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This definition of selfish can include pretty much every traditional moral act of selflessness. “Jesus sacrificed his Life because he selfishly wanted a world where his Father was pleased and Man freed from sin.” It’s clearer to understand selfishness in the traditional understanding as a zero-sum decision which helps oneself at the expense of helping another. Attempting to save one’s brother is thus selfless, as the word is most clearly used, as it comes from a selfless desire to save the life of another at peril to oneself.
Complexity does develop when we ask: “is it most moral and for the greater good to selflessly attempt to save another every time, even if there’s a 55% chance both die, meaning that over 100 iterations it’s certainly causing greater loss of life?”
And the answer to this I still say yes, the selfless act is still greater, because (1) such acts inspire the whole of society, (2) such acts make each member of the society feel safer, knowing he can trust the other, (3) the emotional impetus of the act is heroic and good, and in crises we usually behave according to our emotional intuition.
Thus the paradox of selfishness: what aspect of a choice is essential to accurately calling it selfish or selfless? It seems to me there are three main metrics to use when judging any choice:
Who benefits? (higher status? better experiences? more resources? freer agency? The chooser, the person it impacts, or no one?)
Who does it cost? (lower status? worse experiences? lowered utility? restricted agency? How much?)
Do any of these parties consider the trade of cost / benefit to be fair or unfair?
To boil a multidimensional cost/benefit analysis down to a simple binary may be handy for a rule of thumb, but it’s absurd to make hard-and-fast judgments of any choice’s morality simply by whether the person making the choice is not one of its major beneficiaries.
But beyond all of that, Rand made crystal clear the poison is not in the simplification but in the implication. She found it utterly repugnant that anyone should disdain the self because it is the self. The glory of the human spirit is that we build tools to solve problems, our problems, and often find win-win solutions to do so, including arpeggiating serial win-win-wins through market forces. She praised and elevated people who knew how much they were truly worth and despised anyone who insisted on producers sacrificing their potential and resources for short-term wins for people who squander their potential. It was selfish of her to want a society where people with potential succeed and build great things to use or inspiring art to admire; thus, she heralded selfishness.
Taking it all back to Bedford Falls and George Bailey, George performed righteous and heroic acts, wherever they were on the axis of selfish or selfless, whether he benefited himself or vicariously through people he valued, whether he himself knew the positive consequences or not, whether they inspired anyone or not. If more Bedforders lived honestly for their values, and their values were focused on greatness and not mediocrity, perhaps George wouldn’t have wanted to leave his small town for bigger things. What ate away at George was the sense that he was the only one who could fix things, and it always felt unfair how much he was called upon to give away resources, status, and opportunities for positive experiences. But he gave anyway, because the world he cared about would be worse if he didn’t.
George was almost fooled into insurance suicide by a society which recognized no transcendence in his life and character, only a slight and momentary increase in its own values extracted from his death. That’s the kind of selflessness Rand railed against, whether it be a man or an entire country: that he should value his life less than his death.
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Rand had a very idiosyncratic definition of "selfish". I've always wondered if it was something to do with the way the words translate, interpreted with autistic literalism. But she just means "beneficial to you, in a fully contextual, long-term sense." In her view, screwing over others in short term winnings is ultimately counterproductive, and harmful to your long-term self-interest. In her use of the terms, a "sacrifice" is something that you wouldn't willingly trade away without duress. The classic example is the virgin sacrificed to the Volcano God. Obviously the village would rather have a healthy young person than no health young person. They only "sacrifice" that person under the perceived threat of violence from the Volcano God. Conversely, Jesus was voluntarily paying a cost, much as I would be if I went hungry to feed my kids. I value their health above my own, which means that harming my direct interests to benefit theirs is within the Randian conception of "selfish".
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