The Virtue of Selfishness
	Ayn Rand (1964)
	Ethics & Contemporary Issues
	Professor Douglas Olena
What is Selfishness?
	44 The connotation of the word selfishness is self centered, egotistical, having no consideration for others.
	Selfishness suggests moral cowardice.
	It is a synonym for evil.
	³The image it conjures is of a murderous brute, who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.²
What is Selfishness?
	44 Dictionary: ³concern with oneıs own interests.²
	The dictionary does not tell us whether selfishness is good or evil, or what constitutes manıs actual interests.
	Ethics must do that.
Two Moral Questions
	Rand will contrast selfishness with altruism. Her distinctions have the goal of exposing the weakness of altruism.
	Altruism lumps two moral questions together into one package deal:
		What are values?
		Who should be the beneficiary of those values?
Altruismıs Answer
	44 ³Altruism declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for oneıs own benefit is evil.²
	³Thus the beneficiary of an action is the only criterion of moral value.²
	Anything goes as long as the beneficiary is not oneself.
Altruismıs Devastation
	44 Altruist ethics in its many forms have produced:
		appalling immorality
		chronic injustice
		grotesque double standards
		insoluble conflicts and contradictions
Double Standard
	44, 45 The industrialist and the thief are equally evil because they sought gain for themselves.
	Yet the poor clerk is lionized for sacrificing his personal future for others.
	The dictator is regarded as moral because he has done what he did to benefit the people.
Beneficiary Criteria
	45 Under the altruistic morality:
	³The first thing he learns is that morality is his enemy; 
	he has nothing to gain from it, he can only lose;
	self-inflicted loss, self-inflicted pain and the gray, debilitating pall of an incomprehensible duty is all he can expect.²
Beneficiary Criteria
	45 Since concern for oneself is evil, and nothing in nature will defend or save a person, then he is left without moral defense to protect himself from death.
	Manıs desire to live is evil because it is self serving.
	³No doctrine could be more evil than that.²
Difference in
Self-Interest
	45 Though Altruism evaluates the Thief and the Industrialist as mutually evil, ³there is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery.²
	It is not that a man chooses to pursue his own interests that makes him moral or not but what he chooses to do in his own interest.
Difference in
Self-Interest
	³Altruism permits no view of man except as sacrificial animals and profiteers-on-sacrifice, as victims and parasites‹
	that it permits no concept of a benevolent coexistence among men‹
	that it permits no concept of justice.²
Difference in
Self-Interest
	³To redeem both man and morality, it is the concept of ³selfishness² that one has to redeem.²