Altruism, Pity and Compassion
Significant (and ignored) differences

by W. Teed Rockwell

    Two philosophers, Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, have denied the value 
of both Altruism and Pity, a fact which causes most people to 
ignore their numerous differences. While I agree with their 
evaluation of Altruism and Pity, there is a closely related third 
virtue, which I will call Compassion, the cultivation of which is a 
necessary part of my vision of what it means to be a good person. 

Altruism

    Altruism is the opposite of selfishness; that is, it is 
devotion to the welfare of others. If we accept that all virtue has 
its basis in altruism, then virtue is thus considered to be the 
denial of self, and selfishness to be the root of all evil. If a 
person helps me in such a way as to help himself at the same time, 
this has no altruistic moral worth. Actions are only morally 
admirable if they involve some sort of sacrifice on the part of the 
doer. Kant took this principle to its logical conclusion, and said 
that even the desire to help people was morally neutral. Thus, if 
feelings of pity for a beggar prompted you to give alms, this was 
of no more moral worth than if the desire for a hamburger prompted 
you to take that same money and buy a hamburger. An altruistic 
action is thus not motivated by any desire whatsoever. Altruism is 
present only when all desires are sacrificed to a sense of duty. 

    To say that all virtue has its basis in altruism is to say that 
life itself is evil, for desire for something is the mainspring of 
all life. 

    According to this value system, some of us are less evil than 
others, because we mutilate and mortify our desires from time to 
time, but anyone who is still alive will have a self, with dreams 
and desires of its own, and will therefore be selfish. As long as 
we live, we will continue to indulge these desires, and therefore 
will be necessarily evil. 

    The most destructive thing about this concept of virtue is that 
it makes most people think that no one can ever really be virtuous. 
Just as Puritanism produces prostitution, and tee totalling produces 
alcoholism, so the continual insistence that the Self is evil 
produces millions of "selfish" Selves. I once knew a young man who 
(among other vices) continually ran up unpaid phone bills on other 
people's lines, and frequently borrowed money that he never paid 
back. Once every few years he becomes a devout fundamentalist 
Christian, and talks continually about how all of us are sinners 
because we only think of our selfish little egos. 

    He includes himself, of course, but he doesn't stress this 
strongly. He seems to enjoy the fact that in the eyes of God, the 
differences between himself and an ordinary decent human being are 
not that noticeable. Altruistic morality demands that everyone 
should try as hard as they can to do their duty, but common sense 
tells us that most of the time we can't. This encourages people to 
believe that "almost" is good enough in everything we do, and that 
mediocrity is the highest level that anyone will ever actually 
achieve. 

    This attitude is by no means limited to Christians, however. 
Political liberals and radicals have often believed (with varying 
levels of explicitness) that the system in which we actually live 
and work (called Capitalism), requires every person to either 
exploit or be exploited by the people he works for and/or with. 
According to this way of thinking, anything you get for yourself in 
a capitalist system is in some sense stolen from the people who 
have less than you do, and the only way you can morally redeem 
yourself is to give away what you have to the have-nots. 
Unfortunately, you can't give away everything you have without 
starving to death, and even if you did, it would only slightly help 
the millions of have- nots for perhaps a nanosecond. Consequently, 
what everybody ends up doing is keeping what they have and feeling 
guilty about it.
 
    Slogans like "People, not Profits" imply strongly that anybody 
who was earning profits was necessarily hurting people, and that if 
more and more people became unselfish, the world would become a 
better place to live. However, seeing as capitalism supposedly 
guarantees that the unselfish people will be annihilated by the 
selfish ones, the goal of increasing the percentage of unselfish 
people in the world is doomed to failure, no matter how many people 
become converted in the short run.

    This kind of altruistic duty is a much greater burden for the 
Agnostic liberal or radical than it is for the Christian. The 
Christian is permitted to believe that no matter how much injustice 
he sees around him, fundamentally "God is in his heaven and all's 
right with the world". If he does his part in the world around him 
(If he "loves his neighbor"), he can have faith that God will 
handle the rest. An Agnostic altruist has the duties and 
obligations of God which he must fulfill using the powers and 
abilities of a single human being. Is it surprising that such a 
value system would first drive a person to almost insane hysteria, 
which would eventually burn itself out, leaving only an embittered 
cynicism? 

	During the 60's, these attitudes actually stirred many young 
people to political action, although much of it was fairly 
unproductive. During the 70's and 80's, however, these very same 
attitudes were very effective in paralyzing any efforts at social 
change, which is why conservatives, not liberals, brought about 
most of the social change (for better or for worse) in those years. 
The reasoning that governed this paralysis was something like this: 
The system is corrupt, because everyone in it is selfish. I have to 
be selfish if I am to survive, and there is no point in dying 
because the system will continue corruptly on without me. Therefore 
I might as well take up my position in the system, but there is no 
point in pretending that it is possible for me to have work which 
will make the world a better place to live. It might be worthwhile 
to be sure that your daily work has somewhat less moral vileness 
than working for a munitions plant, but it would be hopelessly 
naive to assume that anything anyone would pay you money to do 
could actually have any positive moral worth. 

	This transition from committed idealist to cynical power broker 
has been gone through by the children of the rich ever since 
Marxism existed. While young, they become Marxists, and then when 
they mature they become just the sort of Capitalists that Marx 
taught them to be. These two attitudes can also be seen operating 
simultaneously in the San Francisco weekly newspaper called the Bay 
Guardian. Most of its articles are carefully researched muckraking 
pieces that demonstrate convincingly that everyone in America with 
any power has sold out to The Business Interests. The rest of the 
magazine is devoted to lists and reviews of various places to buy 
things from those business interests: articles which could all be 
subtitled "Ten new places to spend all of that money you don't 
deserve to have." 

	The writers and editors probably do feel guilty about the 
necessity to devote so much of the magazine to these subjects, for 
there is a thinly disguised cynicism that runs through all of these 
hymns to materialism. They probably justify this to themselves by 
saying that these pieces make it possible for them to get the 
muckraking out to these same people, which will hopefully make them 
somewhat less materialistic. But it is the muckraking which 
actually reenforces the materialism of the rest of the magazine, by 
continually underscoring the hopelessness of doing good in a 
corrupt society. The implication seems to be that you can't do good 
for others, so why not look out for yourself.* 

	The basic assumption behind altruism might be phrased as: 
because greater love hath no man than he who gives up his life for 
his brother, anybody who is still alive obviously doesn't love his 
brother as much as he should. By forcing people into an Either/or 
choice between morality and life, Altruism has created thousands of 
amoral lives, lived under the assumption that morality is something 
that everyone talks about, but never actually lives by.






Pity

	People who are more driven by their hearts than their heads 
often advocate a morality based on pity, rather than duty. Pity is 
the feeling of upset and misery experienced when one confronts a 
being more wretched than oneself. The feeling of pity makes a 
person want to help the pitiable being, unlike the sense of 
altruistic duty which makes a person believe that she ought to help 
the pitiable person whether she wants to or not.

	Seeing as most philosophers are people of the head rather than 
the heart, there are almost no philosophers who have defended the 
ethics of pity, and quite a few (including Kant and St. Augustine) 
who have said that pity and morality have nothing to do with each 
other at all. There are millions of ordinary people, however, who 
feel that being moral means only one thing: Helping those people 
that you feel sorry for, and feeling sorry as often as you can. 
Popular Christian writers usually compromise by saying that pity 
and altruism should work in harness together: that of course it is 
virtuous to feel pity for the wretched, but that emotions sometimes 
desert us and we should continue to do the right thing even when we 
don't feel like it.

	In one sense, Pity-morality requires less self-mutilation than 
Duty- morality, because it requires a person to continue to feel. 
In another sense, however, Pity-morality requires more 
self-mutilation, because it requires a person to feel bad. Doing 
one's duty is usually only boring: it might be actively unpleasant 
on occasion, but even then it requires one to stoically ignore this 
unpleasantness, not wallow in it. A morality based on pity requires 
you to act on other people's feelings as if they were your own, and 
not just any other person's feelings but only those of the most 
wretched people of the earth. According to the morality of pity, a 
truly moral person does not fill his consciousness with the 
thoughts of Shakespeare and the emotions of Beethoven; his soul 
reverberates only with the wailing of cripples and the moans of the 
starving. He does not formulate dreams and plans of his own; he 
merely responds, like a Pavlovian dog, to the ringing of a bell 
from a sickbed. If there were a God who had pity for the human 
race, he would have eliminated the morality of pity long ago. It 
requires every happy human being to soil his soul with the sadness 
of the most miserable, and thus multiplies human misery far more 
than any physical disaster ever could.

	Pity-Morality and Duty-Morality both agree on one lethal point: 
Doing the right thing is not any fun. Both are opposed to the idea 
that morality could be defined as enlightened self-interest: that 
being good is actually more fun than being bad. There are people 
who verbally advocate something like Pity-morality and who 
themselves lead genuinely happy lives, but I will try to show in 
the next section of this paper that their morality is better 
described as a morality of Compassion. There is also the case of 
Mother Teresa, who is far too complex a figure to be fully 
explained by the few paragraphs I will devote to her here.

	Anyone who values human achievement cannot dismiss or belittle 
her triumph over day-to-day human impulses. She is a genuinely 
heroic figure, and an inspiration to those of us who achieve 
heroism only at our occasional best moments. 

	Her morality is clearly motivated by pity, for she devotes 
herself exclusively to the most wretched and helpless, whom she 
calls "the poorest of the poor". She does not, however, appear to 
be driven by duty, but rather by some kind of inner prompting which 
she believes to be the voice of God. The most important thing for 
her is not to be obedient to some code of law, but to follow that 
inner prompting: as she said in the documentary on her life, "If it 
says to help the sick, you should help the sick. If it says to live 
in a palace, you should live in a palace." As we are talking about 
codes of morality here, this is not the place to either attack or 
defend a morality that is based on direct intuitions, rather than 
codes. At any rate, it is clear from the above quote that she does 
not believe that every human being ought to live the way she lives, 
regardless of what might be implied by certain interpretations of 
Christian scripture. She never condemns those who don't live the 
way she lives, and in fact she has rejected novices from her 
service who seem to her to have joined her order out of duty rather 
than joy. It also seems that she is a genuinely happy person who 
enjoys the life she has chosen for herself. When I saw the 
documentary on her life, I did not feel that I ought to help her, 
but I felt as if I wanted to help her, and I have never felt called 
to do that sort of work before. It appears that she genuinely loves 
people that anyone else would find completely hideous and wretched, 
and that anyone who comes in contact with such pure unconditional 
love is forever changed by it.

	However, thousands of people who were capable of their own 
kinds of greatness have merely crushed what was best in themselves 
by trying to imitate hers, and millions of others have given up 
trying to be good entirely, because her form of Christian sacrifice 
was the only kind of goodness they believed to be possible. 
Furthermore, the heroism of her efforts should not blind us to the 
fact that she has done relatively little physical or economic good 
for the people she is trying to help. The few people who receive 
the loving attention of her or her nuns certainly do feel better 
from having received it, and will probably never forget having been 
in her presence. But a businessman who built a factory in her 
neighborhood, provided on-the-job training and medical insurance 
for the people who worked there, and made piles of money for 
himself in the process, would do far more to actually alleviate 
human suffering. However, advocates of the morality of altruism 
would dismiss that man's achievements because "He only did it to 
make a few bucks for himself" and advocates of the morality of pity 
(including Mother Teresa herself) would promptly turn their 
attention elsewhere, because the people there would no longer be 
pitiful. 



The Foundations of Morality

	It is, of course, far easier to criticize an existing system of 
ethics than to create a new one. Because I am going to articulate 
compassion as a positive moral ideal in the next section of this 
paper, I must first say something about moral ideals and how they 
should be evaluated.

	 The traditional way to defend a new system of ethics from a 
critical onslaught is by sheer chutzpah: to claim that the creator 
of this system is God, or the son of God, or received it from God 
on a stone tablet of some sort. This kind of moral foundation is 
called an unconditional "ought." Kant also tried to formulate an 
unconditional ought based on reason alone, which he called the 
categorical imperative. After many months of reading the Critique 
of Practical Reason, I concluded that either he was wrong or I 
didn't understand what he was talking about. 

	Ayn Rand also believed that her morality was based on reason 
alone. Her claim was that a moral person made choices that aided 
his (nonparasitic) survival, and that because survival was 
something that was objectively measurable, morality was therefore 
based upon objective rational reality. "Just as your body has two 
fundamental sensations, pleasure and pain, as signs of its welfare 
and injury, as a barometer of its basic alternative life and death, 
so your consciousness has two fundamental emotions, joy and 
suffering, in answer to the same alternative". (For the New 
Intellectual pp.131-132) 

	Unfortunately for this position, Life rarely offers us two such 
simple choices. There are a variety of things which give us joy, 
and frequently the choice between them has nothing to do with 
physical survival. It is true that there are short-term pleasures 
which are destructive in the long run, and long-term satisfactions 
that can only be won by choosing short-term suffering. In these 
situations, the choice between short-term and long-term happiness 
can be seen as a question of the survival (or at any rate, the 
health and well-being) of the chooser. This is what Rand means by 
this passage.
 
	"Your emotional capacity is an empty motor, and your values are 
the fuel with which your mind fills it. If you choose a mix of 
contradictions, it will clog your motor, corrode your transmission 
and wreck you on your first attempt to move with a machine which 
you the driver have corrupted"(ibid p.132).

 	But there are many satisfying and exciting ways of earning a 
living, and the choice amongst them cannot be made on the basis of 
survival, because all of them are capable of giving their 
practitioners long- term livelihoods. 

    Howard Roark designed buildings because he received more joy 
from being an architect than he would have from running a railroad. 
Dagny Taggart ran a railroad because she received more joy from 
doing so than she would have from being an architect. There is no 
purely rational method by which either one could have made the 
choice between those two activities. 

    The reason Roark became an architect was because in the long 
run he felt better building buildings than doing anything else, 
regardless of whatever short term suffering his goals put him 
through. 

    This does not mean that careful deliberation cannot be helpful 
in coming to a decision as to what would be a satisfying career. 
Particular "feeling-events" caused by occurrences in daily 
experience can be traced back to fundamental premises of value 
(what Aristotle calls irreducible primaries), and then analyzed 
rationally to see whether the connection is legitimate. (I am angry 
at a man whom I see beating a horse because I feel that kindness is 
valuable and cruelty is wrong. The man's behavior is genuinely 
cruel, therefore my anger is consistent with my values). But these 
primaries are themselves a deep fundamental kind of feeling, and 
that is what makes them primary, i.e. irreducible to rational 
terms. The deliberation which enables one to choose fundamental 
values involves not only rationality, but also what is called 
"getting in touch with your feelings". If one discovers through 
such processes that one feels better about designing buildings than 
about running a railroad, then one ought to be an architect. 

	Feelings are not, however, the same as whims. One of Ayn Rand's 
biggest mistakes was to confuse the subjective and the arbitrary, 
and thus to assume that a value system built on feelings would 
necessarily be totally chaotic. Feelings, like everything else in 
the universe, are what they are. There are laws that govern their 
behavior, and the person who does not learn those laws is destined 
to be destroyed by them. Ayn Rand herself had no real understanding 
of how feelings operated. She believed that if she felt strongly 
about something, her feeling was a logically deduced fact about it, 
primarily because she did not have a clear awareness of the 
difference between reason and rhetoric. Her "arguments" for the 
immorality of an action usually consisted of dishing out enough 
rhetorical abuse so that anyone would feel bad if he contemplated 
himself doing that action. Once she had done this, she then claimed 
she had rationally proven that the action was morally wrong. For 
those of us who believe that morality is based on feelings, this is 
a legitimate technique, within limits. This is, in fact, the 
technique which I used in the previous two sections of this paper. 
By Rand's own standards, however, this is the worst sort of 
mysticism, and bears no relationship to the principles of morality 
she claims to follow. It is possible, I believe, to have a morality 
based on feelings which is not arbitrary or capricious, but it must 
be based on; 

    1) a knowledge of the psychological principles which govern 
    feelings themselves

    2) the articulation, using poetical and rhetorical language, of 
    some sort of Ideal way of living, which stirs strong feelings in 
    those who contemplate it.

    3) the formulation of Maxims which describe the sort of behavior 
    necessary to achieve this ideal, given that these psychological 
    principles are true.

 The maxims should be formulated with as much rationality as 
possible, so that their connection to the Ideal can be clearly and 
logically seen. The Ideal itself, however, must be formulated in 
poetic language capable of rousing the reader to follow it and/or 
flee from its opposite. (Rand's novels do this brilliantly.) If 
this Ideal is formulated with awareness of valid and reasonably 
complete psychological principles, and the maxims really do 
describe the sort of behavior that produces the Ideal, people 
striving for the Ideal by following the maxims will lead rewarding 
and satisfying lives. If those principles are inconsistent or 
incomplete, the followers' lives will be damaged accordingly. 

 	What I intend to do is make some general statements about the 
nature of human consciousness, based on my lifetime of experience 
as a conscious human. (This activity is sometimes referred to by 
philosophers as phenomenology). I will then try to show that given 
that these statements are true, a certain kind of ideal life would 
be possible if one followed certain maxims. The "ought" of all my 
maxims is thus what philosophers call a conditional ought: It is 
based on the condition that the ideal life I am describing is one 
that I believe would make you feel good. If this ideal life appeals 
to you, you would have good reason to try to live by these maxims. 
If it does not, I would strongly recommend formulating ideals and 
maxims of your own, and invite you to use whatever fragments of 
mine you like as raw materials.


Compassion

	 In ordinary speech, Pity and Compassion are more or less 
synonyms, but for the purposes of this paper I will make the 
following distinction between them. Compassion I will define as its 
literal meaning: Com- passion; to feel with. A compassionate person 
is aware of the feelings of the people around her; when they are 
happy she feels their happiness almost as vividly as she feels her 
own, and when they are unhappy she also feels their unhappiness. 
Because she feels their feelings, she also naturally takes an 
interest in the ideas and beliefs of the people around her, and so 
she will, as a consequence, ask them the sorts of questions that 
will eventually make her aware of their thoughts as well as their 
feelings. If a compassionate person is around people who are 
pitiable, she will naturally feel pity for them. But she is not 
drawn to pitiable people more than to happy people. In fact she is 
far more likely to want to be around happy people, because she is 
so sensitive to the pain of unhappy ones. 

	Hume called this form of awareness "sympathy", saying (perhaps 
metaphorically) that all of us "vibrate" sympathetically to the 
feelings of others just as strings tuned to the same pitch will all 
vibrate together when one of them is struck. The Mahayana Buddhist 
tradition teaches that compassion is a unique form of awareness 
that centers in the energy around the heart chakra. It is thus a 
kind of sixth sense, according to this tradition, which provides a 
direct awareness of the emotional energy of sentient beings, just 
as the eyes provide an awareness of electromagnetic energy, and the 
ears provide an awareness of vibratory energy. There is, at the 
moment, very little scientific evidence for the existence of the 
chakra system. For those who do not feel comfortable in believing 
in something that has not yet been measured by scientific 
instruments, compassion can be explained as the awareness of 
people's feelings through ordinary sensory channels: changes in 
voice tone, skin color, speech patterns, etc. 

	 Each person responds to these "vibes" in different degrees 
depending upon his or her personality. This is because each person 
is usually only aware of a small part of what he perceives. To some 
degree these variations are merely a reflection of personal history 
and taste: of three people entering the same party, one may notice 
the clothing of the other people present, another may notice the 
music being played, a third may notice the food on the buffet. But 
a morality which values compassion says that there is not absolute 
freedom as to where your awareness may rest if your soul is to be 
what? Good? Healthy? Enlightened? Choose whatever word you like. 
A Compassion-based morality claims it is necessary to be directly, 
immediately, aware of the feelings of the people with whom you 
interact on a daily basis: your family, business associates, even 
the people sitting next to you on the bus. A person may ignore 
clothes or music without damaging himself, but to go through life 
without any awareness whatsoever of other peoples feelings is a 
recipe for self-destruction. 

	Once a person hardens his heart to even one person who is 
suffering, he will no longer be as compassionate, i.e. as aware of 
the feelings of the people he encounters. This is why so many 
religious traditions have considered pity to be synonymous with the 
virtue of compassion, because it is when we are confronted with 
pitiable beings that we are most tempted to numb our sense of 
compassion. Unfortunately, if we succumb to this temptation, our 
awareness will shrink, and this will make us narrower, more 
desiccated people. These terms are as unmetaphorical as any 
descriptions of feelings can possibly be; one actually feels 
smaller when in this state of mind, "boxed in", in a way that 
produces irritability, suffocation, and paranoia. 

	A person who has tried to make himself happy by blinding 
himself to other people's feelings is usually called selfish, but 
the smothering of compassion is a terrible act of self-mutilation. 
It will provide temporary numbness from the pain of those around 
you, and if one has some kind of fulfilling work, it is still 
possible to have moments of deep satisfaction in spite of this 
numbness. But if one does not have some compassionate contact with 
people one cares about, it is impossible to avoid the powerful side 
effect of the non-compassionate life called Loneliness. Compassion 
is the only cure for loneliness, for if you surround yourself with 
people and do not share their feelings, you have the experience of 
being "lonely in a crowd". Charles Dickens has shown the effects of 
this attitude in characters such as Ralph Nickleby and Ebenezer 
Scrooge: characters who hardened themselves to the sufferings of 
those around them, and consequently made themselves every bit as 
miserable as the people they were exploiting.

	Of course, most people realize this at some level, and so do 
not numb themselves to the feelings of everybody they encounter. 
Instead, they establish compassionate bonds with a small number of 
people, and ignore the feelings of everyone else. The world becomes 
thus divided into US and THEM: those people with whom we have an 
I-Thou relationship and those with whom we have an I-It 
relationship. Seeing as this is what most of us in fact do, it 
might not be as easy to paint a rhetorical picture of this state of 
mind as a living hell. But it is extremely easy to make self- 
destructive choices as to who is US and who is THEM. 

	Should I maintain compassionate awareness only of those people 
who are useful to me, and break that awareness off whenever it is 
contrary to my self-interest? If I assume that my bonds with a 
person can be broken any time that I choose, those bonds were never 
really I- Thou bonds in the first place. Should my choices be based 
on family ties, or on culture or nationality? The popularity of 
this choice is responsible for the success of Mafia families and 
for almost every war between nations. Should my choices be based on 
rationally shared values? Ayn Rand lived by this formula and 
alienated herself from almost all of her friends. Because she 
believed that shared values were the only basis for maintaining 
emotional bonds with anyone, a significant disagreement inevitably 
produced an outpouring of hatred for that person. Hatred is one of 
the most effective destroyers of compassionate awareness, and its 
spread throughout Rand's psyche doomed her to a paranoid and 
embittered old age. 

	It seems to me that there is only one genuinely viable choice, 
and that is not to make a choice at all. A sense organ that only 
sees what we want it to see is a sense organ that lies: to do its 
job properly, it must tell us what's out there, not what we would 
like to be out there. One must, in other words, maintain a 
compassionate awareness of everybody one encounters. One must see 
all the people one encounters as people, with feelings and 
thoughts. It is not enough to merely intellectually acknowledge 
that "of course, they have feelings, now that you mention it." One 
must to some degree feel their feelings and think their thoughts. 
If we make choices, either conscious or subconscious, which block 
out our awareness of the humanity of the people we encounter, we 
cut ourselves off from an essential wellspring of our being. This 
does not mean that we must be equally aware of the feelings of 
everyone on the planet. The inner lives of the people we sit next 
to on the bus will not be as vivid to us as those of our family and 
co-workers, because our encounters with them are infrequent and 
disjointed. Our lack of awareness stems not from numbness or 
denial, but from lack of exposure to them. The spiritual danger 
comes from denying our experience because at one particular moment 
that experience may be unpleasant or painful. For when we damage 
the emotional antennae that make us aware of human feelings, they 
cannot be regrown at our convenience. 

	If the need for compassion is a fact of human existence, what 
sort of maxims does this imply to guide human behavior? First of 
all, it eliminates the foundations for both altruism and its 
alleged opposite, because the absolute distinction between 
self-interest and concern for others collapses. We cannot look out 
for ourselves and ignore everybody else, because in doing so we 
doom ourselves to a life of benumbed mutilated loneliness. It is 
essential to our own self-interest to maintain an awareness of what 
other selves are interested in, and thus to feel their feelings and 
to some degree make them our own. 

	However, we need not assume from any of this that we are always 
obligated to respond to other people's feelings, any more than we 
are obligated to always respond to our own feelings. The 
compassionate person does not necessarily do what other people 
want, she merely wants to do what other people want, because to 
some degree she shares their feelings. A person who possesses 
compassion without wisdom would indeed respond," like a Pavlovian 
dog, to the ringing of a bell from a sickbed" and would possess no 
life of his own. But a life governed entirely by impulsive response 
to compassion would be as self-destructive (and as ineffective at 
helping others) as a life governed entirely by the desire for 
alcohol. If I gave all of my grocery money to a beggar, and thus 
let my children starve, this act would not be right, even though it 
was motivated by deep feelings of compassion for the beggar. 

	People with wisdom realize that human finitude is a fact, and 
they take that fact into their plans. In order to have a life that 
fulfills both self and others, it is necessary to have a goal or an 
ideal of some sort, and to formulate plans and projects that will 
turn that goal into a reality. This is true even for people 
involved in what are thought of as altruistic activities. If one 
devotes oneself to nursing AIDS patients, one has made a conscious 
decision to let the starving people in Ethiopia die without lifting 
a finger to help them. Even Kant admitted that we cannot have an 
obligation to do the impossible, and seeing as we cannot solve all 
the world's problems, we have no obligation to do so. This means 
that we have the right to choose which of the world's problems we 
will devote ourselves to solving, and no one problem can say "You 
must solve me. I am too serious to be ignored". Does this mean that 
we could ignore everyone else in the world if we wish, and devote 
our talents to the ravenous acquisition of property and 
possessions? Some people would say no, because to do so would 
violate the commands of God and/or Kant's Moral Law, but I think 
that a more compelling argument against this course of action is 
that it condemns us to the cold loneliness of Nickleby and Scrooge. 
For the sake of our own happiness then, the wise thing to do is to 
find a way of working in the world which uses our potentials to 
their fullest, and keeps us in compassionate nourishing contact 
with other people. 




Compassion and Abstract Values

	 The rewards of so-called altruistic work do not come from 
obeying some obligation to stop the world from falling apart. They 
come from the times when one actually succeeds in helping somebody. 
This satisfaction comes from two different sources. The first is 
the emotional "charge" that one receives from experiencing the 
happiness of the person one has helped. One can receive this charge 
only if one is in sympathetic compassionate contact with that 
person. Mother Teresa's only "skill" is her ability to maintain 
compassionate contact with people whose lives and bodies are so 
hideously disfigured that an ordinary person could only feel nausea 
or revulsion in their presence. But that contact obviously feeds 
her soul whenever she sees the joyous expression of people who are 
experiencing care and tenderness for the first time in their lives. 
Anyone who has ever earned another person's gratitude has tasted 
some measure of this exhilaration. When I was a Christian, I 
believed that I experienced this exhilaration because God was 
rewarding me for doing a good deed. But there is no need to posit 
supernatural intervention if we acknowledge that compassionate 
contact with other sentient beings is an essential nutrient for our 
souls, and that successful acts of charity intensify this contact 
in an especially potent way.

	However, there is another kind of reward which automatically 
comes from successfully performing a so-called altruistic act: the 
sense of accomplishment that comes from a job well done, which is 
essentially the same as the experience that comes from building a 
well-designed building, or learning a complicated and demanding 
dance step. A therapist or social worker who has used her skills to 
help solve a client's emotional problems feels an exhilarating 
sense of self-worth because she has accomplished something that is 
good in terms of her own values. This has nothing to do with being 
able to brag to somebody that one has accomplished something. The 
act itself, and the actor's awareness that it was performed 
skillfully and well, is intrinsically satisfying in a way that is 
independent of whether or not the act was acknowledged by anyone 
else. 

	One of the things that makes so-called altruistic activities so 
satisfying is that they automatically fulfill these two essential 
human needs at once: The need to accomplish things that satisfy 
one's values, and the need for compassionate contact. Other 
callings have a much more ambiguous connection between these two 
goals. It may seem that Howard Roark of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead 
cares nothing at all for other people, and only for buildings and 
the abstract values which determine how he builds them. This is why 
Rand refers to his values as "selfish". However, she makes it clear 
that Roark is inevitably concerned about the people who will 
eventually inhabit his buildings. When Austen Heller moves into the 
house that Roark designed for him, he says "... thank you for all 
the thought you seem to have taken about my comfort. There were so 
many things I notice that had never occurred to me before, but 
you've planned them as if you knew all of my needs. ... You were 
very considerate of me." Roark's reply was "you know, I haven't 
thought of you at all. I thought of the house...Perhaps that's why 
I knew how to be considerate of you." (The Fountainhead p.137). A 
building is by definition something that people live and work in, 
and therefore a well-designed building will take into consideration 
what the architect thinks is best for its inhabitants. Similarly, a 
well-made painting or symphony is designed for the edification and 
delight of those who share the values of the creator. In fact, 
anything whose creation is successfully governed by a value system 
will necessarily give pleasure to anyone who shares that value 
system. 

	Unfortunately, it is not always the case that customers who 
share the creator's values actually exist when the work is created 
hence the neglect and suffering which is Roark's story in The 
Fountainhead and the story of countless other creative people. The 
contact that a creative artist receives from an audience gives the 
same kind of nourishment that a doctor receives from curing a 
patient, and is every bit as essential for the artist's spiritual 
health. But there are frequently times when an artist must 
sacrifice the quantity of the contact for anticipated future 
quality. In other words, an artist must frequently create for a 
very small audience (and sometimes for an audience that does not 
yet exist), because she wishes to create an experience for them 
that only a very few people are capable of appreciating at that 
time. But an artist always suffers when she is forced to do this, 
even though it may sometimes be necessary. 

	This suffering is often so great that an artist may decide to 
tailor her own values to appeal to an audience of real human 
beings, so that her art will be admired and/or paid for. A person 
who makes this kind of compromises is called a "second-hander" in 
the Fountainhead, and is considered to be a moral degenerate. The 
same kind of person is called a "trader" in Atlas Shrugged, and is 
considered to be a hero. Once Ayn Rand achieved financial success 
and recognition for herself, she conveniently forgot that people 
who refuse to become second-handers frequently find no one willing 
to trade with them, and thus end up starving in obscurity like 
Roark's mentor Henry Cameron. For the rest of us, to balance the 
demands of the ideal audience, who may exist only in one's mind for 
many years, and the real audience, with whom one could be in direct 
compassionate contact, is the hardest task that any genuinely 
creative person must face.

	This same choice is present for anyone in any profession, not 
just in morally glamorous activities like social work or art. A 
person who manufactures ice cream because he enjoys doing it, and 
wants to give people the happiness that comes from eating really 
good ice cream, is faced with a choice of values very similar to 
any other creative person's: Do you create for an ideal customer, 
who may not actually exist, or do you give the customer that is 
already there what he wants? There is a very real satisfaction in 
knowing you make the best ice cream there is, and an equally real 
satisfaction in knowing that people are enjoying what you make. 
Some businessmen take the attitude of Willoughby MacCormick, who 
said about his spices "If you make the best, someone will buy it." 
Others devote themselves to market research and make only whatever 
the public is already buying. It is tempting for those of us in the 
so-called creative arts to think that we have a rougher time with 
this choice than do other professions. After all, a lot more people 
eat ice cream than read books these days. But everyone, regardless 
of his calling, must decide how much he adapts himself to the world 
and how much he forces the world to adapt to him. It is the 
fundamental moral choice, and both Ayn Rand and Nietzsche did a 
tremendous service by showing the inadequacy of answering this 
question by saying only "live for others". 

	The view that we must live for others is neither true nor 
false, because it is confused. It is true that we cannot be happy 
unless our life positively benefits other people in some way, for 
we are by nature social animals. We define ourselves, however, by 
choosing our own specific way of benefiting other people. This 
choice is what determines our values and thus creates our Self. 
Rand claimed that any compromise of one's personal values to social 
pressure makes one a second-hander. I claim, however, that it is 
essential to sanity and survival that one's work eventually be 
experienced as valuable by a concrete social network of real human 
beings with whom one is in sympathetic contact. To live on the 
assumption that no one's opinions and feelings matter but your own 
is a useful attitude when one begins to define oneself as a 
creative individual, and it may be necessary to keep this attitude 
for many years in order to fully achieve one's highest goals. But 
it is a spiritually dangerous attitude to have, and anyone who is 
forced by circumstances to maintain it should be fully aware of the 
dangers.

	Ayn Rand had no use for compassion, and believed that a person 
had betrayed himself if he compromised his abstract values to 
accommodate another person. Roark, who exemplified her ideal on 
paper, was usually described as completely unaware of other 
people's feelings. He was "the fountainhead" because he was his own 
source of values, and when he was able to create on his own terms 
he was always happy and fulfilled. Ayn Rand tried to live her own 
life according to Roark's values, and was a success in their terms, 
and in society's terms as well. She had millions of admiring 
readers, an intimate circle of close friends and students, and 
financial success, achieving it all without ever compromising to 
anyone else's point of view. She repeatedly claimed that she and 
her closest friends were living proof that it was possible to live 
by her system of values. And yet despite her delusionary claims to 
the contrary, those who knew her best (most specifically Barbara 
and Nathaniel Branden) agreed that at the height of her success, 
she was miserable most of the time for no fully understandable 
reason. Perhaps this was because she failed to live up to her 
values, but it seems more plausible to me that her values 
themselves were flawed.

    Living compassionately with other people means engaging in a 
dialogue of values with them. During this dialogue we must maintain 
a sympathetic awareness of their values, while simultaneously 
keeping our personal values strong and consistent. To have this 
dialogue turn into a monologue is unhealthy for both the listener 
and the monologist. We must accept the fact that genuine dialogue 
always produces some changes in the belief systems of both parties 
that engage in it, and never results in one party completely 
surrendering her values to the other.

	I think that Ayn Rand's depressive tendencies came from the 
fact that she did not recognize the need to appreciate another 
person's viewpoint, either emotionally or rationally. Although she 
had many friends and admirers, her lack of sympathetic awareness 
seems to have made it impossible for her to be really aware of 
their thoughts and feelings. Most of her closest friends (being 
much younger than she was, and dazzled by her brilliance) ended up 
molding their lives to fit her values, hiding their differences 
from her and from themselves. Very rarely did she ever receive 
actual "input" from them, so it is likely that she rarely received 
the unique nourishment ordinarily received from compassionate 
awareness of friends and neighbors. In a very real sense, she was 
always "alone in a crowd", because she was incapable of empathizing 
with anyone who did not already think the same way that she did. 
This degree of self- absorption made it possible for her to see the 
world with a unique and profound vision. But the fact that she was 
not happy even though she was a success in her own terms seems to 
indicate that she had failed to place value on something that is 
essential to human fulfillment. 

	We cannot live in service of abstract principles alone without 
mutilating ourselves. Even though all of our highest values 
presuppose the goal of benefiting anyone who shares those values, 
it is not enough for us to perform our actions only for some 
abstract "ideal observer". We must be able to experience the 
benefits that flesh and blood human beings derive from our efforts. 
Nevertheless, it is also self-destructive to live the life of a 
"second-hander", which is only knee-jerk responses to compassionate 
impulses and/or the desire for praise. Abstract principles and 
compassion are both necessary if we are to live fulfilled lives  
as is the wisdom to know how to balance their frequently 
contradictory demands.


An Addendum, Mostly About Money

	I have developed the following diagram to summarize the main 
points of this paper. This diagram outlines the four possible 
combinations of two pairs of opposites: the social versus the 
personal and the universal versus the specific. At each 
intersection point are the names of two individuals for whom that 
combination is the highest value.

		  Social	 		      Personal 
universal 	Kant 			        Ebenezer Scrooge
		    Lenin			  	    Donald Trump

specific	Peter Keating 	  		Howard Roark
		    Mother Teresa			Ayn Rand


	Peter Keating, the archetypical second-hander who is Roark's 
foil in The Fountainhead, exemplifies the position that the 
opinions and feelings of the people we encounter socially are the 
only source of value. So does the compassionate value system of 
Mother Teresa, although in a significantly different way. Howard 
Roark and Ayn Rand exemplify the position that each person must 
have their own personal value system, which must be completely 
independent from the social pressure of people encountered in daily 
life. Both of these positions, however, have values that are 
relatively specific, when compared to the service of an abstract 
"common good," which is the highest value for Altruists like Kant 
and Lenin. (i.e. Roark follows his own personal values, and Keating 
follows the values of the particular people around him).

	I have already given my views about values which are Specific- 
Social and Specific-Personal in the preceding section of this 
paper, concluding that neither of these works if completely 
divorced from the other. I have also, in the section on Altruism, 
described the dangers of values which are Universal-Social, and 
thus make no reference to specific persons at all. In the interest 
of completeness, I think I should say something about values which 
are Universal-Personal, with special emphasis on the medium that 
frequently gives this value an illusion of concrete embodiment: 
Money.

 	Our values must be rooted firmly in concrete realities, because 
"universal" values are dangerously empty. Our social lives must be 
built around the real people whom we encounter in our daily lives, 
not around some abstract "common good" or "Categorical Imperative". 
Similarly our personal goals and desires must be built around some 
set of values that define who we are. To be selfish without a set 
of specific, concrete values is not to have a self at all.

	In Francisco D'Anconia's famous speech on money in Atlas 
Shrugged, he explains why it is impossible for a person without 
values to justify his life by accumulating money.

    "But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, 
but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the 
means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide 
you with desires... Money will not purchase happiness for the man 
who has no concept of what he wants: Money will not give him a code 
of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it 
will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of 
what to seek....Is this the reason why you call it evil?" (For the 
New Intellectual p. 90)

	Unfortunately, there are far too many people who love money who 
make this same mistake, and many of them are powerful figures in 
the industrial and financial world: Men like Trump, Boesky, and 
Milken, for example. Because money has no intrinsic value, a person 
whose highest value is money is really what Ayn Rand calls a "lone 
Wolf" driven by "Selfishness without a self" (see Philosophy: Who 
Needs It pp.56- 63). The activities of a person driven by genuine 
intrinsic values will benefit himself and anyone else who shares 
those values; a person who values money alone will only be feeding 
an insatiable addiction. The latter person may be doing worthwhile 
productive work as a by-product, but his value system will make it 
impossible for him to see this. An ice cream manufacturer with this 
kind of values would see himself only secondarily as pleasing his 
customers. His conscious goal would be to "beat the competition" so 
he can make money, and the fact that he can beat the competition 
only by pleasing his customers becomes obscured. Unfortunately, no 
one who believes that serving the public is necessarily 
unprofitable, altruistic, and self-sacrificing will be able to see 
that envisioning a better world, and using your money to create it, 
is more fun than piling up money for no reason at all.

	What most people (rich and poor) fail to realize is that it is 
possible to spend only a very small amount of money on one's 
personal needs, in comparison to the amount of money that very rich 
people actually have available to them. J. Paul Getty's yacht, 
mansion and Rolls Royce are not significantly more expensive than 
the ones owned by the numerous minor executives who work for him. 
The only thing you can do with the quantities of money which are 
called capital is to help other people with it, i.e. run an 
industry which provides jobs for its employees, services for its 
customers, and aid to charity and the arts with the surplus. This 
activity is selfish in that the industrialist gets to decide how 
and when to help people, and thus his work is a form of 
self-expression. But if you're not interested in helping people at 
all, there is really nothing you can do with that much money  
except use it to get more, and thus indefinitely put off the 
question of what the money itself ultimately is for. 

	Any profitable activity provides an opportunity to develop 
skills and make other people happy, if one is willing to see one's 
profession in those terms. It also frequently produces a surplus of 
wealth, which makes it possible to sponsor creative non-profit 
activities. A successful ice cream manufacturer can take the money 
that he earns from manufacturing ice cream, and use it to sponsor 
activities which he thinks are worthwhile but that don't turn a 
profit. (The way that Ben and Jerry's has done.) These non-profit 
activities will inevitably express the personality and values of 
their sponsor. If the benefactor made his money by carefully 
following market research trends in boring or obvious ways, he will 
probably choose boring and obvious charity projects like the Red 
Cross or the United Givers Fund. Creative businessmen like Ben and 
Jerry spend their money on projects which are as creative as the 
ways they found of making it. 

	It is quite obvious that men like Ben and Jerry have no 
interest in money for its own sake. Their love of ice cream and 
their skill in making it and marketing it is a form of personal 
expression for them, which fortunately brings them enough money 
that they can also express themselves through a variety of 
non-profit activities. What more could any "selfish" person want? 
(If we use Ayn Rand's definition of "selfish" as having a sense of 
self created by a strongly held set of personal values.) If all 
businessmen were selfish in this way, there would be very little 
need for government-run social programs. The amount of wealth and 
ingenuity that would consequently be focused on making a better 
world would be far greater than any amount of money ever spent by 
any welfare state, and the variety of positive visions that would 
be released by a free marketplace of social improvement would be 
far more colorful and exciting than any grey flannel utopia ever 
planned by a centralized philosopher-king. 

853A Crocker Ave
Daly City, CA 94014
415/585-8046


 * It must be said in all fairness that there are new perspectives 
manifesting in the Bay Guardian because of the distinction its 
writers now make between "Big Out-of-own Business" and "Small Local 
Business". The Guardian now runs favorable articles on business 
organizations such as Michael Phillips' Briar Patch Network, which 
teaches how it is possible to have "right livelihood" in a 
Capitalist society. I heartily applaud those at the Guardian who 
are encouraging this attitude, and hope it continues to grow. 

                                    