Topics Ethics

Question First of all, Congratulations on this excellent website. It is a pleasure to discover a place on the Internet where the public may present philosophical questions for review by experts. My question is in regards to selflessness and selfishness. I view self-sacrifice as noble and a moral good, and that selfishness is repugnant and a moral wrong. With this in mind, I would like to ask about how to counter an idea posed in a quote by Ayn Rand: “Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Does virtue consist of serving vice?” Can this view of selflessness be countered? I am essentially concerned about if an act of selflessness/self-sacrifice merely allows a selfishness elsewhere to be validated and to profit. Does a selfless act, by necessity, exist with and serve a selfishness? Moreover, is what condemns the self-interestedness of one person nothing more than the self-interestedness of another? Has this particular issue arisen in philosophical/ethical discussion? Please let me know if I have neglected something crucial. Thank you very much, and keep up the great work.

Accepted:
September 8, 2008

Comments

Your question reminds me of a quote that a friend uses as her email signature: "If I'm here to serve others, what are the others here for?" There is an important point here, and it's one that Rand is getting at, namely: an ethics of pure selflessness is, if perhaps not incoherent, at least ungrounded. It must be okay for people to enjoy certain benefits if it's morally worthy for others to work to secure those benefits for them. However, Rand then goes to the other extreme, endorsing instead an ethics of pure selfishness. One can readily acknowledge both the legitimacy of self-concern and the obligation to concern oneself with the welfare of others. There is no contradiction.

So, for instance, on a utilitarian conception of justice, one gets to count one's own utility as fully as anyone else's. If helping another would involve a great sacrifice on one's own part, assuming the benefit to the other is not correspondingly greater, one is not obliged to make the sacrifice. But, it is still incumbent on one to take the welfare of others into account, and this might involve a sacrifice. So utilitarian theory instructs us how to achieve the right balance between selflessness and self-concern. (It is highly controversial whether utilitarianism dictates the right balance, but that is another matter.) On rights-based theories, or other non-utilitarian theories, a notion of fairness, or justice is grounded in the idea of terms of social cooperation that allow individuals to pursue their own interests but within contraints that respect the similar pursuits of others. Here too there is an attempt to strike a balance between legitimate self-concern and concern for others. There is no contradiction between the two.

One might say this however. In a situation, as arguably we face in the world today, in which many, many people suffer serious distress, such as hunger, lack of education, assaults on their basic rights, it might be argued that those who have the ability to alleviate this suffering have an obligation to spend more of their limited resources (whether it be time, money, or influence) on others' welfare than their own. (Peter Singer makes just such an argument in a famous article, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality".) I think how we strike the right balance between self-concern and other-concern is a very difficult question, and clearly we are all prone to self-deception in evaluating how close we come to realizing the right balance in our own lives. But the difficulty of this issue does not in any way show that there is an inconsistency in acknowledging the claims of both, as Ayn Rand seems to suggest in the passage you quote.