Ebenezer Scrooge was not an admirable man. He was bitter, unfriendly, and thrifty beyond reason. The three spirits of Christmas, however, did not improve his morality, rather, they terrified him into embracing what the ghost of Marley called “the common welfare.” While Scrooge rightly dropped many of his imprudent traits on Christmas Day, following his haunting, this need never have required the dropping of the rugged individualism he originally embodied. A fourth spirit should’ve visited Scrooge on Christmas Day to show him the true error of his reformed ways—the spirit of Ayn Rand should’ve come upon him!
On Christmas Eve of 1843, Scrooge kept “a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone” of his moneylending, only to be interrupted by his nephew and charity workers, both of whom only brought out his true flaws. Yet it is in these exchanges where we come to see the moral motivation of Scrooge. When encouraged to have “A Merry Christmas, Uncle!” Scrooge reeled off a diatribe with the crucial line being: “What is Christmas but a time for paying bills without money?” While this hardly warrants wishing the utterer of “Merry Christmas” is “boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart,” surely said in deadpan jest, Scrooge was rightly pointing to the injustice of spendthrift people paying for Christmas on borrowed money and then defaulting on their moneylender, or, begging for extensions.
Scrooge’s thriftiness may be out of proportion; indeed, he wept at seeing his fiance break up with him when she said: “You fear the world too much… All other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.” But, in an age with child mortality at 27 percent, having plenty of money for heating and food might have been very prudent. I doubt the Spirit of Christmas Past would enjoy showing Scrooge his dead son because he could not afford coal for the fire after an unfortunate event. Scrooge is ultimately being lambasted for an admirable desire on his part to be independent of the charity of others or the assistance of the state—to stand on his own two feet.
We see this rugged individualism shine through greatly when he rejects helping the poor. He makes his position crystal clear when asked to help them: “It’s not my business. It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen.” Many will be thinking Scrooge wouldn’t think that if he were in the condition of Bob Cratchit who lived in freezing conditions and with a dying Tiny Tim. Scrooge, however, would morally accept not being helped in such destitution, because, he never assisted in a reciprocal way via charity, instead, he strained every sinew in his mind and body to become self-reliant. Scrooge embodied self-help.
Scrooge takes the proper pursuit of his life to be his own enjoyment, which—certainly when he is old—he misjudges to consist of a maximal security of his financial position. This contrasts markedly with the moral view of his nephew who ideally sees each of us as “fellow-passengers to the grave” who implausibly thinks a true commitment to it “will do me [i.e., him] good.” The fatal flaw in Scrooge is a failure of prudence across a large part of the board, not fundamentally a flaw in his moral thought. When the Spirit of Christmas Past presents him as a child being overly studious or the Spirit of Christmas Present as being “the ogre of the family” of the Cratchit’s or the Spirit of Christmas Future shows him as the man who dies alone, there is simply a failure of proportion, an undue bitterness and a misguided shunning of people, if that.
The finale of Dickens’s novel has Scrooge wake up on Christmas Day as “giddy as a drunk man.” He goes out and buys the Cratchit’s “the prize turkey,” grants a huge donation to the charity men “with a great many back-payments included in it,” and proceeds to dine with his nephew and family. “His own heart laughed; and that was quite enough for him.” The story ends with Scrooge living by the “Total Abstinence Principle ever after,” i.e., promising not to be selfish at all into the future. This picture is truly a fiction of the highest order.
Should Scrooge have followed “the common welfare,” of which the ghost of Marley spoke, and kept to the moral idea that “the poor one” is entitled to dinner over others “because it needs it most,” according to the Spirit of Christmas Past, he would have been a poor man indeed. Instead of waking up joyously on Christmas Day and greeting the world “so fluttered and so glowing,” Scrooge would properly put his “tight-fisted hand at the grindstone” again and set about earning more money. As the effective altruists of the 21st century, such as Peter Singer, William MacAskill, and Matthew Adelstein have shown, a person ensures the best results for mankind at large when he puts his mind to business and then donates to effective charities, not by giving turkey to middle-class clerks who should have their own affairs in order anyway.
Following utilitarian thinking would require every action of his being penultimately devoted to ensuring the alleviation of suffering on Earth. If Scrooge were earning £500, he could have been earning £1,000 had he put his mind to it. After all, he was an excellent man of business. With this excess of £950—for who needs to live better than Bob Cratchit, the clerk—he could invest money in a fund to provide perpetual relief to the truly poor and diseased. Sure, his life would be full of misery, lacking in friendship, and his love would remain lost, but with a mind for money-lending and the enormous potential for good that could do, such personal enjoyment could never be countenanced by “the common welfare” and an acceptance of the “Total Abstinence Principle.”
Yet this is evidently a reductio ad absurdum of the mentioned position. The Spirit of Ayn Rand should have visited Scrooge on the night of Christmas Day and returned him to his rugged individualism, and gotten him to appreciate how to properly lead a good life. Such a haunting should have made Scrooge stand up and utter Rand’s immortal words: “My happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.” The individual properly pursues his own happiness in life—through the development of friendships, the nurturing of a kind disposition, and the balancing of financial security with living in the moment, of course, but these should still ultimately serve his happiness, not other people.
Against this many a utilitarian will claim, Scrooge would not really best serve the greater good should he act as I have said he must, so the reductio ad absurdum to bolster Rand’s thinking fails. Maybe, but a moral philosophy which dictates even the possibility of Scrooge having to immiserate himself for the greater good should be rejected as implausible. Does this Randian morality implausibly say we should never help others? No. Reciprocity, (i.e., “I’ll help you if you help me”) ensures people should help others to indirectly help themselves. Scrooge, however, cannot be criticized for not helping others, because he never asked for or expected any help to begin with and he rightly believes he has discharged any reciprocity he should engage in via his taxes when he rhetorically asks: “Are there no workhouses?”
Scrooge is deeply misguided about what makes up a good life, nevertheless, his interpersonal moral compass before the haunting was not at all out of shape. The Three Spirits of Christmas led him astray into a morality which implicitly denied his existence was for his own enjoyment; rather, they alluded it must be lived for others (which they falsely made out will be in his interest too so as to sugar the pill). No. As Rand declared with a full vigor for life: “Man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others, nor sacrificing others to himself.” Scrooge embraced this rugged individualism before his haunting and he was right to do so.
