Selfishness is a virtue

So recently I got to thinking about “altruism” …

What left George Price utterly despondent and suicidal, Ayn Rand called self-esteem. While the former spent much of his later life trying desperately to prove that human beings were capable of truly selfless acts, the latter spent her entire literary career rejecting such notions outright and deplored any views to the contrary.

Such egoism, Rand argued, is what makes us individuals and it is upon the back of individual achievement that society thrives. If not for these exceptional individuals, who should make no apologies for their brilliance, the dull masses would be interminably confined to their own ordinariness with little hope of reprieve. It is by the pursuit of rational self-interest that the talented ones are able to create and produce such that all may benefit, and so it is we who should be for such individuals and not they for us.

Price, by contrast, was greatly disturbed at the thought that altruism, in it’s purest form, did not exist and at the core humans are selfish in their behaviour towards others, even when one shows kindness to another it is not without some benefit to the giver. However much he or she is thinking of someone else’s welfare even the smallest amount of pleasure that one may derive from acting kindly nullifies any suggestion that one is behaving selflessly. We are, by design, for ourselves alone.

Or at least that’s how Price perceived it.

Like Rand I don’t find the notion that we act for ourselves disturbing in the least. It is completely obvious and also unnecessary to attach any negative connotations to this fact.

I also don’t think that we are either for ourselves or not for ourselves.

I would say neither and that we should reject this zero sum calculation of goodness. Can the complex human psyche be broken down into such a simple binary opposition? Perhaps kindness and self-interest are better thought of not as discrete functions, but as existing upon a continuum whereupon they are exercised in degrees.

For instance I may perform an action that benefits another more than myself and from which I may derive a small amount of pleasure in doing so. I am fully aware of the fact that in this transaction I will receive less, but I am still motivated to act mostly because it makes me feel good to do so. Although, I do benefit in some way I am not the prime consideration in this interaction. I am not seeking advantage over another and neither party is diminished in any sense. In fact, overall benefit is maximised for all.

For this reason I find the concept of altruism to be misleading or perhaps even fallacious. It is not human nature that is flawed, but our conception of it. It is better to think of our interactions with others as reciprocal or mutually beneficial.

Of course that is not to say that individuals always seek to cooperate with and help others. Any such idea would be absurd. People act solely in their own interest all the time, some to a greater or lesser degree than others. I know that I have been entirely self-interested on more than one occasion … at least, and possibly to the detriment of another as well.

And perhaps at the time I thought I was being rational, and maybe I was, or more plausibly I was rationalising away bad behaviour that benefited myself and myself alone. This is the danger with Rand’s emphasis on the pursuit of rational self-interest, because just as people are capable of rational thought processes we are similarly able to come up with well thought out justifications for actions that may be more motivated by selfish desire than anything else and doing more damage than good.

Should I care? For some the answer may be no.

However, the overwhelming majority would have answered yes because most people are able to empathise with another’s suffering or misfortune. It is from this very basic human emotion that our sense of justice and fairness is derived. The justice system was not handed down to us as a gift by the god Juris. It is innate. Such “moral” behaviour is observable in other pack animals as well Everything we do is within a social framework. No man is an island and all that …

In JG Ballard’s Drowned World the opposite was true: “Each man is an island unto himself.” Only a reptile could possibly think so … and believe it too …