Hudgins Communicates Ethics

Edward Hudgins, The Objectivist Center's Washington, D.C., director, spoke at a conference on "Communicating the Ideal of Liberty," sponsored by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and the Sutherland Institute. Hudgins was on the opening panel at the August 14 event in Salt Lake City, Utah. That panel, on "Developing an Ethical Basis for the Communication of Liberty in a Diverse and Divided World," featured spokesmen for Catholic, Muslim, and Jewish organizations who each argued that his faith is consistent with free markets and a free society.

Hudgins countered by arguing for a uniquely secular approach to establishing and strengthening the moral basis for a free society—an approach that originated in Aristotle, Cicero, and Ayn Rand, but which might find favor with those in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, Averroes, and Moses Maimonides. Hudgins maintained that many individuals consider arguments with their minds, their emotions, and their moral sense. Too often their emotions, informed by faulty moral premises, overwhelm their reason, which causes them to support anti-freedom public policies. He suggested that a new individualism could deal with this dilemma.

Individualism, Hudgins noted, has both ethical and political aspects that must be linked together in the hearts and minds of citizens if a free society is to be sustained. Individualists accept their own lives are their highest value and have the deepest sense of self-respect. They recognize that to achieve joy and happiness, they must practice the virtues of rationality—true individualists are not slaves to irrational whims. And individualists take the responsibility for creating the means of their physical and spiritual well-being and take pride in their achievements.

In society, individualists thus expect to be free to live by their own efforts and judgment. Because they do not wish the unearned, they have no desire to violate the rights of others.

Hudgins observed that if this ethos were widely accepted, governments would have a difficult time limiting freedom because individualists would take such limits as attacks on their lives, their dignity, and the values by which they live. Their emotional reactions—based on sound moral premises informed by reason—would impel them to strongly resist such attacks.

Hudgins's talk met with positive reactions from attendees from over a dozen countries, exhibiting the wide appeal of Objectivist principles.