A challenging question for Objectivism

If it's best to value what others do, then Larry has to value what Curly and Moe value, but not ever what he personally does.
And Curly has to value what Larry and Moe value, but not ever what he personally does.
And Moe has to value what Larry and Curly value, but not ever what he personally does.

Showing that we must eat or die is not sufficient to show that we should live, is it?

To see something in ourselves as a virtue, we must first have an idea of what virtue is.  If I understand correctly, this means that we can only love ourselves to the extent to which we are virtuous.  Is that right?

that it's just always been chosen (so far ...).

It seems that we should value ourselves because of virtue.  It stands to reason that we are not going to posses all virtues in perfection.  There may be someone who is more just than we are.  What reason is there, then, to not value that person as much or possibly more than ourselves?

The utilitarians have a more plausible and attractive appearance. They say that any act of force and coercion by the state is proper and lawful if it aims for the greatest good of the greatest number. Sounds pleasant and reasonable, does it not? Such a doctrine would be sound if the world were not what it is. and we were not as we are. It would be a fine doctrine if humans were intelligent bees instead of intelligent apes, but we are not, and it is not.

It is not sensible to ask: How shall “we” act to maximize “our” happiness? This is a nonsense question because individual desires necessarily conflict. The sensible question is: Given that individual desires conflict, how can we avoid too much violence? We can keep the peace collectively. It is impossible to pursue happiness collectively

Utilitarianism has two serious problems, problems that most utilitarians regard as advantages. The idea of the greatest good for the greatest number implies that someone should be in charge, with the authority and duty to sacrifice any one persons property, liberty, and life, for the greater good. It also assumes that a persons good is knowable, and that other people can judge this good for him, make decisions on his behalf, and balance that good with other peoples good. Since any one person is expendable, then there can be no such thing as human rights, as Bentham frankly argued. Clearly the doctrine of the greatest good is going to be highly attractive to those intellectuals who envisage themselves as being in charge of deciding what is good for other people, deciding whose property shall be confiscated for the greater good, who shall be imprisoned for the greater good, or for his own good. ...

Actual individual people need no rules to force them to pursue their own ends, and when rules are enforced on them, violating their rights for the sake someone else's ends, they invariably surprise the utilitarians by vigorously resisting such rules, thus a state that bases its legitimacy and cohesion on utilitarian principles rather than on natural rights and the rule of law, requires a very high level of violence and coercion, violence that tends to constantly increase and become more severe.

The greater good is unknowable because “Society” is not a conscious entity capable of experiencing that good. ...

The real issue is not “what is the nature of good” as utilitarians pretend. The real issue is: Are rights a discovery by individuals that enable them to get along peaceably with other individuals, or are they a creation of a supreme being such as a reified society or reified state, that imposes peace on a vicious multitude with no inherent knowledge of good and evil, thus forcing on them the peace that slaves of a common master possess. ...

It most doubtful that other peoples good is knowable in principle. It certainly is not knowable in practice. In practice, whenever any organization makes a serious attempt to ascertain the greater good it is submerged in a flood of paperwork, and to defend itself against this flood of paper it strangles everything it touches in red tape. It unavoidably finds itself imposing, by increasingly lawless violence, a procrustean and arbitrary concept of the good. If I take a slight detour on my way to work I go through rent controlled East Palo Alto, where I can watch my tax dollars at play, and observe this destructive process in operation.

The most dramatic and devastating demonstration of the difficulty of knowing the greater good, and the most famous and best known, was of course the attempt of the Cambodian government to increase the rice harvest by central direction of irrigation. This led to irrigation ditches being dug in nice neat straight lines without regard to small scale topography, with the result that they failed to transport water, it led to wetland rice being planted on land that remained dry, dry land rice being planted on land that became submerged, and so on and so forth. The peasants, foreseeing death by starvation if they continued to pursue the greater good, selfishly sought to pursue their own individual good, contrary to the decrees of their masters. Their masters imagined themselves to be responsible for feeding the peasants, so they were reluctantly forced to use ever more savage terror and torture to force the starving peasants to pursue the greater good. For the sake of the greater good, the peasants were forced to watch their starving children murdered, for the sake of the greater good they were forced to maim and break those they loved with crude agricultural implements, for the sake of the greater good they were brutally and savagely tortured, for the sake of the greater good they died horrible and degrading deaths in vast numbers, all for the greatest good of the greatest number. ...

Whereas the absolutists produce mere hills of corpses, and then hygienically process the hills into useful products like soap and lampshades, the utilitarians produce them in mountains, but the utilitarians shake the stench more easily, blandly professing their good intentions and casually waving away the tens of millions of murdered women and children.