February 2 marks the birth of one of the most praised and vilified writers of the past century — Ayn Rand, who sold over 30 million books. This makes it an appropriate time to reconsider her controversial rejection of altruism, one of her most misunderstood positions.

Rand rejected altruism as the standard for moral behavior, calling it “incompatible with freedom, with capitalism, and with individual rights.” However, her opposition to altruism was not opposition to benevolence, but to French philosopher Auguste Comte.

To Comte, acts done for any reason beyond advancing someone else’s well-being were not morally justified. That would mean that taking a tax deduction for a charitable contribution strips it of its morality. Feeling good about doing good does the same. Even “love your neighbor as yourself” fails the unlimited duty to others his version of altruism imposes.

The main problem with understanding Ayn Rand’s position on this today is that modern usage of the term has eroded his meaning of altruism to little more than a synonym for generosity, so Rand’s rejection of the original meaning — the requirement of total selflessness — is erroneously taken as rejecting generosity.

As she wrote, “The basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification of his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue and value.”

With Comte as a starting point, more attention to people’s own well-being — more selfishness, in Rand’s terminology — was the only way to move toward recognizing value and significance in each individual’s life.

Comte’s conception of altruism is also inconsistent with liberty, Rand’s focus. The duty to put others first at all times and in all circumstances denies self-ownership and the power to choose deriving from it. Everyone else’s presumptive claims override individual rights. However, benevolence, which involves voluntary choices to benefit others in ways and to the extent individuals choose for themselves, does not.

An omnipresent duty of self-sacrifice also makes people vulnerable to manipulation by those who disguise power over others as “really” a means to attain some noble goal. The desire to sacrifice for the good of others can thereby be transformed into the requirement to sacrifice to the desires of leaders.

As Rand expressed it, “Those who start by saying: ‘It is selfish to pursue your own wishes, you must sacrifice them to the wishes of others’ — end up by saying: ‘It is selfish to uphold your convictions, you must sacrifice them to the convictions of others.’”

To Rand, Comte’s view of altruism was logically impossible, joyless, and inconsistent with liberty, while enabling vast harms. However, we should recognize that she offered no such objection to voluntary benevolence — voluntary individual choices people make to be generous to others.

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The defense against that is protecting individual self-ownership and the property rights that derive from it — i.e. liberty.

When that is maintained as fundamental, the power that each of us maintains to choose what to do with ourselves and our property — including “I could contribute to cause X, but I choose not to” — is accepted as legitimate. And under liberty, Americans would not only be generous, as we have been throughout our history, we would have far more to be generous with.

Such voluntary arrangements would also produce a far better world than the imposition of Comte’s conception of altruism.

Gary M. Galles is a professor of Economics at Pepperdine University.