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Is selfishness/self-centeredness ever a virtue?

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Wolfgangbos
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Posted: Wed 30 Mar , 2005 8:11 pm
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There are entirely too many brilliant people on this board. Nearly all the time my own opinion is being expressed in a far more lucent fashion than I could possibly express it by multiple people before I even read half of the thread. Hence my being mostly relegated to lurker status nowadays. :D

But, if only for the sake of exercising some of the old synapses and the possibility that I might add something even remotely novel, I'll say a few words.

The following is the woefully unstructured rantings of an INTP. Beware!

I do not think that self-interest and altruism are necessarily contradictory. If I wish to help others because doing so makes me happy or gives me fulfillment, then in reality I am being both self-interested and altruistic. For most people, it seems, the two necessarily go hand in hand. Why we are hardwired this way is beyond me, although I have my suspicions, but that this is the essential nature of the vast majority humans seems quite obvious to my eyes.

Many would have me believe otherwise. They paint human life in black and white, dumbing down what truly is an amazing mosaic of colored complexity. They would have me believe that the human desire to be happy and fulfilled is necessarily evil - that the only means towards which we can become "good" is to deny this desire entirely. And, although much of my experience of such people lies within the halls of conservative Christendom, I have found that this unnecessarily pessimistic view of human nature finds its home in persons of many different world views.

I think that it is a vile thing to portray human nature in such a fashion, and I have a very difficult time dealing with those who espouse such a position. I cannot imagine the amount of wasted potential of those who have followed this credo, damning themselves to a lifetime of hating their own desires - and thus their very selves. (For what is the self without desire I wonder? )

Thankfully, this attack on self-interest seems rarely taken to its logical extreme. The self-same laziness that allows a person to be blind to the complexity of the issue also seems to keep them from exploring the necessary ends of their position. In this I take solace. :)

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-Wolfgangbos


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vison
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Posted: Wed 30 Mar , 2005 10:22 pm
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That was great. It was both lucent and lucid. You ought to speak up more often.

The fanatics and tyrants of the world could not do their evil work except by taking advantage of the self-hatred you so well describe.

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Axordil
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Posted: Thu 31 Mar , 2005 3:14 am
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I do agree with those who have said that the primary reason for altruistic behavior, and for postive moral behavior (doing good as opposed to avoiding doing bad) in general, is the warm fuzzy feeling. :D But that's not selfishness, but self-centeredness.

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IdylleSeethes
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Posted: Thu 31 Mar , 2005 3:38 am
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This is an issue which neither religion nor philosophy seems to supply a satisfactory answer. Prim mentioned one of the few clear biblical statements as being in the Golden Rule. I hope her interpretation is correct, but it has frequently been ignored by Christianity itself. With some liberty this can be paraphrased as: “it is in your own selfish interest to be unselfish”. Somewhere in that statement lays the root of capitalism. It does connect with the idea that what is good for me is good for everyone else, which has its own horrid interpretations, but at the root, is the idea that we all deserve to be treated fairly.

So, I think the New Testament comes down in favor of selfishness/self-centeredness, in a backhanded way.

Sartre had an odd collection of ideas concerning our relationships with others. In No Exit he claimed: “Hell is other people.” Some days, it does seem so. In Being and Nothingness he discusses the idea of love and its meaning, which comes across as being the ultimate in selfishness. His view is that the lover desperately needs something from the loved. He says that what the lover wants is control, of what is in Sartre’s view mankind’s curse – the loved one’s free will. I think he overstates his point and what the lover wants desperately is a certain outcome from the relationship. In a more temperate mood he says: “to love is to wish to be loved.” Simone must have counted that as one of her good days.

So, I think Sartre says our most unselfish act is inescapably selfish/self-centered. (Pssst, please don’t mention to him how Christian that is.)

I see Rand’s view as being somewhere in the vicinity of my opinion of the New Testament and Sartre.

Frankfurt has 4 tests for love that I have to paraphrase since I don’t remember what work it is in:

- The lover wishes the best for the loved
- The lover will continue to wish so, even after the love is extinguished
- The lover has no control of the love
- The lover’s interest in the loved must not be contingent

This doesn’t seem testable until it’s too late to be of use, but I think there is a clue to selfishness in the last point. If it is contingent, it is selfish.

So, I think Frankfurt believes selfishness/self-centeredness and unselfishness are separable and opposite.

For more on Frankfurt:

www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7749.html

So, what do we make of the confusion? My opinion is that there is a broad range of the spectrum over which selfishness and unselfishness overlap. In the civilized world, we spend most of our lives in this range stopping for traffic lights, paying taxes, and being temperate in an attempt to keep our own little part of the world orderly. This spectrum forms a ring and in the vicinity of where the extremes meet, true selfishness resides which is approachable from either direction.

My answer to the question posed is: Yes, selfishness/self-centeredness is usually a virtue. A good example is the little warning concerning oxygen masks in airplanes. It is in the interest of your child for you to put your mask on first.

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Idylle in exile: the view over the laptop on a bad day
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