In the last few weeks I've been twice asked whether I consider myself to be "morally perfect" or the like because I have expressed moral judgment concerning others and their behavior here on SOLO.
In Objectivist circles, "to pronounce moral judgment is an enormous responsibility. To be a judge, one must possess an unimpeachable character; one need not be omniscient or infallible, and it is not an issue of errors of knowledge; one needs an unbreached integrity, that is, the absence of any indulgence in conscious, willful evil." [VOS, p71]
Going by this standard, or at least my understanding of it, I find myself qualified to judge. I hope you are also, or will become so.
Being "morally perfect" or attaining "moral perfection", however, is a very different standard to that of having an unbreached integrity, and it seems to me that some Objectivists get confused by the difference between the two standards. I am not morally perfect. No one is.
Even Ayn Rand, when asked by a questioner from the audience during a Donahue interview asked her whether she considered herself morally perfect answered that she did not think of herself in such terms.
Yet Ayn Rand wrote that "Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute."
Attaining and maintaining an unbreached rationality is, therefore, in essence, the un-waivering acceptance of reason as an absolute together with the "full and relentless use of your mind".
Meeting the criteria of accepting reason as an absolute is not so difficult to attain and maintain once one understands what reason is, but honestly, who among us uses or even could use our mind to its fullest capacity, relentlessly? I'd like to meet someone who thinks that they do or could achieve and maintain 100% focus every waking minute, 365 days of the year.
So what of all this talk by Ayn Rand about striving for moral perfection then? If it can never be attained and maintained in reality, aren't we Objectivists in the same boat as the Christians in terms of trying to attain the impossible? Not, I submit, if one makes a small change to the order of the wording used for the concept I believe Ayn Rand was conveying. Moral perfection, properly understood, is an ideal to strive for but unattainable to maintain in reality. What is both attainable and maintainable in reality is the standard of being perfectly moral.
"Perfectly moral?", you ask. "What is the difference between being perfectly moral, morally perfect and attaining moral perfection??" My answer is simple. The latter two, which are synonymous, refer to the highest moral potential that is attainable by man, whilst the former refers to the highest moral potential that is attainable by you, right now. The latter two refer to the state of everything being as morally right as they can ever possibly be, whereas the former refers to the state of nothing being morally wrong at the moment.
I'll employ two somewhat related concepts to make my point, those of health and law. If I were to tell you that I am in perfect health or perfectly healthy, that is a standard by which you would understand that there is nothing wrong with my health at present. If I were to tell you however that I have achieved "health perfection", you would be somewhat perplexed and probably try to abstract an idea and imagine what the healthiest state that a person could ever achieve would be, and think that I am conceitedly claiming to have achieved that state. In law, if I were to tell you that I or what I am doing was perfectly legal, you would understand that I am not in the process of breaking any laws at present. If, however, I told you that I am "legally perfect", again you would be somewhat perplexed and probably try to abstract the idea of some sort of court declaration stating that I have never broken any laws anywhere, ever.
What is important to recognize here is that applying morality to your life is a process and not a state or status. The state or status of being moral results from a successful execution of the moral process: "A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at any step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own severity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort of the quest" [Galt's speech, AS, p126]
According to Objectivist ethics, therefore, for so long as one is successful at executing the process of being rational, one's state or status is that of being rational, and thus moral. When one commits an error in the rational process, that is not in and of itself to be immoral, but the juncture at which time immorality may enter. When one identifies and fixes an error in one's rationality, then the state/status of "moral" is retained. When one tries to "cheat, to fake the evidence and evade the effort" of identifying or fixing the error, or of engaging in the rational process itself, then one lapses into being immoral. All immorality is always chosen irrationality. If one lapses into immorality, it is only by identifying and fixing readily identifiable and fixable errors (including, where possible, making good on any harm done to others as a result of those errors) that one once again attains the state/status of being "moral". To the extent that one does not have the ability to identify errors in the rational process, or the ability to engage in the rational process itself, one is then amoral (as is the case with infants or the insane).
In conclusion, to be rational means that one is ipso facto moral according to an Objectivist ethics. Placing a "perfectly" before "rational" or "moral" is something of a redundancy, except, that is, to emphasize that there are no known flaws in the rational - and thus moral - process. To be moral is to be fully moral, and to be fully moral is to be perfectly moral. To introduce immorality is to be immoral, not moral. Only immorality is a matter of degrees.
Perfecting is itself a process also - a process that has no end.