Isn't Everyone Selfish?

(Originally written July 18, 2006 in Book 3)

The Virtue of Selfishness
Ayn Rand

Isn't Everyone Selfish?
by Nathaniel Branden

Linehan - If this essay follows the premise this title entails it will have the same intellectual worth as a child saying, "I have to have those jeans, everyone has them!" It would have to follow this line of thinking, "everyone is doing it, therefore I should". It would be so absurd to adopt this as a standard. R might actually laugh out loud, rather than scream at this book (as I have regularly done).

Selfishness vs. self-sacrifice arises in an ethical context. It asks the question - Who is to be the beneficiary of his actions? One's own self or someone else?

Egoism holds that man is an end in himself; altruism holds that man is a means to the ends of others.

Selfishness entails:
1) A hierarchy of values set by the standard of one's self-interests
2) The refusal to sacrifice a higher value to a lower one or a non-value

Genuinely selfish people choose their goals based on reason alone.

Since rational men's interest do not clash, other men benefit from a man's rational act.

Men who die for their wife's sake do so only in a self-interested way. There is no sacrifice here. They simply choose to die based on a set of values. Life, post-death of man's wife has less value to them then death, so in their rational hierarchy they must choose death.

Linehan - Absurd, utterly and completely absurd thinking.

The selfishness or unselfishness of an action is not determined by the feelings of the actor. it is determined objectively.

Emotions and desires are not causeless, irreducible primaries.

"It is only the legacy of mysticism that permits men to imagine that they are still speaking meaningfully when they declare that one can seek one's happiness in the renunciation of one's happiness" (Rand, 60).