Ayn Rand, whose birthday it was last week (born February 2 1905), was not the kind of person you’d want as an ethics advisor. Or at least I wouldn’t. Her moral (some would say “immoral”) position, honed as a reaction against her early life in Russia, was that each of us should look out for him/herself, and other people’s interests be damned.
In her novels, including the bestseller Atlas Shrugged, and in essays and media appearances, she championed individualism against the sort of philosophy that takes others’ interests seriously. For her, all collectivism was bad, and self-reliance was good. It was immoral for the weak to expect anything from the strong. Laissez-faire capitalism was the right way to live. Unfettered self-interest was the key to the future of humanity.
Although she’s not taken seriously by philosophers, she still has many fans (including, disconcertingly, Sajid Javid). But her approach, sometimes described in seemingly contradictory terms as “ethical egoism” is antithetical to ethics. Ethics begins when we give some weight to other people’s interests rather than just to our own. That is the minimum requirement. Someone who ruthlessly pursues their own egotistic interests whenever they can get away with that is a nasty piece of work and tantamount to a psychopath – certainly they are outside the realm of morality. Grabbing what you can get isn’t a moral position, it’s an affliction. No amount of pseudo-philosophical Randian rationalisation is going to change that.
Which brings us back to UK politics today. Despite the festering smell of sleaze, no one in government is openly claiming, Rand-style, that ruthless pursuit of self-interest is all that matters. Or at least not yet. That doesn’t mean they’re not thinking it, of course – if ethical considerations don’t have any weight for you, seeming to be one thing and yet being another might be the swiftest way to your goal – that’s something that Machiavelli recognised. But let’s take Rishi Sunak’s expressed desire to bring integrity into the heart of government again at face value. If he wants ethics to be part of this, and if he wants to curb those within government who put their own self-interest higher than the country’s interests, what would that mean philosophically?
If I were Rishi Sunak’s ethics advisor, I’d point out that ethical judgments should be impartial in the sense that they are made on the assumption that people judged are treated equally, without special favour. When you make an ethical judgment such as that it is wrong for a minister to conceal that he has been subject to a tax investigation by HMRC, or has had to pay a fine, or has in some way broken the ministerial code, then that judgment has to hold not just for that individual, but for any other individual in relevantly similar circumstances. That sort of principle should have held too for those who attended illegal parties during lockdown. If the morally appropriate response was dismissal for one individual, it should have been the appropriate response for any other individual in similar circumstances.
Whenever someone in power behaves inconsistently or gets differential treatment, there is the suspicion that they are no longer behaving or being treated ethically, that some other consideration has clouded judgment or given them a special joker card to play. But the point about acting ethically and with integrity (which is what Sunak has said he wants to do) is that ethical considerations should trump all other considerations. You can’t claim to be acting ethically and then let party politics determine the outcome. That’s just expediency. Ethics is a matter of doing the right thing for the right reasons, and if those reasons hold for one person, they should hold for anyone else in relevantly similar circumstances.
The get-out here, of course, is the phrase “in relevantly similar circumstances”. That leaves some leeway for interpretation. But here the onus has to be on the person making the exception to spell out precisely what is special about these allegedly special circumstances. If not, the suspicion is that they’re incapable of giving good reasons as to why this particular case requires such special treatment, or worse, that they’ve deliberately treated similar cases differently.
To take just one example of apparent inconsistency, if Nadhim Zahawi is unfit to be a minister because of his breach of the ministerial code, why, as I write, is Suella Braverman, who the Conservatives’ former chairman has said made “multiple breaches of the ministerial code”, still in office?
