Selfishness
Selfishness is placing concern with oneself or one's own interests above the well-being or interests of others.[1][2]
Selfishness is the opposite of altruism or selflessness; and has also been contrasted (as by C. S. Lewis) with self-centredness.[3]
Contents
Divergent views[edit]
The implications of selfishness have inspired divergent views within religious, philosophical, psychological, economic and evolutionary contexts.
Classical[edit]
Aristotle joined what he saw as the majority of his countrymen in condemning for selfishness those who sought only to profit themselves; but approved the self-love of the man of reason who sought to gain for himself the greatest share of what deserved social praise.[4]
Seneca proposed a cultivation of the self within a wider community - a care for the self which he opposed to mere selfishness in a theme that would later be taken up by Foucault.[5]
Medieval/Renaissance[edit]
Selfishness was viewed in the Western Christian tradition as a central vice – as standing at the roots of the Seven deadly sins in the form of pride.[6]
Francis Bacon carried forward this tradition when he characterised “Wisdom for a man's self...[a]s the wisdom of rats”.[7]
Modernity[edit]
With the emergence of a commercial society, Bernard Mandeville proposed the paradox that social and economic advance depended on private vices – on what he called the sordidness of selfishness.[8]
Adam Smith with the concept of the invisible hand saw the economic system as usefully channelling selfish self-interest to wider ends;[9] while John Locke based society upon the solitary individual, arguably opening the door for later thinkers like Ayn Rand to argue for selfishness as a social virtue and the root of social progress.[10]
Roman Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain opposed the latter view by way of the Aristotelian argument that framing the fundamental question of politics as a choice between altruism and selfishness is a basic and harmful mistake of modern states. Rather, cooperation ought to be the norm: human beings are by nature social animals, and so individual persons can only find their full good in and through pursuing the good of the community.[11]
Psychology[edit]
Lack of empathy has been seen as one of the roots of selfishness, extending as far as the cold manipulation of the psychopath.[12]
The contrast between self-affirmation and selfishness has become a conflictual arena in which the respective claims of individual/community is often played out – between parents and children[13] or men and women, for example.[14]
Psychoanalysts favor the development of a genuine sense of self, and may even speak of a healthy selfishness,[15] as opposed to the self-occlusion[16] of what Anna Freud called 'emotional surrender'.[17]
Game theory[edit]
Given two actors, oneself and someone else, there are four types of possible behavior directly impacting the welfare of the actors: selfishness, altruism, spite, and cooperation. Selfishness is harming someone else in order to help oneself; altruism is harming oneself in order to help someone else; spite is harming oneself in order to harm someone else; cooperation is helping someone else and also helping oneself.[18] [19]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ Selfishness, The Free Dictionary, accessed on 17 December 2011
- ^ Selfishness - meaning, reference.com, accessed on 23 April 2012
- ^ C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1988) p. 116-7
- ^ Aristotle, Ethics (1976) p. 301-3
- ^ G. Gutting ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2003) p. 138-30
- ^ Dante, Purgatorio (1971) p. 65
- ^ Francis Bacon, The Essays (1985) p. 131
- ^ Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1970) p. 410 and p. 81-3
- ^ M. Skousen, The Big Three in Economics (2007) p. 29
- ^ P. L. Nevins, The Politics of Selfishness (2010) p. xii-iii
- ^ Maritain, Jacques (1973). The Person and the Common Good. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. ISBN 978-0268002046.
- ^ D. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (1996) p. 104-10
- ^ R. D. Laing, Self and Others (1969) p. 142-3
- ^ What is Selfish?
- ^ N. Symington, Narcissism (1993) p. 8
- ^ Terence Real, I Don't Want to Talk About It (1997) p. 203-5
- ^ Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (1994) p. 98
- ^ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/
- ^ http://www.dictionaryofeconomics.com/article?id=pde2008_G000007&q=game%20theory&topicid=&result_number=3
Further reading[edit]
- A Theory of Justice (by John Rawls)
- The Evolution of Cooperation, Robert Axelrod, Basic Books, ISBN 0-465-02121-2
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins (1990), second edition—includes two chapters about the evolution of cooperation, ISBN 0-19-286092-5
External links[edit]
Is Human Nature Fundamentally Selfish or Altruistic?