Why Use The Word "Selfish"?

[merjet]

Why Use The Word "Selfish"?   Yaron Brook morphs into a clueless Peter Schwartz.

[KorbenDallas]

7 hours ago, merjet said:

Why Use The Word "Selfish"?   Yaron Brook morphs into a clueless Peter Schwartz.

That was hard to watch, Brook needs a remedial VoS read

[Don E.]

What was wrong with it? You guys are just making bald assertions, that he's "clueless", and "hard to watch", without providing any reasoning or evidence. If you read the first page (8 paragraphs or so) of the Introduction to VOS, Ayn Rand answers that exact question herself - why she chose to use the word "selfish" - and Yaron's answer sounded perfectly consistent with her answer, to me. Can you elaborate on your viewpoint? 

 

[BaalChatzaf]

I believe Rand wanted to administer some philosophical  shock  to shake up those she opposed.  Traditionally, the word "selfish"  is used to describe a non-virtuous  and sinful attitude.   Rand wanted to  stand matters on their head.  So she took what normally  refers to the mother of sin and made it the greatest of goods.  Rand was in no mood for winning friends  and gentle persuasion./

[anthony]

You're right about her making the blunt contrast, but I think to shock is the least of it . One can't put a better face on the truth, so why be tentative? If one can impart what "rational" means to its fullest extent, and then what is "I" (and, I want, I love ...) there's nothing to be made nervous about by rational egoism. The most important effort is in explaining 'rational', the selfish part follows logically - that egoist has no desire to 'take' from others and won't. Brook played it quite straight, I thought.

[Brant Gaede]

Yaron did a good job in spite of his accent. He did a better job than Ayn Rand did who vitiated the idea of selfishness within the opening text of VOS, not well enough living up to the book's title with her weak dictionary definition not found in any dictionary. But both YB and AR--of course AR--are standard Ortho respecting the concept with YB having no excuse for not spreading it out more generally philosophically. Maybe he has elsewhere. I don't pay the guy much attention.

--Brant

[Megan]

I'm new here, but this in particular has always bugged me. To one and all, the word selfish has negative connotations.  Rightfully so.  Rand change the dictionary meaning. When people disagreed, she proclaimed, "See how irrational the world is!" I never bought it.  Random liked attention, and this kind of thing provided it for her.

[anthony]

"Rightfully so", Megan? If "selfish" has a). always been connotated with using others, taking from others, etc. -and b). that in fact, it's always been tacitly or explicitly unthinkingly accepted that one must - virtuously - live for others... you will see that a. has always been a justification for b. - and both are false.

Rand broke through that vicious circle and for me it's insignificant whether she revised/cherry picked the dictionary denotation, or not. Dictionaries also eventually follow generally 'accepted' meanings, so I wouldn't pin everything on their definitions in this case. Radical ["of the root(s)"] is what Rand returned to.

[Megan]

I appreciate your opinion.

[KorbenDallas]

12 hours ago, Don E. said:

What was wrong with it? You guys are just making bald assertions, that he's "clueless", and "hard to watch", without providing any reasoning or evidence. If you read the first page (8 paragraphs or so) of the Introduction to VOS, Ayn Rand answers that exact question herself - why she chose to use the word "selfish" - and Yaron's answer sounded perfectly consistent with her answer, to me. Can you elaborate on your viewpoint? 

 

I didn't say "he's 'clueless'", I said he needs a remedial VoS read.  That's not a totalizing statement about Brook, it's a particular statement about the video.  I'm not anti-ARI or anti-Brook, but he doesn't do a good job.  I typed out his main argument below---but imagine that Brook didn't say it at all, that someone on this board did, someone without credentials, one individual saying it to another individual, to answer the question:  Why use the word "selfish"?

"Why do we use the term use selfish, why not use self-interest given the stigma the word selfish has the fact that people view it so negatively?  So first let me say the same statement exists for self-interest, it's just a little softer because people don't usually use that term.  But it's the same basic idea morally: it's unacceptable.  But the reason we use selfish is because it's an important word, it identifies in reality an important phenomenon, the idea of somebody taking care of himself.  The idea of somebody placing his own interests, his own life, as his number one priority; and now what is contrasted, or that concept is contrasted, with self-less... selfish, selfless---selfless means, right?  And everybody agrees on this, whether they agree with us on the definition of selfish or not---everybody agrees that selfless means not caring about yourself, not placing your own interests, placing the interests of others first, living for the sake of others.  So the contrast between selfless and selfish is very very important, self-interest captures that somewhat but it's not as condensed, it's not as clear of a contrast, and you don't get that contrast.  You don't have un-self-interested or lack of self-interest or, what's the opposite of self-interest?  It's selfless, but really the parallel selfless is selfish."

This is a semantic argument, and not why we use the word "selfish".

[KorbenDallas]

5 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Yaron did a good job in spite of his accent. He did a better job than Ayn Rand did who vitiated the idea of selfishness within the opening text of VOS, not well enough living up to the book's title with her weak dictionary definition not found in any dictionary. But both YB and AR--of course AR--are standard Ortho respecting the concept with YB having no excuse for not spreading it out more generally philosophically. Maybe he has elsewhere. I don't pay the guy much attention.

--Brant

I think Rand might have derived her definition from the OED, but it doesn't appear there explicitly:

1.a. Devoted to or concerned with one's own advantage or welfare to the exclusion of regard for others.
   b. Used (by adversaries) as a designation of those ethical theories which regard self-love as the real motive of all human action.

¶2. By etymological re-analysis used for ‘pertaining to or connected with oneself’.

After reading your post, I got a kick out of 1b's "used (by adversaries)" 

[william.scherk]

Barbara Branden notes several times on OL the advantages of using the term "rational self-interest."  I post the full answer she gave to me back in 2008.  She helped me 'square the circle' and not get bogged down on a word.  Word!

[emphasis added]

On 3/11/2008 at 10:47 PM, Barbara Branden said:

william.scherk said:

Barbara Branden said:

"We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know."

W.H. Auden

...the biggest stumbling block for me regarding Objectivism is the antipathy to altruism (or maybe 'altruism'). I live my life by a strict accordance to how people treat me. If they consider me, I consider them. If they think only of themselves and what benefits themselves, I don't consider them fully human. If they have no urge, hidden, vestigial, dormant or within reach, to empathize with others, to care about other people, and to occasionally put their own short term advantage aside while considering its implications for others, I withdraw from congress with them. I don't want to live in a community that is ruled by selfishness...

To illustrate my point, during the hideous crash and sinking of Flight 90 in the Potomac on January 13, 1982, several people leapt into the freezing water to try to rescue the doomed. I wept, not for the dead and injured, but for the altruistic efforts of those rescuers. I regard that impulse, from whatever depth of humanity, to be part of human glory. What other animal would do that? It certainly wan't Kant who pushed them into the water at the risk of their own death.

 

William, if I understand you -- and I think I do -- I agree with the intent of your post. The lack of empathy, the inability to identify with and to vicariously experience the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another person, the inability to care about other people, is a disease. In the psychological literature, as I'm sure I don't have to tell you, it is considered a prime symptom of a personality disorder. But feelings of empathy are perfectly consistent with the Randian concept of selfishness, although not with its usual definition. Rand spoke of rational self-interest as being synonymous with her concept of selfishness, and it is the term I prefer to use.

To understand, care for, and to help others can certainly be to one's self-interest. And in your post you named the reasons why it can be. You wrote: "I live my life by a strict accordance to how people treat me. If they consider me, I consider them. If they think only of themselves and what benefits themselves, I don't consider them fully human." In other words, if you see a value in them -- in this case, the value being that they treat you with consideration -- you will treat them with consideration. If you see no value in them, you won't deal with them or be of assistance to them. What sort of person would you be if, seeing values in them, you treated them without consideration? As Rand said, "A value is that which one acts to gain and keep."(italics mine)

Further, rational self-interest often requires putting our own short term advantage aside while considering its implications for others. If a friend is ill, you presumably would not take as a primary that you intended staying home and reading a book rather than taking your friend to the hospital. Again, the issue is one of personal, selfish values: you value your friend's health more than than you value reading that book that day.

And similarly with the example you gave of people leaping into freezing water to save those who were drowning. Altruism would consist of doing so even if you knew that the people drowning were terrørists headed for New York. But if you are a good swimmer, you could very well weigh some risk to yourself against the horror pf certain death for others. Human life is a value, and short of knowing that the people drowning were killers or the equivalent, you would be right to consider the preservation of innocent lives to be a value.

Rational self-interest is not solopsism, it is not indifference to human suffering, it is not the absence of fellow-feeling. It consists of the pursuit of values -- and of taking action to preserve those values.

Barbara

-- an excellent and intelligent thread was that: Altruism (from December 2007)

[anthony]

4 hours ago, Megan said:

I appreciate your opinion.

My pleasure! and drop by again with yours.

[Wolf DeVoon]

5 hours ago, william.scherk said:

Barbara: "The lack of empathy, the inability to identify with and to vicariously experience the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another person, the inability to care about other people, is a disease. In the psychological literature, as I'm sure I don't have to tell you, it is considered a prime symptom of a personality disorder."

Isn't that what Helen Mirren sought to smear Rand with? Certainly that's what Jeff Walker contrived to achieve in The Ayn Rand Cult. Edith Efron went out of her way to help Walker belittle Rand: "There is no way to communicate how crazy she was... Ultimately everyone who knew her would ask themselves, 'Is she insane or am I?'... She was a profoundly manipulative woman. And the flaw it implied in her was not simply a neurosis but a profound disease."

But let's go back to Flight 90. Most people carried on selfishly: TV crews, press photographers, cops, EMTs, etc whose job performance and self-interest kept them out of the water. Now, it's a fine thing to be a hot dog. Jump in the water. Better though to be an aircraft designer, maintenance mechanic, air traffic control operator, 911 dispatcher, etc -- people who do things for selfish reasons and don't jump in the water for anyone, nor shouldn't.

[Brant Gaede]

7 hours ago, KorbenDallas said:

I think Rand might have derived her definition from the OED, but it doesn't appear there explicitly:

1.a. Devoted to or concerned with one's own advantage or welfare to the exclusion of regard for others.
   b. Used (by adversaries) as a designation of those ethical theories which regard self-love as the real motive of all human action.

¶2. By etymological re-analysis used for ‘pertaining to or connected with oneself’.

After reading your post, I got a kick out of 1b's "used (by adversaries)" 

Negatory, as far as I'm concerned. There is no stylistic overlay. Also, she'd never have agreed with that formulation of selfishness. ("b" is interesting.)

--Brant

John Hospers literally checked 200 dictionaries which would have been available to her from about 1940 on up and couldn't find it)

[Brant Gaede]

1 hour ago, wolfdevoon said:

Isn't that what Helen Mirren sought to smear Rand with? Certainly that's what Jeff Walker contrived to achieve in The Ayn Rand Cult. Edith Efron went out of her way to help Walker belittle Rand: "There is no way to communicate how crazy she was... Ultimately everyone who knew her would ask themselves, 'Is she insane or am I?'... She was a profoundly manipulative woman. And the flaw it implied in her was not simply a neurosis but a profound disease."

But let's go back to Flight 90. Most people carried on selfishly: TV crews, press photographers, cops, EMTs, etc whose job performance and self-interest kept them out of the water. Now, it's a fine thing to be a hot dog. Jump in the water. Better though to be an aircraft designer, maintenance mechanic, air traffic control operator, 911 dispatcher, etc -- people who do things for selfish reasons and don't jump in the water for anyone, nor shouldn't.

Speak for yourself. (I'm not trying to be rude; I simply don't have the time to be nicey nice tonight.)

--Brant

Rand wasn't insane though she may have been about Nathaniel for a while

Efron went over the top, which was seemingly characteristic of her; you should read her letter published in Newsweek (1962?) supporting Rand against being attacked in the publication ("If you propose to act like cockroaches be prepared to be treated as such" [exact quote? I think Barry Goldwater was on the cover])

[merjet]

I used "clueless" because Brook basically repeated the meanings of "selfish" and "selfless" in Schwartz's book. Schwartz obviously echoed Ayn Rand. Both Brook and Schwartz show themselves as clueless about the common meanings and exemplars of those two words. They inflate fringe meanings and atypical examples into popular meanings and exemplars. A brute, thug or Attila the Hun -- Rand's examples -- are far from typical. Schwartz claims the popular or common meaning of "selfish" means predatory, typified by con men and thugs. Far more typical in my opinion are somebody who hogs food meant for others as well, the child who wants to play with others' toys but not let them play with his, one who butts in line, or a basketball player who so often shoots and doesn't pass that it is a detriment to his team. These are the sort of examples we learn when young. When I looked on the internet for synonyms of "selfish", I found many, but "predatory"' wasn't one of them. Nor was "selfish" among the synonyms for "predatory."

One growing up in America learns the sort of examples I gave, and in my experience the admonishment "don't be selfish" is typically directed at children. Are selfish children equivalent to adult con men and thugs? One might make an excuse for Rand -- she didn't learn the common meanings because she didn't grow up in the USA. Schwartz has no such excuse and Brook should know better by now. How does The Virtue of Hoggishness sound to you? 

Brook says Objectivists use "selfish" the way they do because it identifies in reality an important phenomena. Would Brook say the examples I gave above are not real phenomena? He also omitted giving another reason -- he is echoing Ayn Rand. Using her (probably) imaginary dictionary, she declared that "selfish" meant only "concerned with one's own interest". She lopped off the important qualifier that most or all real dictionaries include -- a disregard for others. 

Brook says "selfless" means not caring about yourself and living for the sake of others. Okay, once in a while, for somebody like Mother Teresa. However, more common examples are a philanthropist donating to a charity or school, or LeBron James is a selfless basketball player. In the philanthropist's case, it does not mean what Brook says. In LeBron's case "selfless" or "less self" does not mean what Brook says. It means LeBron cares more about his team winning the game than his individual statistic(s). He is not narrowly "selfish." He does not disregard his teammates.

Last but not least, Brook is "preaching to the choir." Beyond those folks who would already like to join the choir, how many new recruits will his message get? How many potential ones will he turn away?

[Megan]

Merjet - perfect.  Wish I'd taken the time to spell it out so clearly.

[anthony]

I wouldn't soften 'the message' at all. Go the whole hog and proudly call it "rational egoism". People see through equivocation and think you are hiding something. I don't know anyone else's experiences, but several times I have tried "rational self-interest" and the like with people, and ultimately still got little understanding, non-acceptance, that predictable discomfort, and few 'takers'. Again, what I've noticed is that for a few, however baldly I framed it, it's instant understanding - that light bulb moment that speaks to their deep concerns and terrible confusion about themselves with respect to others. I'm interested in this, since I believe it points to the fact that some individuals, a minority, have managed to keep their independent minds alive - and many more who've given up (?) Basically, I'm thinking you can't 'make' an Objectivist, only point out the literature and he 'makes' himself, or not.

[anthony]

It is a "radical" selfishness which no dictionary is yet going to define. (Perhaps in future). I could not care less if it's not defined to my 'satisfaction'.

Anyway, what comes first: the thing, the idea - or the dictionary definition of the thing and idea?

[Brant Gaede]

2 hours ago, anthony said:

It is a "radical" selfishness which no dictionary is yet going to define. (Perhaps in future). I could not care less if it's not defined to my 'satisfaction'.

Anyway, what comes first: the thing, the idea - or the dictionary definition of the thing and idea?

Uh, you don't seem to know usage preceded a word being put in a dictionary.

--Brant

[Megan]

Agreed, Brent.  That's what makes Rand's usage so frustrating.

[anthony]

3 hours ago, Brant Gaede said:

Uh, you don't seem to know usage preceded a word being put in a dictionary.

--Brant

Uh-uh. Usage of *an idea*, of course, what do you think I meant? A word doesn't just come into existence, without a referent in reality, and use. A particular word would be penned to identify a (existent and utilized) concept or thing - and then it gets defined by dictionaries. Dictionaries don't make up words. So my first thought is fine - the idea comes first (unless one believes in the OT and Genesis: "In the beginning was The Word..." which is primacy of consciousness).

There was next to no previous use of "selfish" which didn't have negative connotations, so poring through dictionaries to give credibility to (to prove, heh!) Rand's specific, original type of egoism is not just fruitless, it's ludicrous and subjective. It was a brand new idea, with the "self" as the ethical good. And again, the idea (and Rand's use) had to be identified first.

Even so, if anyone wants to quibble, there is the suffix "-ish" to deal with. My dictionary defines it: "1. from nouns, w. sense *having the qualities of* (knavish); 2. from adjj., w. sense *somewhat* (thickish)".

Coltish, puckish, roguish, etc etc.

Therefore, the basic, early etymology of self + ish, leads to: "having the qualities of self". No more and no less, a denotation as neutral and objective as it could be, once upon a time - until altruist moralists got their hands on it and loaded it with their peculiar connotations.

[merjet]

"In popular usage, the word "selfishness" is a synonym of evil" (VoS, Introduction).

"Evil" was not even listed here among 136 synonyms for "selfishness" a few seconds ago.

"Evil" was listed here tied for 310th place as a synonym for "selfish" a few seconds ago.

[Megan]

I would consider selfishness a behavior problem or "bad." Hogging the ice cream does not equate with Hitler.