We look down on selfish behavior. And for good reason – looking out for our own interests and disregarding others often causes suffering to the people around us. Textbook examples of selfishness (betrayal, manipulation, lying) hurt us. And obviously, we discourage these behaviors.
But dig deeper into the idea of selfishness, and it gets a little confusing. Take the example of a person who repeatedly values money over honesty or any other moral principle. This person will lie to their friends, mislead whole populations, and ruin other people’s lives to enrich themselves. This behavior is undoubtedly selfish, but it’s also just dumb.
Sure, most of us generally abide by some set of moral principles because we generally have opinions on ethics and how people should act to improve society. But what we often miss is that plenty of our ‘moral’ behavior is also selfish. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Being honest with our friends and family is not strictly an ethical decision. It’s nice to have friends and a supportive family, and lying to them would make them less likely to stick around. We help people when they ask not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it makes us feel good and they may return the favor someday.
The person who lies to their friends and manipulates for greedy reasons is just as ignorant as they are selfish. They cut themselves off from connection and healthy relationships for material gain. And they fail to realize that while pursuing wealth is not inherently unwise, sacrificing things like friendship and community for wealth is rarely (if ever) worthwhile.
Egoism
In philosophy, constant selfishness as a code of conduct is called egoism. It is basically the opposite of altruism. While the altruist consistently values others over themselves, the egoist consistently values themselves over others.
Ever since I first encountered this idea when studying philosophy in college, it has fascinated me that the egoist does not always act in ways that are obviously selfish. For example, no smart egoist would sell a faulty product or blatantly lie on their resume, for completely selfish reasons. They don’t care about the ethical problems with ripping someone off or lying, they just don’t want to damage their reputation.
It’s actually quite difficult to come up with an idea of a typical egoist. We may imagine an egoist as a CEO with some shady dealings or a politician who will do anything to gain power. But these aren’t necessarily fair descriptions. They only describe egoists who value money and power above all else. An egoist with other values would look completely different.
For example, it’s plausible (though perhaps unlikely) that The Dalai Lama is an egoist. This may sound odd at first since he dedicates his time to helping others be happy. But, he may do so in a completely self-interested way, believing that there is no better way for him to spend his time than by helping others.
In fact, there’s a theory called psychological egoism that claims it’s an observable fact that we’re all motivated by self-interest, and even costly sacrifice can be explained by selfish motives. (If you’d like to read more about it, Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy covers it well.)
The claims of psychological egoism are contested. But they do raise some interesting questions about kindness and personal well-being.
Kindness is Good for You!
There is good reason to believe that psychological egoism is false. For example, it’s quite difficult to explain why someone would risk their life to save someone else if they only cared about themselves. Yet, people do this quite often – at least often enough to make us believe in some level of altruism.
So, it seems fair to say not only that we should act altruistically at times, but that we actually do. Our desire to help others is probably not solely rooted in feeling better about ourselves or hoping they return the favor. But the fact that intellectuals can even argue that kindness is selfish is pretty remarkable. And really, we’re quite lucky that such an argument can be taken seriously. It validates the belief that we benefit from helping other people. Imagine if instead, every time you helped someone, you got a migraine. We’d all be stock-trading senators in no time!
Psychological research supports the idea that acts of kindness benefit the person performing them. In fact, research from psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky suggests not only that helping others makes us happier, but even that it appears to strenghten our immune system.
So, if you are an egoist, just know that you should still be kind. Otherwise you might get depressed and sick!
Who Are You Helping?
We can speculate that we are rewarded emotionally and physiologically from acts of kindness because of our history as a species. As animals that have lived together in groups for hundreds of thousands of years, we’ve evolved to care about other members of our respective groups.
In fact, psychologist Dacher Keltner argues that the phrase “survival of the fittest” does not accurately portray Darwin’s thoughts on humans. He claims (in this article) that Darwin really believed in “survival of the kindest” with humans and other mammals because his research proved that sympathetic mammals raise more successful offspring.
Along with evolutionary explanations for why people care about kindness, there is no shortage of philosophical and religious arguments for why people should be kind. Philosophers have claimed that we should maximize happiness for all people in all of our actions, or that we should always treat people as ends in themselves. Similarly, religions have laid out rules against harming others, stealing, lying, and more. In their discussions of right and wrong, philosophers and followers of religion rarely bring up self-interest. The focus is often on prosocial actions or rules.
Philosophical or religious arguments for kindness can motivate many of us. We care about the health of the world and our community, and so we’ll be nice because we believe it’s the right thing to do. But luckily for us, there’s more benefits to kindness than the satisfaction of doing the right thing. And nobody talked about these benefits more beautifully than Marcus Aurelius did in this entry of Meditations:
“What is rational in different beings is related, like the individual limbs of a single being, and meant to function as a unit… or you could say a part… But then you’re not really embracing other people. Helping them isn’t yet its own reward. You’re still seeing it only as The Right Thing To Do. You don’t yet realize who you’re really helping.”
Page 87 of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations
When you help others, you help yourself. Not just because of the satisfaction of doing the right thing. Not just because of the positive physiological effects. But also because just like a healthy body supports healthy organs, a healthy community supports healthy individuals.
Doing the right thing as a moral duty is admirable and perhaps necessary in some cases. But a sense of duty doesn’t always have to be our motivation for doing the right thing. Instead, genuine interest can motivate us and we can do the right thing enthusiastically.