Should You Want To Live?
Should you want to live? Read that again. Should you want to live? It's not an obvious question. It's a fishy question. For Ayn Rand, the purpose of morality is enjoyment, long-range, i.e. life. The whole problem of morality is that we often want to do things that are bad for that goal . Moral thinking helps us discover the ideas and the courses of action that further our interest , as opposed to our immediate pleasure or satisfaction. If you don't want to live, then, according to Objectivism, moral arguments are irrelevant, because you've given up what moral argumentation appeals to: the desire for durable joy . The choice to live is pre-moral. Morality is about how to live. Choose to live—to pursue happiness—then we can talk about morality. Some think that because "man's life" is the standard of morality in Objectivism, bare survival is all that Objectivist morality involves. They hold that any desire for happiness above bare survival, according t