Practicing the Virtue of Justice while Making Exceptions for the Ones We Love: A Contradiction?

In Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, Gail Wynand, one of the book’s protagonists, argues that “love is exception-making.”¹ At the same time, though, Rand upholds that the virtue of justice demands that we evaluate and treat every person we encounter justly, giving them neither more nor less than they deserve. “Justice,” American philosopher Leonard Peikoff explains, “is the virtue of judging men’s character and conduct objectively and of acting accordingly, granting to each man that which he deserves.”² Observations such as these have led some critical thinkers to question the compatibility of the virtue of justice and the nature of love. Is it true, they wonder, that we still consistently practice justice when we make exceptions for someone we love, be it our romantic partner or our best friend? Or are we faced with a contradiction? To show why Rand’s conception of love as exception-making does not violate the demands of justice, it is necessary to thoroughly understand what it means to consistently practice this virtue.

“Justice,” Rand writes in her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, “is the recognition of the fact that you cannot fake the character of men as you cannot fake the character of nature, that you must judge all men as conscientiously as you judge inanimate objects, with the same respect for truth, with the same incorruptible vision, by as pure and as rational a process of identification—that every man must be judged for what he is and treated accordingly.”³ Thus, like every other virtue, justice has two sides, an intellectual and an existential side. Intellectually, justice demands that one use one’s mind to the best of one’s ability to reach an objective verdict about the people one encounters. Existentially, the virtue of justice demands that one act in accordance with this knowledge by lauding and associating with moral people while condemning and shunning immoral people.

The embodiment of the virtue of justice, Rand holds, is what she calls the trader, i.e. the man who never grants the undeserved but instead, as Peikoff puts it, always “exchang[es] value for value by mutual consent to mutual benefit.”⁴ As Rand explains, “The symbol of all relationships among [rational] men, the moral symbol of respect for human beings, is the trader. … A trader is a man who earns what he gets and does not give or take the undeserved. A trader does not ask to be paid for his failures, nor does he ask to be loved for his flaws. … [A] trader is … a man of justice.”⁵

A rationalistic, out-of-context reading of the passages above indeed seems to suggest that the notion of love as exception-making is incompatible with the virtue of justice. How should it be possible to remain just, i.e. to never grant the undeserved, if one makes allowances for someone one loves? After all, being just is not a momentary exercise but an ongoing, non-contradictory, all-encompassing enterprise. As Peikoff explains, “Justice … is an absolute, an aspect of the proper relationship between one’s consciousness and existence. Justice is fidelity to reality in the field of human assessment, both in regard to facts and to values.”⁶ To understand why making exceptions for one’s romantic partner or one’s best friend does not violate the demands of justice, it is paramount to understand the discriminatory nature of love.

Whether he likes it or not, man has to make choices and to discriminate for as long as he remains in existence. If you are hungry and you want to eat a burger, you have to choose a restaurant in which to eat your meal, thereby effectively discriminating against all other restaurants. If you decide to contribute to a charity, you have to choose one organization, thereby effectively discriminating against all other organizations. If you are looking for a new employee for your company, you have to choose one of the applicants, thereby effectively discriminating against all other applicants. If you have a free afternoon and you long for an intimate conversation with a friend, you have to choose one of your friends, thereby effectively discriminating against all your other friends. In short, whenever man has to make a decision about how to spend his scarce resources, be it money or time, he has to discriminate in favor of one person or group as against all others. What we are faced with in this context is nothing but what has become known as the ‘basic economic problem’ applied to human relationships.

Just as in the scenarios mentioned above, man also has to discriminate in the realm of love. There is a difference, a difference not in kind but in degree, however, between the aforementioned examples and the selection of one’s romantic partner or one’s best friend, a difference which stems from the crucial importance such intimate relationships play in the life of a rational man.

Being served a yucky burger in a restaurant is certainly not a pleasant experience. After all, you can eat the unappetizing burger, refrain from eating it and stay hungry, or go to another restaurant and spend some more dollars for a substitute there. While none of these three scenarios is ideal, this particular experience will hardly have any long-term repercussions (unless and until there are, for instance, later signs of serious food poisoning). Similarly, hiring an employee who turns out to be unreliable and irresponsible is hardly an enjoyable encounter. At best, you will quickly realize that your new employee is a nuisance and fire him right away without any damage done. Worse, though, it may take time until you recognize the employee’s shortcomings and fire him. In this case, your employee might already have seriously damaged the reputation of your company (and indirectly your own reputation). Yet even in this scenario, there will likely be no long-term repercussions if your organization is generally known for its professionalism and if your other employees speak up for you.

Eating a yucky burger, giving money to a corrupt charity organization, hiring an irresponsible employee, trusting a disloyal acquaintance—as frustrating as any of these experiences may be, they usually do not have a lasting effect on our lives. The same can hardly be said about love, though. Sincerely loving a person who turns out to be a scoundrel often leads to serious emotional distress and may, if not coped with, even result in lifelong trauma.

The reason why love differs from the other scenarios is the special status intimate relationships play in the life of a rational person. It is highly unlikely that a rational person in a free society chooses only one restaurant where he eats burgers or that he finds only one employee whom he wants to work with. Rather, a rational consumer intends to have a varied diet to perfect his health. Similarly, a rational employer aims to hire employees with different strengths and fields of expertise to increase the profits of his company. In short, it is true that an exquisite restaurant, a virtuous charity organization, a reliable employee, and a loyal friend are all crucial values. Neither of these values is unique or irreplaceable, though. We usually do not spend our lives eating in merely one restaurant or working with merely one employee. Rather, substitutes are easily available.

The same can hardly be said about love. It would, for instance, be ludicrous (to put it mildly) if a man claimed that his partner is the love of his life yet that she is also easily replaceable. In contrast to the aforementioned scenarios, a rational man chooses only one woman whom he considers unique and with whom he wants to spend the rest of his life with. In doing so, he basically affirms her exceptional status by discriminating against every other woman on earth. If she turns out to be his soulmate and final choice, a rational man makes exceptions for her, i.e. he makes allowances for her which he would not make for any other person on earth, because of the special role she plays in his life. He knows that what he has found and what he is in love with is “the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness,”⁷ i.e. a person for whom there cannot possibly be a readily available substitute.

This point can perhaps be best exemplified by another alleged conundrum which has plagued some critics of Objectivism. On the one hand, Rand holds that man should maintain his life and pursue his happiness. “The Objectivist ethics,” she states, “holds man’s life as the standard of value—and his own life as the ethical purpose of every individual man.”⁸ Yet, on the other hand, Rand also argues that it is morally proper to risk one’s life (and even to kill oneself) to protect and save a person one truly loves. In The Fountainhead, for example, the novel’s protagonist Howard Roark tells his soulmate Gail Wynand, “Gail, if this boat were sinking, I’d give my life to save you. Not because it’s any kind of duty. Only because I like you, for reasons and standards of my own. I could die for you. But I couldn’t and wouldn’t live for you.”⁹ Similarly, in Atlas Shrugged, the novel’s protagonist John Galt tells Dagny Taggart, the woman he secretly loves, “[I]f [our enemies] get the slightest suspicion of what we are to each other, they will have you on a torture rack—I mean, physical torture—before my eyes, in less than a week. I am not going to wait for that. At the first mention of a threat to you, I will kill myself and stop them right there.”¹⁰

To overcome the two alleged conundrums outlined in this article, it is necessary to understand that a rational man puts his values into a hierarchical order. The virtue of integrity, in turn, demands that he never violate his value hierarchy but that he act in accordance with it. “[A]ll of a man’s values,” Rand stresses, “exist in a hierarchy; he values some things more than others; and, to the extent that he is rational, the hierarchical order of his values is rational: that is, he values things in proportion to their importance in serving his life and well-being.”¹¹

To a rational man, the realms of career and love place highest in his hierarchy of values for these are the two most life-serving areas of his life. Like productive work, intimate relationships greatly enhance his happiness. “[L]ove,” Rand highlights, “is an expression and assertion of self-esteem, a response to one’s own values in the person of another. One gains a profoundly personal, selfish joy from the mere existence of the person one loves. It is one’s own personal, selfish happiness that one seeks, earns and derives from love.”¹² Aware of the unique, irreplaceable role the people he loves play in his lives, a rational man will treat these individuals differently than others. If he, for instance, sees that somehow he appreciates, i.e. an acquaintance or a friend, is drowning, a rational man would first judge the risk involved in saving the person and then take the appropriate action. Valuing his own life, he would not give his life to save them, though. If he, however, sees that somehow he loves, i.e. his romantic partner or his best friend, is drowning, he will act differently. Understanding the irreplaceable value of these people, he might well decide to give his life to save them and try to save them at the risk of his own life. As Rand puts it, “If the person to be saved is not a stranger, then the risk one should be willing to take is greater in proportion to the greatness of that person’s value to oneself. If it is the man or woman one loves, then one can be willing to give one’s own life to save him or her—for the selfish reason that life without the loved person could be unbearable.”¹³ Indeed, Rand goes as far as arguing that the man who would not attempt to save a person he loves due to lack of courage needs to be deemed immoral. “[I]f a man,” she writes, “is able to swim and to save his drowning wife, but becomes panicky, gives in to an unjustified, irrational fear and lets her drown, then spends his life in loneliness and misery[,] one would condemn him morally for his treason to himself and to his own values, that is: his failure to fight for the preservation of a value crucial to his own happiness.”¹⁴

The reason why making exceptions for the people one loves is not a violation but an affirmation of both integrity and justice is that moral principles, such as virtues, are not only absolute but also contextual. As Peikoff explains:

Just as particular objects must be evaluated in relation to moral principles, so moral principles themselves must be defined in relation to the facts that make them necessary. Moral principles are guides to life-sustaining action that apply within a certain framework of conditions. Like all scientific generalizations, therefore, moral principles are absolutes within their conditions. They are absolutes—contextually.¹⁵

Consistently practicing the virtue of justice means always judging people objectively and then treating them accordingly by granting each person what he or she deserves in a particular context. Consequently, there is no intrinsic, all-size-fits-all, out-of-context demand of the virtue of justice. It would, for instance, be ridiculous to claim that the virtue of justice demands that we spend exactly seven minutes and twenty-two seconds attempting to save any drowning person we encounter, regardless of the level of risk and intimacy involved. Rather, acting in accordance with our rational hierarchy of values demands that we take the context into consideration.

Given the unique and irreplaceable status of the people we love, the virtue of justice actually demands that we treat our romantic partners and our best friends differently than other people. By making exceptions for the people we love, we effectively reaffirm the exceptional role these people play in our lives. In doing so, we grant them precisely what they deserve by performing actions which we would not perform in any other context. As Gail Wynand puts it, “[L]ove is exception-making. If you were in love you’d want … the impossible, the inconceivable for you in your relations with people. That would be the one gift, the great exception you’d want to offer the man you loved.”¹⁶

By choosing a person as our romantic partner or our best friend, we discriminate against every other person on earth. By giving them a unique place in our value hierarchy, we make a great exception. The exceptional status of our soulmates, romantic and nonromantic alike, in turn, leads us to treat these individuals differently than any other person on earth, including our casual friends and acquaintances. Doing so is not a violation of the virtue of justice or the virtue of integrity. Rather, such actions reveal loyalty to one’s rational hierarchy of values in action.

1. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (London: Penguin, [1943] 2007), 515.

2. Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (New York: Meridian, [1991] 1993), 276.

3. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (London: Penguin, [1957] 2007), 1019 [emphasis in the original].

4. Peikoff, Objectivism, 276.

5. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1022 [emphasis in the original].

6. Peikoff, Objectivism, 282.

7. Ayn Rand, “Philosophy and Sense of Life,” The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, 2nd ed (New York: Signet, [1969] 1975), 22.

8. Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, [1964] 2014) [emphasis in the original].

9. Rand, The Fountainhead, 636.

10. Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1091.

11. Ayn Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies,” The Virtue of Selfishness [emphasis added].

12. Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies.”

13. Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies.”

14. Rand, “The Ethics of Emergencies.”

15. Peikoff, Objectivism, 274-275 [emphasis in the original].

16. Rand, The Fountainhead, 515-516.