and," whereby, as Adam Smith noted in Wealth of Nations, "every individual intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in so many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."2 No moral construction is placed on the political workings of this invisible hand, which appears merely to be descriptive, not normative, the result of the enactment of a process that inheres in a political system both appropriately and workably balanced between individual and social rights and obligations. MacKinnon says that this attitude "does raise questions about those who are unable to compete or unable to do so without help."3
But, in the view of ethical egoism, as articulated by Nozick but perhaps most famously by Ayn Rand, this invisible hand has a salutary, organizing effect on the social environment, such that individual self-interest does not degenerate into anarchy. The debt that MacKinnon says ethical egoism has to classical economic theory is consistent with Rand's presentation of its defense, inasmuch as the action of the novel from which the excerpt comes, Atlas Shrugged, concerns a group of self-made millionaire industrialists--ethical egoists all--who withdraw their creativity, their support, their products, and indeed themselves from an American economic, social, and political culture in which the economic-production and individual-achievement ethic has been programmatically devalued and access to government subsidies and the benefits of production have been transferred from the producers to assorted individual and collective academic and industrial "looters"4 (as they are repeatedly called) who do not much want to work to produce anything but do want to be associated with the social capital of selflessness while also working the system for material gain. This is in the background of Rand's articulation of a moral philosophy of ethical egoism, which she elsewhere calls the virtue of se...