Suppose, for example, that I have inherited a tidy sum of money, and now just want to enjoy the easy pleasures of lying around drinking beer, watching sitcoms, and snorting coke. My behavior is clearly self‐​destructive and irrational. So if all rights are rights to actions that we need to take, as rational beings, for our own life and happiness, Rand’s view implies that it’s not a violation of my rights for the government (or concerned individuals) to force me to do something more worthwhile, such as studying or working, under threat of punishment. But this is not a very rights‐​respecting view, and a society in which such coercion is practiced is not a very rights‐​respecting society. And Rand’s conception of a proper government as a limited government also entails that such coercion is impermissible. She argues that a proper government must be confined to only two tasks: (a) protecting us from domestic and foreign violence and fraud and (b) settling disputes according to objective laws. There is no room in her night‐​watchman conception of the state for paternalistic or moral legislation allowing the government to coercively prevent people from self‐​destructive or immoral behavior.

How, then, can we reconcile this view of the proper role of government with Rand’s claim that “[r]ights are conditions of existence required by man’s nature for his proper survival,” where “are” is the “are” of identity? One possibility is that in saying this, she is thinking of what gives rise to rights and what makes them valuable to most of us. 19 It seems undeniable that if human beings had been incapable of valuing their own—or anyone else’s—proper survival or happiness, we would have been incapable of valuing rights. Again, if human beings had been incapable of thinking and acting long range, if it had been in our nature to always act impulsively, we would have been incapable of living by principles, or even of conceiving of them. Hence, since rights are principles sanctioning an individual’s freedom of action, we would have had no rights or even a concept of rights. But the fact that the capacity for thinking and acting long range, valuing our own or others’ proper survival and happiness, is essential for having rights doesn’t entail that rights must be limited to the freedom to take the actions that are rationally necessary for our life and happiness, period. Take, for example, the couch potato described above. A couch potato has the capacity to think and act long range, to value his long‐​term survival and happiness, even if his actions are irrational and self‐​destructive. This capacity is enough to make him a rights bearer. Respecting his rights may or may not do him any good, but it does respect him as an autonomous being responsible for his own life. A society that respects people’s rights respects even the couch potato’s rights.

Other statements by Rand show her recognition that what matters is liberty, whether it’s exercised rationally or irrationally, so long as the exercise does not violate anyone else’s rights. As she declares, “[A] right is the moral sanction of … [the individual’s] freedom to act on his own judgment, for his own goals, by his own voluntary, uncoerced choice.” 20 Again, freedom is said to be “the fundamental requirement of man’s mind” because “the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual.” 21 She does not say that freedom is needed only for making rational judgments, or only for exercising one’s rational faculty. 22 But Rand is, at best, inconsistent on this point.

Turning now to the other specific rights that human beings have, two of the most important are freedom of speech and property. As with other rights, the right to free speech “means freedom from interference, suppression or punitive action by the government—and nothing else.” 23 It does not mean the right to be given a podium or newspaper in order to express one’s views or, for that matter, the right to be given an appreciative audience. The right to property is “the right to gain, to keep, to use and to dispose of material values” 24 —not a right to have property, but simply a right to act to gain it, and once gained, to use it or sell it or give it away. And all these actions must themselves be respectful of other people’s rights. A diamond ring gained by theft does not become the thief ’s property, no matter how hard he had to work for it or how ingenious his plan. Nor does the right to use one’s property mean that one may use it in ways that violate the rights of others. For example, if I live in an apartment, I have no right to play my radio as loudly as possible at 1:00 a.m., thus disturbing my neighbors’ sleep. 25

The next question is: Why should we respect each other’s rights? It’s good for me that other people respect my rights to my life, liberty, and happiness, but how is it good for me to respect their rights? On an egoist ethics, it has to be good for me to be justified. One answer is the instrumental answer given by the 17th‐​century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes: we should respect others’ rights because we can’t hope to get away with violating them. But this answer is not enough because there are times when we can get away with it.

Rand adds another reason: immorality requires self‐​deception, which, in turn, leads to psychological conflict and, if pursued as a policy, a sense of emptiness. But for many people, an occasional deception or worse causes no psychological conflict, and for too many people even the policy of deceiving, defrauding, or robbing others for the sake of their own goals causes no conflict or sense of emptiness. Given the variability of human nature, this conclusion should not be surprising. Moreover, surely we ought to respect others’ rights because they have rights and not because it might be psychologically bad for us.

Here again, Rand’s neo‐​Aristotelian conception of survival qua man and of happiness comes to the rescue. To live a life proper to a human being requires living virtuously, and each virtue is defined partly in terms of a recognition and acceptance of some fact or facts, an acceptance understood by the agent to be indispensable for gaining, maintaining, or expressing his or her ultimate value: a happiness worth having. For example, integrity is “the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake your consciousness,” 26 a recognition that is expressed in loyalty to one’s rational values and convictions, 27 and honesty is “the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake existence,” a recognition that is expressed in truthfulness in thought and speech. 28 Justice is the recognition of the fact that we ought to give others their due and part of what is due them is respect for their rights. 29

An important question about rights is whether they can conflict. Rand denies this possibility if they are properly defined as protections of freedom of action against physical force or fraud. So‐​called “positive rights” conflict with negative rights because they are claims to benefits for certain people at the expense of other people’s freedom of action. For example, my “positive right” to have you bake me a cake for my gay wedding conflicts with your (negative) right to refuse to participate in an act that you regard as being against your religion. It has been argued, however, that even negative rights can conflict. To use an earlier example, my right to use my property as I see fit seems to entail that I have a right to play loud music whenever I like, even though you also have a right not to be disturbed at 1:00 a.m. However, Rand would say that I don’t have such a right because the sound of the music is not confined to my property. To paraphrase the old saying, my right to play loud music at 1:00 a.m. ends where your ears begin.

Rand also argues that not only rights, but even rational interests, don’t conflict, at least in a free society. 30 In her words, “[T]here is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.” 31 This harmony of different people’s rational interests has been taken by some commentators to be essential for the existence of rights and a peaceful society.

But what is Rand’s argument for the proposition that rational interests don’t conflict? It seems that conflicts of rational interests abound. To take the case she herself considers: two people apply for a job, but only one gets it. 32 Assuming that both are qualified, hasn’t the loser’s rational interest been frustrated because the other person got the job? True, the loser hasn’t been treated unfairly and hasn’t sacrificed his interests, as Rand points out, but this point is irrelevant to the question of a conflict between his rational interests and those of the other candidate.

Rand argues that, assuming that the employer was rational, the better person got the job. But what if the employer wasn’t rational—or not on this occasion? Or he was rational but made an innocent mistake of judgment about the better candidate? Quite apart from questions of rationality or vision, in a buyer’s market, employers often practically toss a coin to decide whom to hire, or do so on the basis of quite irrelevant factors, such as liking one applicant’s sense of humor better than the other’s. There is nothing irrational about this when two (or more) applicants turn out to be equally qualified. To take an even simpler case: I want that little doggie in the window, but so do you, and you get there first and buy him. Commonsensically, our interests conflict even though they are rational. The only way to remove the appearance of conflict is to declare retrospectively that I never had an interest in the little doggie. But this is just a “sour grapes” rationalization. Why would I have tried to get to the store to buy the little doggie, or felt disappointment when I failed to buy him, if I didn’t have an interest in him?

These criticisms, however, are compatible with Rand’s general point that acting dishonestly or unjustly in order to get the job—or the doggie—is not in our overall, ultimate interest. Better to break rock in a quarry, like Howard Roark, than to sell out. They are also compatible with the fact that rational interests do not necessarily—that is, by their very nature—conflict. The conflicts are contingent on extraneous factors, such as that there is only one job or one doggie for two rationally interested people. If rational interests necessarily conflicted, there would be no rights—indeed, there would be a war of all against all. But there is no good argument for Rand’s claim that rational interests cannot conflict. Nor does acknowledging that they can endanger the existence of rights.