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Concept
Selfishness
Summary
Selfishness is being concerned excessively or exclusively, for oneself or one's own advantage, pleasure, or welfare, regardless of others.
Selfishness is the opposite of altruism or selflessness; and has also been contrasted (as by C. S. Lewis) with self-centeredness.
The implications of selfishness have inspired divergent views within religious, philosophical, psychological, economic, and evolutionary contexts.
Aristotle joined a perceived majority of his countrymen in condemning those who sought only to profit themselves; but he approved the man of reason who sought to gain for himself the greatest share of that which deserved social praise.
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.
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.
Francis Bacon carried forward this tradition when he characterized “Wisdom for a man's self...[a]s the wisdom of rats”.
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.
Adam Smith with the concept of the invisible hand saw the economic system as usefully channelling selfish self-interest to wider ends. John Locke, along with Adam Smith, was a key figure in early classical liberalism: an ideology that champions notions of individualism and negative liberty. These core themes inevitably relate to the concept of selfishness. Locke, for example, sought for people to exercise "self-government"—the idea that an individual should make his/her own decisions. This inherent right would allow individuals to pursue self-interests, rather than suffer the burdens of any altruistic obligations. Thus, unlike political ideologies such as socialism, Locke and other classical liberals believe that selfishness is engrained in human nature.
Official source
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