How Can Godless Reason Deal with Ethical Theory?

 [W]hy should we believe that it is our flourishing [and all it implies about treating others justly] rather than our bare survival that serves as our natural end and so constitutes our self-interest?...

[O]n an Aristotelian conception of rationality, one may legitimately take the fact that a goal of flourishing coheres better than a goal of bare survival with our other moral beliefs as a sufficient (though defeasible) justification for believing that flourishing rather than bare survival is our natural end.... [Philosophers such as J. L. Mackie and Ayn Rand] would no doubt object strenuously to the idea of using premises about value to derive conclusions about human nature. But for the Aristotelian, once gain, the growth of knowledge is not a matter of rigid hierarchies but of networks of mutual adjustment, and no privileged class of beliefs holds absolute veto power over beliefs of another class. Hence, we are justified in taking the greater moral appeal of flourishing survival as a reason for accepting it.[104] 

[Endnote 104]: That is not to say that we should not search for an explanation of why this account is true, or try to discover what facts about human nature and the structure of teleological explanations make flourishing rather than bare survival a final cause for organisms like us. I think this is a worthy goal, and one that I am pursing in my own research. But I don't think we need the explanation initially in order to be justified in accepting flourishing as our end. (Nor, I suspect, do non-philosophers need it at all. "For the 'that' is the starting-point; and if this is sufficiently apparent, there will be no need in addition for the 'because.'" [That's Aristotle. -SR] I think there is a certain amount of philosophical knowledge that everyone needs in order to live a truly human life, but what exceeds that may non-culpably be left to the specialist. That flourishing is the proper end belongs, I suspect, to the first category, and why to the second.)  

--Roderick T. Long, Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand 

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