Is it possible to be selfish without hurting anybody?

May --- A word like Sweed-ish means “related to Sweeden;” similarly, a word like self-ish means “related to the self.” To be related to Sweeden does not mean to be good about Sweeden and bad about every other country. Similarly, to be related to the self does not mean to be good to the self and bad to everybody else. My question implies that one can be selfish at the expense of others and one can be selfish at no one’s expense. Therefore, the statement “...if you ALWAYS act for yourself you WILL hurt others” seems untrue. First of all, one would not be able to survive if one ALWAYS acted in the interest of others at one’s expense. Therefore, ALWAYS is out of the question both ways. If it is not moral to sacrifice others for us, it is not moral for others to sacrifice us for them.

Morality depends on the consequences that any action originating for any SELF produces, but fundamentally all human actions are related to the self, in the self’s interest. It is in my self interest t

There are ethical principles, like laws of physics, chemistry and biology, that govern morality. They have to be discovered, like everything else in life. Humans are not infallible, so we can all be wrong.

James K ---- I said selfish "all the time" meaning exactly that, consistently. Why? Because the self, our self, is with us all the time. We are the self and can’t be anything else but what we are. I can have dessert for myself, then I can go to work “for my self interest”, then I can go for a walk (for the benefit of my self), then I can rescue a lost dog (because my self has empathy and can’t stand looking at the consequences of a dog without its owner); then I can go volunteer for one “altruistic” social cause or another and donate of my time, money and energy because my self feels so much better doing something for the purpose of living in a world without poverty, diseases, and crime. So, which of these actions are disconnected from the self? None. We do every

Hi, Aaron --- Yours is a bit too convoluted of an argument. You basically try to place all human actions in two well-defined black or white areas. Either an action is selfish (harmful to others) or selfless (beneficial to others). I think it’s a false alternative. The example of the ice scream fits. It’s not that one doesn’t have the money to offer a free ice scream to a friend – a friend is still a selfish value. Does a person have the money to offer a free ice scream to a stranger? Does he have enough to offer it to two, three, ten strangers? When do the strangers become too many for the money? Is that the standard for drawing the moral line? Do we draw the line when one is so poor that he has no money for a certain number of strangers? This will put the poor automatically on a moral high horse. The poorest person has only needs and nothing to give. Is that what makes him moral?

Selfless does not mean selfless for one person. It means that as long as there is some value in that self (ice scream, money, energy, etc.) others should benefit from everything that is extra. Money, time and energy are scarce commodities that all individuals need for survival and for improving their lives. If people drew the line to the bare survival according to the principle that “one is only morally entitled to what allows him to live and what goes beyond that amount belongs to whoever might desire it or need it” then there would be no progress beyond survival, just like in the animal world. The mind would serve no purpose for improving human life. Life could never be improved, since all improvement is a surplus beyond the mere survival level.

In this moral predicament, a man who had more energy, strength or ability could not choose to use his skills to improve his own personal living condition without denying others with less energy, less strength or ability the part of wealth that was his. This is true in a prehistoric society as it is in the financial and technological world of today. Between the man who gives away all his wealth to the poor and the one who aims at accumulating a great amount of wealth to invest in the development of a new medicine, which man has indirectly given more to society as a whole? Which man has squandered to nothingness his wealth, and which one has used it wisely in his own self-interest while indirectly benefiting the whole mankind?