Over the millennia people have tried to make some sense out of the chaos of life. Usually without much success. Sounds good at the time but then goes wrong.
I suppose capitalism is the modern mantra of selfishness and in vogue especially in America.
Selfishness is in red because
@Pat494 seems to view it as evil.
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.
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
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.
