 Rand’s ethics is thus firmly teleological, this-worldly, and foundationalist. Virtue is “the act by which one gains/and or keeps” values in light of a recognition of certain facts (1961b: 27, 28); it “is not an end in itself … not its own reward” (1957 [1992]: 939). A fact central to a “scientific” ethics is that reason is the chief indispensable human tool of survival, and we exercise reason by choice. Hence rationality is the fundamental moral virtue, a virtue implicated in all the other virtues, including productiveness  (Section 2.4 below).