Selfish is a plain word that is easily understood. Well one would easily think so! Thus, one might grant, so too would the word selfishness be easily understood.

Let’s start with the dictionary.

Selfishness: n stinginess resulting from a concern for your own welfare and a disregard of others.
Selfish: adj concerned chiefly or only with yourself and your advantage to the exclusion of others

The dictionary entry for Selfish goes on to explain:

Someone who is selfish cares only about themselves and doesn’t consider others. If a ship is sinking and you refuse to let anyone else into your 4-person lifeboat, you’re extremely selfish.

Selfish combines the pronoun self-, meaning to or for yourself, with the suffix-ish, for “having the character of.” So if your actions are selfish, they all have to do with getting something for yourself, like attention, or candy, or power. Selfish is usually meant to be an insult; someone selfish goes beyond just taking care of themselves, and actively takes from others. The opposite of selfish is self-sacrificing, which means, “giving everything to others and sacrificing your own needs.”

All well and good.

Where it starts to be less than ‘black and white’ is when the issue of boundaries is embraced. In other words, the boundary between what is absolutely selfish, what is moderately selfish, what is moderately self-sacrificing and what is absolutely self-sacrificing. Underlining the subjective nature of the words selfish and selfishness. That’s even before considering that one man’s selfishness is another’s normal behaviour!

There’s a blogsite called Psychology of Selfishness authored by Ifat Glassman, a painter living in Redmond, Washington, USA. I have no knowledge of whether or not she has an academic background in psychology but a post on that blogsite back in February, 2010 certainly offers some intriguing ideas.

Thursday, February 18, 2010
What is Selfishness?
Before I get into what selfishness is I want to briefly answer – why is it important to know what is selfishness and what is not?
The reason is that selfishness is a fundamental principle – whom are you live for – for yourself or for others, and what does it even mean to live for yourself? The answer to these questions can determine the course of your life, the kind of actions you take and the emotional reward you ultimately receive from your life.
Secondly, selfishness is an ethical issue. If one misidentifies what selfishness is, one can experience unearned guilt or live a life which is not as good as one could have.

Ms. Glassman is spot on, in my humble opinion, in regarding selfishness as both an issue of ethics and a fundamental principle of life.

However, she goes on to say, after quoting “one of Ayn Rand greatest achievements was her identification of the true meaning of “selfishness”, to say:

The person who kills and steals and the person who produces and earns are considered as having the same moral quality, since they both do it to promote their own ends.
Is it any wonder, then, that people condemn selfishness – and is it any wonder that so many people feel guilty for any kind of happiness or enjoyment they pursue for themselves, not for others?
The fault here is in the basic understanding of what selfishness is, and in replacing “lack of value for human life” with “selfishness”.

I have a significant problem with the idea that a murderer can have the same moral quality as one who produces and earns and I don’t doubt I am alone with that opinion.

As do I have a problem with a sentence towards the end of her essay, “Selfishness, is actually demanding. Because happiness is demanding.” Clearly a need to turn to Ayn Rand herself for greater clarification.

But before so doing, you and I need to understand what is meant by Objectivism.

The website of The Atlas Society explains:

Objectivism is the philosophy of rational individualism founded by Ayn Rand (1905-1982).

Objectivism holds that there is no greater moral goal than achieving happiness. But one cannot achieve happiness by wish or whim. Fundamentally, it requires rational respect for the facts of reality, including the facts about our human nature and needs. Happiness requires that one live by objective principles, including moral integrity and respect for the rights of others. Politically, Objectivists advocate laissez-faire capitalism. Under capitalism, a strictly limited government protects each person’s rights to life, liberty, and property and forbids that anyone initiate force against anyone else. The heroes of Objectivism are achievers who build businesses, invent technologies, and create art and ideas, depending on their own talents and on trade with other independent people to reach their goals.

Objectivism is optimistic, holding that the universe is open to human achievement and happiness and that each person has within him the ability to live a rich, fulfilling, independent life.

In the introduction to her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand proposes:

The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness—which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man—which means: the values required for human survival—not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the “aspirations,” the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment.

The Objectivist ethics holds that human good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.
The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.

Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.

This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.

When Ayn Rand goes on to write about those differences between the murderer and the worker, it shows to me that Ms. Glassman misinterpreted Rand’s proposition. Again, from Ayn Rand’s book:

There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level (see Ayn Rand’s book, “The Objectivist Ethics”).

That’s clearer to me; much more so. Yet it only goes to reinforce the maze within which one can easily become lost when exploring these ideas of selfishness.

Let me offer a little more from Ayn Rand:

If it is true that what I mean by “selfishness” is not what is meant conventionally, then this is one of the worst indictments of altruism: it means that altruism permits no concept of a self-respecting, self-supporting man — a man who supports his life by his own effort and neither sacrifices himself nor others. It means that altruism permits no view of men except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites—that it permits no concept of a benevolent co-existence among men—that it permits no concept of justice.
To redeem both man and morality, it is the concept of “selfishness” that one has to redeem.

The first step is to assert man’s right to a moral existence — that is: to recognize his need of a moral code to guide the course and the fulfillment of his own life . . . .

The reasons why man needs a moral code will tell you that the purpose of morality is to define man’s proper values and interests, that concern with his own interests is the essence of a moral existence, and that man must be the beneficiary of his own moral actions.

Since all values have to be gained and/or kept by men’s actions, any breach between actor and beneficiary necessitates an injustice: the sacrifice of some men to others, of the actors to the nonactors, of the moral to the immoral. Nothing could ever justify such a breach, and no one ever has.

Ayn Rand then closes her Introduction by offering this proposition:

Just as man cannot survive by any random means, but must discover and practice the principles which his survival requires, so man’s self-interest cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved by the guidance of rational principles. This is why the Objectivist ethics is a morality of rational self-interest—or of rational selfishness.

Since selfishness is “concern with one’s own interests,” the Objectivist ethics uses that concept in its exact and purest sense. It is not a concept that one can surrender to man’s enemies, nor to the unthinking misconceptions, distortions, prejudices and fears of the ignorant and the irrational. The attack on “selfishness” is an attack on man’s self-esteem; to surrender one, is to surrender the other.

How to summarise all of this with respect to the central theme of this section of the book? Back to that definition of Objectivism from The Atlas Society that was included earlier on. Back to these sentences:

“Objectivism holds that there is no greater moral goal than achieving happiness. But one cannot achieve happiness by wish or whim. Fundamentally, it requires rational respect for the facts of reality, including the facts about our human nature and needs. Happiness requires that one live by objective principles, including moral integrity and respect for the rights of others.”

Back to one single sentence: “Fundamentally, it requires rational respect for the facts of reality, including the facts about our human nature and needs.”

I am drawn to Ernest Hemmingway’s classic novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls. Simply for the reason that the phrase seems so apt for mankind in this 21st century. The bell tolls for all of mankind and will not cease its tolling until we embrace a rational respect for the facts about our human nature and our needs.

1,849 words Copyright © 2014 Paul Handover