(Editor’s note: This article appeared here first posted by Tom Clark in May, 2005. Images were added by the editor from sources linked to.)

The Objectivist Center and the Ayn Rand Institute, organizations devoted to safeguarding and disseminating Ayn Rand’s legacy of radical libertarianism, did an effective job of letting the world know about her 100^th birthday in February (2005).  Op-eds about Rand’s philosophy appeared in newspapers across the US and abroad, celebrating the sovereignty of the individual and condemning the infringements of big government on personal freedoms.

Running a Google news search using the terms “free will” and “determinism” will pick up a good number of such op-eds, and you can find their sources here and here.  It turns out that Rand’s Objectivism includes among its tenets a strong commitment to free will and rejection of determinism (unless it’s the determinism of self-determination).  Here’s a taste from an op-ed in the Freelance Star of Fredericksburg, by Michael S. Berliner, board member of the Ayn Rand Institute:

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Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God” – Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique portatif, 1764.

Of those who argue for a divine cause for the existence of morality there are two general types. First, there are those literalists to whom the word of their scripture is the code by which to live. To these believers, there is no morality inherent in us but that which comes from indoctrination of certain archaic rules. The other group of believers is less inclined to value literal interpretations of scriptural law, but still believe that there could be no natural causes for this strong urge to act as moral beings. Voltaire was one of these.

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