"Man -- every man -- is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake,
and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose."

Kant treats the first part as being true irrespective of the last; Rand
rightfully recognizes that you can't have the first part without the
last.  Kant treats his principle as being derivable from rational first
principles alone without reference to such low empirical factors as
happiness and life.  It's more like, morality is an end in itself that
you respect without any expectation of personal benefit; you simply
"know" it to be right, and respect it for that alone.

Rand does, I think, have an argument that looks like Kant's in terms of
the form of argument (but not much beyond that).  Something or other to
the effect that a rational man recognizes the necessity of his being
free to think and act in order to live and pursue happiness as man --
and that one can't logically uphold this for oneself, in virtue of the
kind of being that one is, without also recognizing the same necessary
conditions for others.  You'd be guilty of a practical contradiction
and would not, if you followed through on it, have a basis to reject or
oppose others' responding to you in kind.  It's one of those logical
preconditions for pursuing any kind of ends to respect people's freedom
to think and act -- only that the *ought* contained in this is
justified, in Rand, via reference to man's moral purpose, the pursuit
and achievement of happiness.  Kant treats the norms as if
self-justificatory, not requiring any reference to a further moral
purpose.

So a rational egoist's moral psychology isn't one of "I'm the only one
that counts, and to heck with others of they get in my way."  This
notion was already treated of in the Branden essay, "Counterfeit
Individualism" in -The Virtue of Selfishness-.  A dimension of rational
self-interest is the appropriate recognition of the requirements of man
-- every man -- to pursue his own interests in a social context.

Eric Mack provides a brief summary of Rand's non-Kantian understanding
of man as an end in himself, which I take to be essentially correct:

"Ayn Rand was an advocate of both egoism and rights. As an advocate of
egoism, she held that the individual ought not to impose upon himself
sacrifices of his well-being, even if those sacrifices would promote
the well-being of others. She held that the appropriate ultimate end
for each individual is his achievement of his own well-being. As an
advocate of rights, she held that each individual must eschew imposing
sacrifices upon others; likewise, each individual may demand of others
that they not impose sacrifices upon him. Individuals must not treat
others as means to their own ends.

"What precisely is the relationship between Rand's claim that the
ultimate end for each individual is the achievement of his well-being
and her claim that no individual is a means to the well-being of any
other individual (or group)? This is a difficult question. It was
wonder about the precise relationship between Rand's advocacy of egoism
and her advocacy of rights that led me to devote a large part of my
academic life to more general questions about the relationship between
end-promoting reasons and means-precluding reasons.

"One common view about the relationship between Rand's claims about
ultimate ends and her claims about precluded means is that precluded
means are simply those means that do not effectively promote ultimate
ends. Wesley's enslaving of Hank is a precluded means because (and only
because) it will not really effectively promote Wesley's ultimate ends.
With this understanding, what is wrong about Wesley's enslavement of
Hank is that it is harmful to Wesley. (Hank has his own reasons to
resist this enslavement. But if Hank has rights against that
enslavement, Wesley must have reason to eschew the enslavement and, in
the view at hand, those reasons must be a matter of the enslavement
being contrary to Wesley's ends.)

"I want to plead for a different view of Rand's advocacy of egoism and
rights-a view which sees Rand's egoism and her endorsement of rights
as two equal facets of the root idea that each individual is a moral
end-in-himself. To be a moral end-in-oneself is necessarily connected
with having an ultimate end of one's own-an ultimate condition to go
for in life. To recognize oneself as a being with an ultimate end of
one's own is to recognize that one has reason to promote that end and
not the ends of others. To apprehend others as ends-in-themselves is to
apprehend each other person as having an ultimate end of his own and,
hence, to apprehend each other person as not merely an object available
as an instrument of one's own ends. Others' existence as beings with
ultimate ends of their own gives one reason, not to serve their ends,
but to treat them as beings who are not at one's own disposal-as
beings who uniquely are at their own disposal. It is because and only
because Hank is a moral end-in-himself that, when he asserts his rights
against Wesley, he is not merely appealing to Wesley's self-interest."

[I.e., Hank is appealing to his own right to exist for his own sake.
Still, I would add that Wesley's *rational* self-interest doesn't
consist in treating Hank other than as an end-in-himself, for the
reason that rationality involves recognizing every man's right to exist
for his own sake.  It's about respecting the *conditions* in a social
context required of life qua man, as distinct from the prescription of
the *ends* that each man ought to seek.]

From
http://www.objectivistcenter.org/articles/honoring-ayn-rand.asp

While I am ever in anticipation of Mack's book getting published, I did
just read the notice that Cambridge Press will be publishing Tara
Smith's forthcoming -Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist-.
 That's a landmark event -- arguably the top academic publishing press
in the world, avowedly committed to defending Randian philosophy.
Looks like Smith beat Mack to the punch. :-)

The Cambridge URL: