I am evil incarnate. There is nothing whatsoever good about me in any way, shape, or form. I blow past being selfish clear into outright malicious territory, and the universe would be infinitely better had I never existed.
I’m Lawful Good. Seriously. I don’t jaywalk.
I’m probably less selfish than most people. I don’t eat the last slice of pizza unless no one wants it, I like playing host and providing party food. And I’m humble too. I pride myself on my humility.
I have to say that I do think of myself as a fairly good person. Though I think that there are times when I should do more. When ever I do have a selfish thought I tend to feel really guilty about it.
I do wish I was in a position financially to help more people. It pisses my wife off that when a conversation pops up about what we would do if we won the lottery the first 10 things on my list are to help others. I always thought it would be the greatest thing ever that if I won the lottery to pick some homeless person and give them a place to live, medical attention and help them get back on their feet.
Of course thing number 11 to do is buy myself a Ferrari, but then I feel guilty because I know that for the cost of a Ferarri I could house and feed so many. Sometimes it pisses me off that people consider Republicans heartless, as I am one but would help others out before myself in almost any situation.
Don’t be so pessimistic; at least you know and awareness is a good starting point toward conversion to angelhood / saintdom or at least less evil. Many don’t even have a concept and they are the true evil: ignorance is blessing and very primal evil also.
Good and selfish. They are not mutually exclusive at all.
Without intending to GD-ify the thread, I disagree with the above. “Selfish” implies a moral failing by definition.
If an act didn’t exhibit a moral failing of some kind, it wasn’t selfish.
Not particularly, for either.
Same here. I volunteer regularly (animal-related causes, a domestic violence safe house), have to guard against being a soft touch and letting people take advantage of me and am generally more comfortable in a giver role than a taker one. In fact I am very uncomfortable in a “taker” role, I hate feeling indebted or reliant. Also don’t like feeling that I’ve cheated the system, or a friend, or a clerk at a store. So my motives may be less altruistic and more just doing whatever keeps me in my comfort zone.
But I also have a temper, am impatient and judgemental, and prone to lashing out when I get pissed off.
I don’t think being selfish is ipso facto a bad thing, always. A friend needs an emergency loan to prevent her water being shut off; if loaning her the money means I cannot make my mortgage payment on time, or can’t afford monthly heartworm meds for my dogs, then being “selfish” (keeping my resources for my own use) may do more harm than good.
Eh, I’m okay.
I don’t necessarily think of myself as a good or bad person. I am, however, a selfish person. I want to live in a such a way that I like myself. So I tend to do things that other people think of as good or right so I can tell people without lying (which I really suck at and don’t enjoy doing) that I did the right thing.
I have acknowledged many times to my mom, who tends to ask increasingly unreasonable favors of me, that I am a wholly selfish person. I think I’m probably compensating for childhood in that regard. There are only so many nights a little girl can cry herself to sleep before she depletes all her worldly empathy. My mom was extraordinarily selfish and stupid in her choices of long-term partners, and I suffered at least as much for her choices as she did. That she will never realize this (that the reason for my neuroticness all boils down to her shitty taste in men) practically guarantees that my relationship to her will never improve.
The only person who I’m not selfish about is my little sister.
I guess we need a definition of selfish.
Because I don’t think selfish and good are mutually exclusive. A person can be very kind, loving, and friendly (genuinely), but still be quite self-centered and greedy.
It may be that they have a “me and mine” philosophy, where they put their family above everything else (which is nice), but it’s still selfish. The person who would kill another person to save their kid does so not because they are pure of heart. Their action is motivated by the fear of losing a loved possession. That makes their action selfish to a certain extent.
Or a person may place a premium on their personal comfort. They won’t push you out into the rain to steal your umbrella, but they aren’t going to give you their umbrella either. Doing so would be good, but is not doing so bad? If it is, then everyone who has an umbrella is bad.
Giving your girlfriend a bunch of roses is a very sweet thing to do, but it’s not saintly because your intention is driven by reciprocation. You want to see her happy, but you also want her to love you back.
Ecologists have argued for years whether or not true altruism exists in nature, and I imagine psychologists/sociologists have studied the same thing in humans. We all give and share…but I know I often do so with myself in mind. Put money in the collection plate or you’ll go to hell…sign your coworker’s “get well” card or you’ll look like an asshole…let that kid have a candybar or he’ll drive you nuts with his complaining. Very few people do something completely out of the goodness of their hearts. At least, IMHO.
I guess one way you could divide up types of action is as follows:
A. Morally justified acts motivated by consideration of gain for oneself
B. Morally unjustified acts motivated by consideration of gain for oneself
C. Acts not motivated by consideration of gain for oneself.
I’d say “selfish” refers only to acts of type B. I’d say we don’t really have a word for A. I’d say people who try to call both A and B “selfish” are (in every case I’ve ever seen) usually playing around with connotations, sense can’t be made of their arguments unless we attribute to them an understanding that “selfish” typically refers just to acts of type B, but they are recommending that it should refer to A as well.
The question of the possibility of altruism is the question of whether acts of type C are possible. (I believe they are both possible and actual, and not rare.)
On the above categorization, not giving a stranger your umbrella is (on most plausible filling-in of the details of the story) an act of type A, and so is not selfish.
Also, on the above categorization, giving the stranger your umbrella because you believe it will make you feel good may (depending on the circumstances) be type A or B, so may or may not be selfish.
Meanwhile, giving the stranger your umbrella where the action is caused by the fact that you are the type of person who feels good when you help others (but where the action is not rationalized on that basis) is an action of type C, and so is altruistic.
(You wouldn’t say, “that guy is happy to give money to poor people. How selfish of him!” This is evidence that altruism is possible and that “selfish” always denotes a morally unjustified action.)
I’m not understanding “morally justified”. I don’t see morals playing a part in whether I give you my umbrella or not. Lots of things factor into the decision (Do I like you? What will happen to me if I give you my umbrella? What are the chances of you returning my umbrella?). But morals? I guess I just don’t see it as a moral dilemma.
I guess if we substitute “morally unjustified” with “bad”, then of course “selfish” becomes more akin to bad. But I don’t know if that does the word justice. In my use of the world, “selfish” means “valuing one’s wants and desires over other people’s.” In some situations, this is bad (you eat all the cookies in the cookie jar because your greed keeps you from caring that other people might want some). In some situations, it is not necessarily bad (you don’t answer the banging door late at night because you think the person on your doorstep is going to bring nothing but more stress to your life). In both cases, you are putting your interest above someone else’s…even causing pain to others in the process. But they don’t fall on the same moral scale. They can’t really even be compared in terms of morals (one involves stupid cookies and the other could actually involve someone’s life).
Someone, a person I barely knew, once let me borrow their umbrella. They had another one, but this does not matter. They let me borrow their umbrella when they did not have to. A very kind act from a good person. But I don’t think she did this because she is altruistic, because I’ve seen her do selfish things other times. She did it because it made her feel better. Just like when I hear a coworker at work whine about having forgotten their lunch at home, I offer my cheese and bread. If I didn’t do so, I would feel guilty, like I’m not a good person. So I offer the food for their both benefit AND mine.
This is true. However, a person who gives to charity, even happily, is not necessarily doing so because they love people. They may like the feeling of freeing oneself of material possession and the absolution of guilt that comes with it. “Selfish”, as commonly used, may not be the most appropriate word for this person. But “generous” may not be either.
I raise my hand as a testimony to this kind of “generosity”.
I think I’m very good and relatively unselfish in the context of modern American society. This is an important element of my view of myself. I do wonder if I’m kidding myself, though. If I could push a button and get some kind of quantitative answer on this, I think I’d push it, but I think I’d be pretty nervous too.
Do I think of myself as good or unselfish?
No, I do not.
I see no reason to get into any details here, so I won’t. But though I work consciously (in the real world) to do kind and giving things, it’s not my first impulse and never has been. It’s always been easier for me to be sarcastic rather than speak kindly; to bully rather than to negotiate. I don’t want to be that guy anymore, but in some ways he’s more fundamental than the Skald everybody sees in meatspace; certainly he’s older. And when I’m nice to someone, it’s for the basically selfish reason of wanting to be someone I don’t despise.l
Looking at the list again, you’ll see that as a matter of logic, every action must fall under one or the other of the categories. (There’s no such thing as an action that is neither morally justified nor morally unjustified. This is trivially true since the two terms are negations of each other, so are exhaustive. But as an illustration: I just took a sip of my drink–that’s morally justified, quite trivially, simply because there’s nothing that makes it morally unjustified.)
You’re claiming that “selfish” covers actions of both type A and type B. I suppose this should be treated as an empirical claim about the English language. Maybe we have a “ideolectical” difference between us here.
It seems like my way is better, though, since “selfish” almost undeniably does have prima facie negative connotations for every English speaker, as far as I know. (A person may reason himself into thinking not all selfish acts are wrong–but what I’m saying is that this takes an act of reasoning. Prima facie, calling something “selfish” is a way of condemning the act. This, in turn, indicates that the word “selfish” includes moral condemnation in its meaning. One has to clarify what one means if one intends to use “selfish” to mean something else.)
Take the phrase “Joe did that because he enjoys helping people.” This is actually an ambiguous claim, and it’s common to confuse the two primary readings.
On one reading, this means “Joe was caused to do that by his enjoyment of helping people.”
On another reading, it means “Joe decided to do that on the basis of his enjoyment of helping people.”
Joes action in the second case is probably of type A, possibly of type B.
But Joe’s action in the first case is most probably of type C.
(I’m saying “probably” just because with such a brief sketch of the situation, it’s possible to fill in the details in many ways which might change the correct evaluation of Joe’s action.)
On the first reading, we’re not saying Joe took his own possible gain into account when he decided to do what he did–we’re simply attributing to Joe a personality characteristic which leads him to find enjoyment in helping people. This enjoyment may move him, but we’re not claiming it is one of his reasons for doing what he did. It’s a cause, but not necessarily a rationale.
On the second reading, we’re specifying that Joe took his own possible gain into account–even if it’s just the “gain” of feeling good when one helps people.
On the first reading, we’d need to hear a lot more of the story before we could rightly call the action “selfish” or even “self-interested” in some weaker sense.
On the second reading, we’re attributing self-interest to Joe’s action. We’d still need to hear more, though, to determine whether the self-interest involved was morally justified or not.
First of all, I refuse to sully this discussion with “what would I do if some lunatic was threatening to kill my mom and my cat if I didn’t derail a speeding train full of kindergarteners that were strangers to me” type of scenarios. Those things don’t happen in real life, so it’s stupid to judge your reactions to those kind of questions as proof of your innate good or evil.
Now, do I consider myself a good person? Yes. Unselfish? More than the average person. And I’ll also admit something else. I don’t like being as unselfish as I am.
I’m the sort of person that gets taken advantage of easily, because I can’t stand the feeling of not being liked. I have a hard time saying no even to the most outrageous requests.
Plus if I do put myself before someone else for whatever reason, I will feel agonies of guilt about it for days on end.
I wish I was more thoughtlessly selfish. I think I’d be happier.
I suppose you are right. But I think there must be a word out there for what I’m calling “selfish” but does not necessitate negativity.
Going back to the example of the person who refuses to answer the banging door late at night because they are concerned that they will have to extend themselves in an uncomfortable way…is this selfish behavior? I say so. A generous person would displace their interests in favor of the distressed individual on the other side of the door. Opening their door would be an act of generosity.
What would keeping the door shut be called? “Selfish” sounds harsh, I know, but what is it? If the opposite of generous is selfish, then why isn’t keeping the door shut a selfish act?
A very generous person pays the bill whenever he and his friends are at a restaurant/bar. A very selfish person never pays the bill. What do you call someone who pays the bill but only when he or she feels obligated to? Is there no name for such a person?
If Joe gives because he loves people, he is altruistic. Because love is doing something kind just because it brings happiness to someone, with no expectation of anything positive in return.
If Joe gives because he enjoys the attention he gets from giving…or he gives because likes feeling like a good person that will go to heaven…or he gives because it makes him feel better about kicking all those puppies…then he is NOT altruistic. His act is generous but his intentions are selfish.
I guess my point is that people rarely fall into neat and clean “selfish” and “generous” boxes. Even actions are hard to categorize. Looking at it in black-and-white terms as you appear to be doing may be easier than a more nuanced approach, but I think it is oversimplifies human behavior.
Like I said, I don’t think we have a word for it. “Self-interested” maybe, but even that probably has negative connotations. I’d go for the locution “having an element of self-interest.”
Totally agree, though depending on the particulars I’d say Joe might either be selfish or there may simply be an element of self-interest in his actions.
Uh, weird, I though I was the one bringing in a “more nuanced” approach. You (and many others I’ve had this discussion with) seem to want to say everything’s ultimately selfish, or at least highlight the fact that this is a possibility. That’s not even black and white–that’s just black and black.
So I point out there are at least three shades we need to deal with (A, B and C as I listed them above) and I even make the very non-black-and-white claim that we don’t even have an easy word for one of those shades.
Don’t mean that as testy as it may sound, but I was kind of taken aback when you said I “want everything black and white” etc. I am very certain our roles in this discussion are the reverse of that.