An opioid pill (Opana ER) that successfully relieves pain is being removed from the market by the FDA—not because of any claims of unsafety or inefficacy, but because people have found a way to pulverize the drug and inject it to get “high.” Since such people risk contracting HIV or hepatitis C through the sharing
A very favorable review of In Defense of Selfishness was written for Forbes.com by John Tamny. Titled “Ayn Rand and Henry Hazlitt Made the Same Point in Different Ways,” this edifying review can be found here.
In the realm of ethics, no characteristic is more widely condemned than selfishness. Practically no one challenges the premise, which we’re all taught from childhood, that acting for one’s own benefit is morally tainted, while sacrificing for the benefit of others is the essence of moral virtue. It is considered self-evident that selfishness is evil.
Here is an interesting email I received from a prospective reader of IN DEFENSE OF SELFISHNESS: “I am considering buying the book, but I am on the fence. Looking at the table of contents, it appears it may be more focused on defeating a negative than upholding a positive. For example, the section headings seem
The “season of giving” comes with its own set of commandments. Give back, we’re told. Remember the needy. Don’t give because it makes you feel good; give because it’s the right thing to do. But these platitudes don’t represent my perspective on the Christmas season. As an Objectivist, I’ve adopted an ethics not of altruism but of
I am extraordinarily happy to announce that I’ve gotten a publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, for my book. This is a major publisher—the same one, by the way, that published Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins. After considerable wrangling, we agreed on the following title: IN DEFENSE OF
Well before In Defense of Selfishness was published—when its working title was The Tyranny of Need—I was interviewed by Don Watkins of the Ayn Rand Institute. Here is an edited excerpt (and you can click below it for the audio version of the full interview): Q. If you asked most people what morality is, I think they
(This is a brief summary of my new book, followed by the Table of Contents.) What if the central idea we’re all taught about morality is wrong? Virtually everyone regards self-sacrifice as a moral virtue. From childhood on, we are told that serving the needs of others, rather than our own, is the essence of
When the Tea Party calls for real cuts in our welfare state, it is typically denigrated by the left as a practitioner of “extremism.” It would be a mistake though, to regard this response as mere name-calling. It is far more significant—and dangerous. This smear is an instance of a widespread technique regularly employed to undermine