Selfishness

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Selfishness is, at base, the concept and/or practice of concern with one's own interests in some sort of priority to the interests of others; it is often used to refer to a self-interest that comes in a particular form, or above a certain level.

1 Selfishness regarded as good, or a healthy thing
2 Group selfishness (as compared to individual selfishness)
3 General
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Selfishness regarded as good, or a healthy thing

There are some non-religious philosophies that hold a positive view of selfishness, usually on the basis that it isn't what the common usage refers to, and that the identification of 'promotion of the self' with 'evil' is an unhealthy practice that actually devalues some good qualities such as productivity or the taking of personal responsibility. One view is that since one needs to act in a mainly self-interested way in order to advance in life doing so should not be regarded as wrong, or labelled as harmful or inappropriate.

Similarly, an individual might ask himself why he ought to choose to act unselfishly anyway if he has no guarantee in advance that others in the world will not act selfishly. One will tend to act selfishly for one's own self-protection, in a world where one mainly encounters others doing the same.

The best known example is probably the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, which focuses on what it calls "rational selfishness" or "rational self-interest." The philosophy holds that individuals should not act on momentary self-interested whims but on what is in their long-term self-interest, which is defined to require respecting the individual liberty of others by refraining from initiating coercion against them.

[edit] Group selfishness (as compared to individual selfishness)

selfishness usually refers to the self - that is, to the individual. However, in common speech, a group of people can be accused of "selfishness" too, in the sense that members of that group are not concerned with the welfare of anyone outside their group but are only inward-looking: concentrating on the needs of the group.

[edit] General

Based on the theory of the iterated prisoner's dilemma, evolutionary biologists and game-theorists come to the conclusion that selfishness is - besides cooperation among relatives and genetically programmed behaviour - the basis for cooperation among individuals of the same or different species.