What is Heroic Individualism?

Assume the Crown!

A Non-Answer

This page talks about Heroic Individualism. The rest of the site aims to do philosophy in that spirit and style. If you really want to know what Heroic Individualism is, you need to read the rest of the site and continue reading upstream to its many sources and tributaries.

An Answer by Slogans

Know Thyself!
Become who you are!
Love your fate!
Be all you can be!
Make something of yourself!
Assume the Crown!

An Answer in Pithy Quotations

No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. (Emerson)

All good things which exist are the fruits of originality. (Mill)

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist. (Nietzsche)

A Concise Answer

Heroic Individualism is an orientation in ethics according to which living rightly and living well come together in one’s honest efforts to realize one’s ideal self. Heroic Individualism conceives each person as the protagonist and author of an unfolding story whose narrative arc instantiates a personal destiny worthy of appreciation, admiration, and even reverence if only one musters the courage and integrity to be worthy of who one is.

A More Simply Stated Concise Answer

The Heroic Individualist supposes the only authoritative standard in ethics issues from one’s own ideal self. One’s ideal self is the main character of the story of one’s life told so the hero is exactly who one aspires to become. Though much in life is not up to you, you are always free to become that character. Become who you are!

An Answer Situated in Historical/Philosophical Context

Daemon means "spirit" in ancient Greek. Eudaemonia literally means something like "a spirit in harmony" and is usually translated as "happiness." For the ancients, the best sort of life manifests this blessed harmony of soul. If a man is to live well, he is advised "to attend to the daemon within him, and to reverence it sincerely." Thus does Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, invite and provoke each reader to his own meditations. According to this ancient wisdom, the wellsprings of the good life are to be found not in the opinions and concerns of other men, but in the expressions of that divinity abiding within one’s own soul. The search for this inner divinity cannot be delegated to another; one must meditate upon one’s self for one’s self. However, this call to self-reliance by no means entails our quests must be solitary and without helps, for we are already nudged and cajoled along the way by the sage emperor and those others inspired of a similar wisdom, thinkers who well understood the heroic task of becoming who one is. Their works do not pretend to tell us how to live well so much as they invite us to think along with them as they wrestle with themselves, provoking each reader to wrestle also with her self. Their meditations invite and provoke our meditations.

Heroic Individualism is an approach to ethics that means to recover for our age an ancient wisdom discernible in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics but most clearly exemplified in the 19th Century works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and John Stuart Mill. Like Existentialism, with which it enjoys a certain kinship and family resemblance, Heroic Individualism is not defined in terms of any specific theory or set of doctrines. It is rather an orientation towards ethics in which the story of one’s life neither comes with nor requires the external warrant, sanction, or approval of some deity or transcendent moral order, each individual being forced instead to rely upon nothing but himself as his own author and audience in justification of his existence. Such fierce individualism remains popular beyond the walls of the academy but is frequently condemned on campuses by moralists and utopians of all stripe. Contemporary scholarly opinion typically conflates the rugged individualism of the romantic hero for the methodological individualism of politics and economics. This conflation has led many thinkers to mistake ethical individualism for an atomistic, abstract, and asocial doctrine. Heroic Individualism sets out to correct this confusion by confronting readers with a rich, concrete, socially situated individualism grounded in the notion of the self as a center of narrative gravity. Heroic individualism conceives each person as the protagonist of an unfolding story whose narrative arc instantiates a personal destiny worthy of appreciation, admiration, and even reverence. Heroic Individualism means to provoke readers to discover themselves and to stand up for themselves as the rugged individuals they aspire to be, redeeming the profane world by the divinity of that inner daemon whose holy voice banishes all nihilism borne of the death of God and collectivist substitutes for God. Against the collectivists’ inevitable bombast, "Ich bin das Volk!" the heroic individual declares, "Ich bin, der ich bin!"

A More Philosophically Technical Answer

Every discussion must begin somewhere. Let our discussion begin with as neutral and broad a conception of ethics as we can muster. Suppose ethics is the study of what there is most reason to do or want. So defined, ethics is not narrowly concerned with the stuff of morality--rules, duties, obligations, and the like. These may be some part of ethics, but ethics aspires to investigate all of what is and is not worthy of pursuit and to what degree. The results of this investigation can be articulated in terms of a conception of the good. One's conception of the good is one's implicit or explicit answer to the questions of ethics; it says what one believes there is most reason to do or want.

A tempting mistake in ethical reasoning proceeds immediately from the articulation of some conception of the good to conclusions about how everyone ought to behave if that conception is true. This supposes that if a conception of the good is true, then it must describe ethical facts independent of the agent whose conception it is, such that a true conception of the good will hold good across agents. A conception of the good declares some truth with respect to reasons, and it seems natural to suppose that, since reasons are universal, insofar as I have a reason to do x, anyone ought to do x. To accommodate this rationalist impulse, whatever diversity across conceptions of the good resists this formula is declared not to describe real reasons after all and is discarded as a matter of mere accident, taste, or desire. However, this all assumes rather than proves that agents are interchangeable with respect to reasons for action. It treats the self who is the subject of ethical predicates as a bare logical atom who will be exactly what it is no matter what is attached to it. Alternatively, if who I am depends on what reasons I take myself to have, or vice versa, then it would be a mistake to substitute "anyone" for "I" in "I have a reason to do x." If who I am is entangled with what ethical claims are true of me, then the truth of an ethical claim depends on who the claim is about. This does not abolish the universality of reasons, but it constrains it almost to nothing. Given my conception of the good, it may be true that if you were me, then you ought to do x, but it does not follow that you ought to do x. You are not me. We are unlike in many respects, but it is plausible that you are not me in part because who you are depends on your conception of the good. In that case, there is a real sense in which you cannot become me, since becoming me would mean you are no longer you. Knee-jerk universalism in ethics obscures the possibility that the reasons one accepts are thus partly constitutive of one's self and vice versa.

A constitutive relation between one's self and one's conception of the good suggests itself since any complete conception of the good includes or implies a conception of one's ideal self—the person one aspires to become. One's character makes one more or less well suited to discovering, realizing, and enjoying the good, so pursuit of the good entails a reason to realize one's ideal self. Consequently, one's highest conception of one's self stands before one's self as a good. To pursue the good successfully on my own terms, I shall have to become the person I aspire to be. At the same time, whether I am on the path to success on my own terms will depend on who I take myself to be now. Thus, diligent interrogation of my conception of the good will result in an inventory of who I take myself to be and who I aspire to become. Though perhaps not the whole of who I am, this is surely a chief part. That so much of who I am is given in my conception of the good is a pregnant realization, for it promises to ground the whole rich language of character ethics in nothing beyond my present subjective motivational set insofar as this implicitly or explicitly projects for itself an ideal. Further reflection reveals that no further ground for all the data of our normative lives may be needed. If I attend to who I aspire to become, all the rest of ethics falls into place. What is good for me is sufficient to ground to whole of ethics. This is the main hypothesis of what we will call ethical individualism.

If the self and whatever ethical claims are true of that self are metaphysically entangled, then one cannot come to know about either in terms of the other. One cannot read off who one should become from what reasons one has, nor what reasons one has from who one should become. One shall have to investigate both at once. To accomplish this, Heroic Individualism proposes to study the self in the full context of the field of reasons with which it is entangled. That full context is plausibly given in terms of a concrete character embedded in a concrete narrative. So, the Heroic Individualist supplements ethical individualism with the further hypothesis that one's present self and one's ideal self are each discovered in the context of the unfolding story of one's life, of which one is at once sole author and lead protagonist. Once upon a time, it was believed that some other Author was responsible for the whole story of the world, and this settled some range of ethical claims as demanding universal assent, but such fairytales have lost their warm charm in an age of cold science. In this new circumstance, the extent to which ethical claims hold good across individuals becomes an empirical matter discovered in the unfolding of concrete reality, as individuals settle ethical claims for themselves. Since there is no other author dictating what shall be the contents of your story, you will have to be a Promethean hero, stealing divine fire on your own behalf. The nearest the Heroic Individualist has to a categorical imperative: Become the hero of your own story!

A Long Answer by Way of Dialogue with a Curious Skeptic

"Isn't what you're calling ethical individualism just another name for ethical egoism?"

That's basically right, so long as we're careful to avoid certain confusions regarding what that means. First off, egoism is an ethical theory, sometimes presented as a theory of right action according to which an act is right if and only if it most advances the self-interest of the agent doing the action; conceived as a theory of right action, egoism contrasts with utilitarianism and, like utilitarianism, has to be supplemented with some specific value theory to constitute a complete ethical theory. When people think of egoism, they are usually thinking of hedonist egoism, which says you should always do whatever brings you the most pleasure. In contrast to all this, Heroic Individualism does not purport to be a theory of anything, and it certainly does not endorse any selfish or base hedonism. In general, the word "egoism" is too easily confused for "egotism." Egoism says right action is self-interested, but self-interested does not mean selfish. If ethical individualism is an egoism, then it is eudaemonist egoism, and this must not be mistaken for egoism attached to some shallower value theory like hedonism or preference satisfaction. The emphasis for Heroic Individualism is really on the eudaemonism rather than the egoism. If it turns out that all the questions in ethics can be addressed in eudaemonist terms, as I strongly suspect is the case, then there is really little reason to posit any further morality beyond the pursuit of one's own flourishing. That is eudaemonist egoism, I suppose, but I'm sure there are more and less individualist versions of eudaemonist egoism (probably the classical eudaemonists like Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics were egoists but not individualists). So, ethical individualism has certain affinities with eudaemonist egoism, but it is not just another name for the same thing.

Indeed, some folks I would count as Heroic Individualists, like John Stuart Mill, are not egoists at all. Mill is officially a utilitarian and even officially a hedonist (of a curious sort), but the passages in which his individualism especially stand out have a decidedly eudaemonist ring to them, at least to my ear. (Look at On Liberty, especially the chapter, "On Individuality, as one of the elements of well-being." It is interesting that Mill attributes much of that work to his wife, Harriet Taylor. Maybe she was a eudaemonist egoist and no utilitarian? Hard to tell.) Nietzsche and Emerson are more plausibly egoist, at least in certain moods, but they are both sufficiently anti-theoretical and unsystematic to make it hard to say for sure.

In the end, I think they were right to avoid theory and system. That's the way of science, not ethics. If I were forced to chose a theoretical descriptor for my own ethics, however, I might settle on eudaemonist egoism as the least bad option available.

I hope that answered the question. Was there supposed to be some objection? Your tone of voice was a bit dubious.

"I'm still sorting out what to think. Is Heroic Individualism an immoralist view, then?"

That's still not really an objection, though I still hear the tone of an objection, or at least some expression of incredulous disapproval. As "egoism" is sometimes misused more to indict than describe, so is "immoralism." More so, in fact, since the term is intended to shock and provoke. Yes, it is probably fair to say Heroic Individualism entertains ideas a theorist might call immoralist egoism, but those words have a precise meaning in the philosophical lexicon and are liable to give lay readers the wrong impression.

I think it's typical of any Heroic Individualist to take a dim view of any kind of shrill moralizing, but that's not the same as being an immoralist. For the individualist, you may have your morality and I may have mine. Just keep your morality off my lawn and we can get along fine. Some expressions of Heroic Individualism go a bit farther and more or less endorse Nietzsche's criticism of transcendent morality. It is in this sense that he calls himself an "immoralist." I am happy to call myself an immoralist in the precise sense Nietzsche meant, but I usually don't since I think there's a pragmatic reason to keep moral language around. In that sense, I am more a reductionist than an eliminativist or error theorist with respect to moral claims. Individuals really do mean to live up to their own moralities, even if they acknowledge there are no moral commands with the magical power to compel the respect of all humans or all rational beings as such or whatever. Since there's room to speak of a morality grounded entirely on one's own conception of what is true, beautiful, and good, the individualist can and perhaps should endorse a robustly pluralistic conception of morality according to which each individual is the ultimate moral authority in her own life. I have my morals, and you have yours. Nietzsche's criticism of morality is mostly about rejecting the notion that there is some real, external standard of conduct built into the fabric of the universe as declared by God or Reason or Some Other Capitalized Thing that Is Not Me. He opposes such transcendent moral truth, and I sympathize with his view, but I suppose nothing transcendent needs enter into moral discourse. It is merely a semantic quibble whether my talk of individualist moralities should properly count as moral discourse. Kant and others of his ilk—along with certain kinds of error theory—might deny that a morality less than categorical in its commands is "really" a morality at all, and this may be what prompted Nietzsche's provocative name for his position—not that Nietzsche needed excuses to be provocative. In any case, I take it this is mostly just about what to call something and not about what it is. Call things what you like, so long as everything is clear.

If it makes things more clear to you, then I am happy to call myself an immoralist eudaemonist egoist, but bear in mind that not all Heroic Individualists would be so sanguine about this specific theoretical jargon. Mill tries to shoehorn his individualism into an alternative theoretical framework, while Nietzsche and Emerson resist being easily categorized into any particular theoretical framework.

"So, you're an immoralist and an egoist and an individualist. Why are you so anti-social? Didn't your mother love you enough as a child?"

Now you're not even pretending to offer a question or an argument, and you've gone all the way over into abuse.

There's nothing anti-social about a view that contends each individual is justified in treating his own excellence on his own terms as his ultimate moral standard, since those excellences almost without exception issue in highly pro-social attitudes and beliefs. Humans are highly social animals, after all. We needn't add any fairytales to make these attitudes and beliefs effective. I don't need God or Big Brother or Pure Reason to tell me that I ought to care about those I care about. That I already do care about them is sufficient for me to reflect on the kind of person I need to be to advance their interests, which are utterly identified by me with my own interests.

And my mother loved me plenty, just as I love my kids plenty. Sheesh.

"You're a father? You spent all that time and energy for the benefit of another?"

Yes, I did. Twice. On purpose.

"But what reason did you have as an immoralist egoist to behave for the benefit of another?"

You left out eudaemonist. Correcting for that crucial omission makes it clear that such activities are not merely to the benefit of another. I was expressing my conception of my highest self. I was doing what I need to do to flourish as the thing I am.

"So you just use your kids as instruments to your own good? You're just using them for your own ends?"

No. The well being of those I care about is constitutive of my flourishing. It's not that benefiting them causes pleasure in me or anything like that. The good life for me is partly constituted by their well being. For my own sake, I care about each of them for their own sake.

"So your flourishing involves caring about others, and you're not really an egoist after all!"

I don't see how caring for others contradicts eudaemonist egoism. My reasons for action are all grounded in my own flourishing.

"You've just admitted you don't care only for yourself. That's a phony egoism."

As I worried might happen when I allowed the word "egoism," you're conflating "self-interested" for "selfish." These are not the same thing. Aristotle makes the distinction clear in his contrast between "good self-love" and "bad self-love." One can do a better or worse job of pursuing one's own interests, and the selfish person generally does an especially bad job. Since there is a fact about whether one is or is not pursuing one's own interests effectively, there are grounds for criticizing or praising one's character and behavior that do not rely on any transcendent morality or alien point of view. When I criticize you by saying you failed to accomplish your own goals, my criticism cannot be dismissed as mere moralizing or applying to you standards that are not your own. All the more, I cannot evade my own failures when I criticize myself for failing to accomplish my own acknowledged goals. That's all ethics has to be. If I care about my own flourishing, the rest all takes care of itself. The well being of those I care about is part of my flourishing because I care about them. There is no room to contrast my own interests with theirs, since their interests help to constitute my interests.

"But your conception of the good smuggles in a bunch of morally laden stuff through the back door, like your caring for others. You're not being a very good immoralist, but I'll grant that you're being sneaky."

My own highest conception of myself includes a description of my excellences. Many of these excellences entail adopting ends that are pursued for their own sakes, as constituents of and not mere instruments to the good life, and the harmonious union of all these ends constitutes what is pursued for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else—my conception of the chief good, flourishing, eudaemonia, happiness, the good life, whatever exact words you prefer.

These excellences pertain to a host of human pursuits, describing such various roles as being a father, a husband, a friend, a teammate, a colleague, a teacher, an artist, a biker, a headbanger, a philosopher. Excellence in each of these roles demands commitment to some or another incarnate conception of what is good and worthy of pursuit. The sum total of these constitutes my conception of the chief good. As an immoralist egoist, as you prefer to frame it, this conception of the chief good exhausts my reasons for action, but you underestimate the resources such a conception typically has for demanding high standards of ethical performance. As Emerson says, "If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment one day." I'm not smuggling anything in that isn't some part of my flourishing as the individual I actually am. I'm busy enough with all my various projects that there's no need or room to add another project called "transcendent morality" or whatever other external authority you might imagine.

"But you're missing the point of the question. Where do you get all these ideas about what's good and bad if not from an inherited transcendent morality you mean to do away with? What grounds all this values talk without reference to any external standard of good and bad, right and wrong? Where's your flourishing get its content if not from something that's already good in itself?"

Oh, the usual stuff. Genes, environment, history, quantum flux. That kind of stuff.

"Huh?"

What grounds virtues and values without transcendent morality is mostly just a matter of best guesses about what sort of thing I am and what will turn out well for a being like that. Much of this is based on evidence from history and stories and testimony supplementing my biologically inherited cognitive and perceptual apparatuses, but these are all just directed to best guesses about empirical matters that do not lend themselves to the methods of science because they regard some ultimate particular. It seems like I would be happier if I became a father, so I make the experiment and accommodate myself to the results. There is a fact of the matter here. I will or will not prove happier for my choice, but the fact that most humans do or do not find they are happier for becoming parents or whatever is of limited relevance for discovering the truth. I may or may not be like other humans in the relevant respects. Past performance is no guarantee of future returns, and all that. The judgment involves a particular project in the life of a particular individual, and the experiment cannot be repeated, so the matter cannot be settled by scientific method and must be left to a practical wisdom regarding the ultimate particular that operates more like perception than calculation or reasoning. Culture informs all this. Biology informs all this. Logic and a critical examination of my cultural and biological inheritances matter too. That's how one makes one's inheritances one's own—by affirmation in self-reliant reflection. I make my guesses and place my bets. I commit myself. Thus do I make something of myself and create values, which is not so mysterious or radically untethered from reality as it might sound.

In light of an inherited folk psychology that enables me to explain and predict the behaviors of the many exceedingly complex beings with whom I interact regularly, a framework I seem wired to operate within in expectation and aspiration even if not always in fact, it's not at all crazy to think that sincere and successful commitment to one's conception of the good will promote such virtues as loyalty, honesty, and discipline; along with these are higher order virtues like integrity, which says what it means for me to fashion the best character I can have for myself over the course of a whole life. In large measure, expectations and aspirations make the reality, but these are grounded in objective facts about my biology and history. There is nothing queer or superstitious here; it's all stuff based in the same natural world described at a different level by the natural sciences. Your ideal self is not some spooky ghost or transcendent form.

"Haven't psychologists had a hard time finding virtue in actual humans?"

That's no surprise, since integrity is an accomplishment and not an established fact.

Your ideal self is just who you would be if you hit upon being exactly the sort of person best suited to live well on your own terms. That doesn't guarantee anyone will live up to his own ideal. Indeed, one may have no way to know whether one has hit the mark even in one's own specific case, but we can each still aspire to be a bit more articulate about what we're aiming for in a general way. In general, this can be accomplished by becoming versed in the language of virtue. Without appeal to some transcendent morality, it may seem that living well does not require the virtues, at least not according to every conception of the good (a lucky hedonist may very well live up to his avowed conception of the good), but the pursuit of living well does entail a commitment to some conception of the good, and such a commitment entails the virtues. The hedonist who does not wish to rely on luck alone will have to concern himself with virtue. The nearest there is to a categorical imperative in all this has very little content and nothing discernibly moral in any grand sense: Become the person you aspire to be; or, what comes to the same thing, whatever you propose to do, do it well. It turns out that is remarkably hard to do, and loads in more ethical content from the whole context of life than one might expect.

"But why pursue excellence in roles that require you to benefit another? Why bother to be a father? Without some higher warrant, why bother to do anything?"

That last question is an expression of nihilism, and it is phony, at least as far as I'm concerned, and I'm guessing it's phony for you too. You're not really puzzled about this any more than I am, but we philosophers like to press beyond what's already obvious until it becomes mysterious. I too have felt the indigestion of an impending nihilism. It passes. The simple fact is I really cannot live as a nihilist. I am a father. The only choice is to be good at it or bad at it. Before I was a father, I wanted to be a father. It seemed to me like a good thing to be. How things seem to me is no choice either. The only choice is whether to trust this desire as akin to perception of a good or to mistrust it as misperception. On this, I make my guess and place my bets. I commit myself. Since I am bombarded by appearances of value all the time in the form of my desires, I have a hard time taking total nihilism seriously. It's just wrong to suppose I have to work from nothing in all this.

Of course, all these appearances of value have their causal histories in biological evolution shaped by selection pressures that are no part of my own goals as they present themselves to me. Roughly, humans like me want to make babies because any ancient humans who didn't want to make babies didn't make babies and their traits were not passed on. I'm around because my ancestors made babies, and they passed on to me whatever traits encouraged that. So? Acknowledging that causal history needn't alter how I experience the choice or activity of raising kids. All my machinery for appraising the world is attuned to certain ways of life. Some of that is quite inappropriate to the modern world, so I need to be critical and discerning about all this, but I can hardly expect to live well on my own terms if I choose to fight against my nature instead of working with it. That doesn't mean I just have to accept whatever stupid desires I have; part of my inherited machinery of choice is a capacity to reflect on whether another piece of cake would be as good for me as my desires might make it seem. Navigating all this is not something that can be reduced to any pat formula, and I doubt the language of science will be much help when these questions about the ultimate particular are confronted in the first person concrete. This is part of why certain theoretical aspirations in ethics seem especially misguided to me, but I suspect we can at least be a bit more articulate in all this by mastering the language of desire and the language of virtue. That's where my appearances of value meet my machinery for evaluating appearances of value.

As anyone but a moralist, a religious fanatic or a nihilist would grant, I have reasons to care about being an excellent father, husband, friend, colleague, neighbor, or whatever, just because these are the things that matter to me. It makes no difference that this is "just" a consequence of the total causal history of the universe to this point. It follows that I have reasons to cultivate the virtues, reasons which reflect my commitment to an ideal of self and prepare me to benefit others in my roles as father, husband, friend, colleague, neighbor, or whatever, all of which is required by the pursuit of living well, at least for me but probably for you too.

"Well, this now all sounds terribly mild for an admitted immoralist."

You called me an immoralist, though I admitted the term. When I use it to describe myself, it's mostly ironic. In my mouth, "we immoralists" means something like, "we free spirits disapproved of by Kantians, utilitarians, politically correct social justice warriors, church ladies, and all the other finger-wagging moralists." The free spirit needn't run wild, wide eyed and drooling, to be free. Think of the dog who struggles against the rope but sleeps peacefully under the same tree he strained to escape when tethered.

Insofar as conceptions of the good issue in the classical virtues, my immoralism is liable issue in object level judgments substantially similar to common sense morality. In fact, I think the heroic individualist comes much closer to common sense morality for most folks than any other philosophy or religious enthusiasm I know.

"But what about those whose conceptions of the good do not issue in classical virtues? What of the serial killers?"

Really? You just accused me of being timid, and now we need to talk about serial killers? OK. Are you thinking of taking up killing for sport?

"On your view, what would be wrong about it if I did? Aren't serial killers as much a product of their biology and history as the rest of us? If that's all there is, then…"

Well, I suppose the serial killer has his reasons, and the Heroic Individualist does not authorize the use of morality as a club to beat anyone's reasons out of him, but we still have actual clubs. Each will have to make use of them based on his own authority. Let anyone resorting to violence for whatever reasons beware, however, that while there is no transcendent morality to denounce your violence, nor is there any transcendent morality to excuse it. Expect violence to be met with violence.

That goes as far as seems necessary to deal with the serial killer. You seem to imagine folks will be tempted to become serial killers if there is no moral law to constrain them. This is generally wrong. The natural born killer has been dealt an especially bad hand by fate, and for just that reason his way of life does not represent any real alternative to you and me. If you think it would be easy or fun to flourish as a serial killer, you probably have not thought this through very carefully, which is probably for the better. If you have thought it through and you still think it would be somehow cool or fun to live as a serial killer, you scare me a little bit.

Of course, I assume you do not really think it would be cool or fun, at least not outside some video game fantasy. This is because it almost certainly does not fit your actual conception of the good. For the vast majority of us humans, that's enough. No more philosophical argument is necessary. On the other hand, if you were sincerely attracted to such a way of life, would you really need a philosophical argument giving you permission to live it? Would it not be clear to you what you had most reason to do?

Of course, it is equally clear that we all have good reason to protect ourselves against whatever is dangerous. Consistent with our own conceptions of the good, we have every reason to condemn such creatures, maybe even to the point of calling them evil (though I hesitate to gesture towards a metaphysical or metaphorical club when a physical and literal club will do better). It is plain enough that they have no right to our forbearance, at least so far as they pose an imminent threat. We may thus find it prudent to threaten them in the plainest way with the forfeiture of their very lives, liberties, and properties in the event that they act in violation of the established rights of any citizen. The state is the threat of violence, and if we are to have a state, then its awful power should be focused squarely upon those who themselves enact violence.

"But what makes one a sociopath?"

Oh, the usual stuff. Genes, environment, history, quantum flux. That kind of stuff.

"No, I mean what is the definition here? Aren't there a lot of conceptions of the good that are less radically evil than the serial killer, but still unacceptable?"

Of course! There are a host of ways of life that I find disagreeable. I am committed to a particular conception of the good, after all. There are lots of ways of life I would not chose for myself or those I care about. Not everyone does well making something of themselves. There are plenty of botched and twisted individuals around, and a vastly greater number of botched humans are around who do not manage to become individuals at all. My disapprobation is not restricted to the serial killer.

"So it's OK for the state to impose your conception of the good on everyone? Some individualist you turn out to be!"

Whoa! Just because I disapprove of a way of life, which just means I would not choose it for myself or those I care about, does not mean that I think anyone should resort to violence to stomp it out. State power is a resort to violence, nothing more, and we should never forget that. In my judgment, it should be directed only against those who are themselves violent or threaten violence.

"But that's what I'm asking about. What counts as ‘threatening violence'? When are you saying the state should impose your conception of the good?"

Oh, I see what's getting confused here. I'm not saying the state should ever impose my conception of the good. I'm saying I have reasons in terms of my conception of the good to join with as many others as necessary, each according to their own various conceptions of the good, to support the enforcement of some set of rules. I suppose the exact rules are bound to be a perpetually contested matter, since we are operating from a diversity of fluid values and circumstances, but there are reasons to think a considerable majority of us could agree to a political regime so long as we could be reasonably sure it wouldn't start meddling in all our various affairs. I think that basically amounts to limiting state power to enforcing rules that keep the peace such that prosperity ensues. I'm sure there will be endless debate about the exact boundaries, but the rough outlines are clear enough. Heroic Individualism does not settle every practical matter or theoretical controversy, but it does clarify the terms of debate.

Each of us has reason to be reluctant to endorse violence, no matter what else we value. Violence has a way of slipping the leash. Violence tends to be met with violence. None of this changes when the violence is perpetrated by the state, so we should be very cautious regarding what we authorize the state to do. We mean to keep others from preying on us, so should want rule of law, not the rule of men, and we should be prepared to enforce the rule of law even against the state if that becomes necessary.

"But isn't allowing for state power the creation of some external authority after all?"

The state is just another agency with whom one may have to contend, standing on all fours with every other individual agency. It enjoys no more special or magical authority to command individuals than any other individual enjoys. This sets a strong presumption against condoning state action in general. Whatever support one has for the state will have to be grounded, as with all else, in one's conception of the good. If the pursuit of my conception of the good is to be facilitated by some system of rules, it will either have to promise to benefit me at the expense of others in a negative sum game, which I can hardly expect others to endorse, or it will have to promise to benefit each of us in some positive sum game. Violence is basically a negative sum game, at least in its immediate outcomes, and each of us should worry that we will be the losers of such a game, if not today then sometime in the future. Still, enforceable rules can promote various positive sum games, especially with respect to economic coordination and information processing, and enforceable rules may significantly reduce violence overall. Rights define the domain within which each individual enjoys sovereign authority to pursue his or her own conception of the good, including all those pursuits that involve voluntary cooperation with others. I can't fathom why anyone would endorse any narrower a domain of individual sovereignty than absolutely necessary to keep the peace. Equality of basic rights with a strong presumption in favor of liberty describes a system of rules that I think almost any of us could affirm, some with more or less enthusiasm, while any alternative threatens to make some of us subject to others and should be resisted by all. Even the king today should fear becoming a subject tomorrow.

If we are to have a state at all, then, we should agree that none of us shall be slaves by law, if only from the reasonable fear that one is more likely to be a slave than a prince in a world of slaves and princes, if not today then tomorrow. The slave has every reason to resist such a regime, even by violence as necessary. Even the sociopath who aspires to be a prince over all or over some should endorse a limited state that frustrates such aspirations, since he does not wish his life, liberty, or property threatened. The serial killer, along with the thief, the fraudster, the kidnapper, the thug all violate rights. They are would-be princes, declaring sovereignty over and beyond what any overlapping consensus with respect to equal rights under the rule of law could plausibly allow. If the only thing that will restrain their violence is the threat of violence, so be it.

In contrast, those who do not violate rights are not my concern. It is their business what conception of the good they pursue, and I welcome their experiments in living as further data in the quests of me and mine to discover for ourselves the nature of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Those living by conceptions of the good that are not in perfect harmony with my own do not harm me thereby; to the contrary, they benefit me and each of us by exploring the various ways of life available to creatures like us. A basic complementarity of diverse individuals spontaneously emerges when we are free to enter into voluntary arrangements in pursuit of our own various interests. I am no longer tempted to regard strangers as potential threats or prey, for they become the butchers, bakers, and brewers from whom I expect my dinner. Insofar as they respect what is mine and I respect what is theirs, there is an opportunity for our mutual flourishing. Even where we are direct competitors, we benefit one another as foils and prods to even greater excellence. So it is true enough that I have reason to value and respect others, even complete strangers and weirdos, at least where these are sincere and therefore educational. I can honor their pursuits even where these are not what I would choose.

This frank and sober individualist account of human sociality should finally put to rest any notion that there is something anti-social in Heroic Individualism. We rugged individuals are social animals as much as any human. We do not acknowledge that our sociality should diminish our individuality in any way, for these are not in competition where men and women are free.

An answer by pretentious allusion

The heroic individual harkens to that iron string that vibrates within, philosophizing with a hammer as with a tuning fork over the highest and most harmonious development of powers to a complete and consistent whole. He heeds the intuition of that aboriginal self discovered in the solitude of highest mountain peaks and lowest wooded valleys, revealing the zigzag course of a yes, a no, a straight-line, a goal, defining those desires and impulses that express his own sacred nature as an energetic character and no mere steam-engine, and dictating that tablet of law suited to hanging over his own head. He encounters the vision of a transparent eyeball whose return to faith and reason harms stupidity as surely as any faith or reason ever harmed egoism, for whom all mean egotism vanishes and leaves behind its root in the cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he is. The faith and reason of the heroic individual inspires the good self-love of the noble soul which is reverence for itself. It hates only the betrayal and unreasoning of bad self-love, that obedience to alien impulses founded in either an ape-like faculty of imitation or an incontinent disobedience against what is noble and authoritative in him by what is base and grasping. Accordingly, the faith and reason of the heroic individual accepts that place in divine providence which supports the greatest weight of its ultimate eternal confirmation and seal and finds its highest freedom in becoming what it is—the basis of all culture that does not reject the stuff of which heroes are made, because it knows not how to make them.

The heroic individual lives from devil or angel, god or beast, antichrist or Dionysus, as his sacred nature demands.