Heroes

Ayn Rand identified the “package deal” as one of the deadly errors of thinking: combining opposites into the one concept, thus hopelessly confusing thinking. It is at its worst in ethical issues, where something good is conflated with something bad: something that can only damage the good and promote the bad.

A terrible example of package deal thinking is displayed in, of all places, a recent Scientific American blog: Walking the Line Between Good and Evil: The Common Thread of Heroes and Villains. There is indeed a “fine line between good and evil”, we are told, a notion supported by “science”. Heroes, it goes on to say, are “extreme altruists”, characterised by impulsive, rule-breaking behaviour no different in essence from a psychopath, just pointed in a different, more “useful”, direction.

If anything more was needed to show why philosophy is important, especially to scientists, this blog is it. It makes bland conformance to social “rules” the standard by which behaviour is judged. It identifies heroism by inessentials, defines it by altruism, and explains it by effectively deranged psychological mechanisms. Then pretends that mess is “scientific”. Compare this view of heroism with Ayn Rand’s in her epilogue to Atlas Shrugged:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Which is the true hero? The man or woman described by Rand: or a psychopath whose only difference from a murderer is an arbitrary emotional choice to be an extreme altruist rather than a killer?

There is no fine line between good and evil, between heroism and villainy. They are polar opposites. The first is defined by a rational, life-promoting pursuit of values, whatever it takes. The second is irrational, destructive and anti-life.

Yes, someone can do something courageous out of irrational motives. But that does not define heroism.