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[blockquote]œ...that which you call ˜free will™ is your mind™s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character. Thinking is man™s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one™s consciousness, the refusal to think”not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment (Atlas Shrugged, œThis is John Galt Speaking)[/blockquote]

The theory of radical evil is that for a person to do something wrong, he or she has to first have decided in general, prior to any other action, that the first principles of right and wrong will not be the first principles of his or her life. This basic corruption, when coupled with particular occasions for deviation from moral standards, is the source of all concrete immoral action. Since morality is (according to the Standard Model of radical evil) a function of reason, and reasoning and thinking come to pretty much the same thing, that means that our general perversity comes from perverting our use of our ability to reason or think. (Note also the equation of freedom with thinking re: autonomy and the ethics of the categorical imperative.)

Therefore, when Ayn Rand traces every particular ethical mistake on our part to a "basic vice," she's attributing those mistakes to a form of radical evil.

I wish Rand had liked Kant more. I keep discovering overlaps between their ideas that it just... Augh.

Are there people whose behavior is dictated only by what is right and wrong? How do they know what to eat, or with whom to associate, where to live, etc.?

Right and wrong aren't the first principles of my life. They are limits to my own personal projects, which are inspired by different forces altogether.

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Are there people whose behavior is dictated only by what is right and wrong? How do they know what to eat, or with whom to associate, where to live, etc.?

Right and wrong aren't the first principles of my life. They are limits to my own personal projects, which are inspired by different forces altogether.
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But you don't derive those limits from your projects, I'm guessing. And since you use morality as a limit, you give it some kind of priority over your projects. So while like modus ponens it doesn't serve for a major premise in your life, it does serve for a rule organizing everything else given by other sources, and so in that sense it's a first principle of your life. QED

As for eating, etc. I think morality is about more than deontological side-constraints on the pursuit of the good anyway, and so information relevant to our personal ethic includes, for instance, where we live. The concept of a home, of a place to belong, seems to me like it's normative.

I take your point, on first principles.

But doesn't this concept of "radical evil" apply to such things as taking extra newspapers from the vending machine? I.e., aren't most people radically evil to a certain degree, in that they do things they know are wrong?