Noble selfishness

It's a challenge to defend against selfish people with virtuous plans

Everyone is selfish to some degree, and some selfishness is broadly considered acceptable: self-care and self-preservation are generally considered advisable, and preferable to constant self-sacrifice. However, some people are noticeably more selfish than others. Most of the time, it’s obvious that such selfishness is a vice, but it’s not always straightforward. Since at least the time of Adam Smith, it’s been clear that selfishness is also one of the underpinnings of capitalism, and that the “invisible hand” of the market arguably produces a virtuous result from multiple independent selfish choices.

Outside of purely economic situations, it’s less obvious that selfishness can be OK. When I was in high school, it was a revelation to me when I first encountered The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand. (Don’t worry, it's OK: I'm better now.) Although it was eye-opening at the time to have such a decisive reasoned rejection of what I had been taught about virtue and selfishness, I now think of Rand as juvenilia. I'm usually a little surprised when I encounter adults who take her seriously; for example, I find it slightly disturbing that Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve was a Rand follower. In some ways, her writing seems like an excessive reaction to the similarly-excessive ideas underpinning earlier writings by socialists and communists. (Attracting attention with extreme positions predates social media!)

A theory of selfishness also comes up when moral philosophers consider what it means to be an asshole. Although it sort of looks like (and probably sells like) a kind of joke book, the book Assholes: A Theory by Aaron James is a careful analysis of what it means to be such a person, and what their existence implies for the rest of us. An asshole "allows himself to enjoy special advantages in social relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people." An asshole is thus a person who is unusually or completely selfish, while firmly believing that their selfish behavior is justified.

We might well say that “classic assholes” are people who are selfish, who know it, and who defend it. Such people are definitely a problem – especially if they reinforce each other, and lower prevailing norms so that everyone feels entitled to be an asshole. Arguably, we are currently in a remarkably asshole-intensive phase of US history, even compared to the excesses of the earlier “Me generation.” (It would be catchy but inaccurate to say that we are at “peak asshole.” Unfortunately, it’s hard to be sure that the prevalence of selfish behavior won’t keep intensifying.)

Although classic assholes are problematic people, they are easy to understand and easy (in some ways) to handle. They are potential hazards in life, but they are not confusing, either to me or to themselves.

However, there's a different set of people who are selfish, arguably to the point of being assholes, but who don’t act in a typical asshole way. For these selfish people, it's both difficult for them to perceive their selfishness, and it's difficult for me to manage my interactions with them.

The central challenge is that although they are selfish, and are pursuing their personal particular goals, and are relentless in their effort to enlist me in support of their own goal, their goal is not in itself selfish. Instead, they have a noble or unselfish goal, they want to help one or more other people, but they pursue that noble goal in a relentlessly selfish way… at least, from my perspective.

For example, suppose that they want to do something nice for someone else. On the face of it, that goal makes them unselfish. But now suppose that they are leaning on others to give them time, energy, and/or resources to accomplish their unselfish goal. It seems clear that there could, in principle, be a place where their overall action seems selfish, in the sense of focusing mostly on their goals at the expense of others, regardless of the nobility of their goal.

Now, it’s one thing to say that being “nobly selfish” is possible in principle. It’s considerably more difficult to establish any concrete situation as being an instance of the problem. I might well feel that someone is acting like an asshole, but I might have little success in convincing others of that. Indeed, I might even be called the asshole: after all, I’m asserting some form of my own personal selfishness against someone who is trying to do something noble. The easy quick judgment would be that they are a nice person, while I am the asshole.

I find this combination of “unselfish goal with selfish implementation” to be challenging. In those situations, it’s hard for me to be confident that I'm doing the right thing when I treat the person as selfish, and try to reclaim my time or my priorities. It also makes it hard for me to convey to them either (1) the tactical issue: that I'm declining to help them despite the nobility of their goal, or (2) the larger problem: why their behavior is unpleasant, and ultimately self-defeating.

Do the ends sometimes justify the means? If one is pursuing an unselfish or noble goal, does it matter that one is pursuing it in a selfish or ignoble way? I'm unable to answer the question in general. I just know that I find people irritating when they behave selfishly with me. It is particularly annoying if they are selfish in a way that makes it hard for them to perceive that they are selfish.