The question is whether rationality says to pursue self-interest, or whether it says to respect the individual rights of others. Otherwise you've got an inconsistent account of rationality.
No, you're missing the point. If your principle is self-interest above all else, then you're committed to dropping any other principles as soon as they cut into your self-interest. That means you violate someone else's rights as soon as it's in your self-interest to do so. Whether that's because...
Um, in those all-too-common cases the ethics and the politics give contradictory direction: one says to go with self-interest, and the other says to respect the rights of others. I mean, if I give you two supposedly absolute rules "Always obey your mother" and "Never lie", I had better have an...
Maybe it's in your self-interest to respect rights most of the time. But there are exceptions to this rule, and they're not far-fetched or few in number. Real life presents countless cases where crime pays: i.e., where you can violate someone's rights, get away with it, and walk away smiling...
Here are two contradictions in Objectivism:
* Their ethics is all about individual self-interest, but their politics is all about individual rights. In other words, in their ethics they say to put your self-interest above all else (even if this means violating the rights of others). And in...