These days it's very hard to find someone who's not selfish. In fact, it's natural for us to act out of self interest and most of our principles are founded on this belief. But why are we SO selfish? Is it really human nature? Our society? What do you all think.

Just to give an example:
Stickied in this section is a way to feed people in need by giving time, however, it's one of the least popular threads on a site where I'm comfortable saying has a lot of good people.

It's just human nature, hun. It's been this way for millions of years- and I can almost guarantee you that it will ALWAYS be this way. People automatically do what's best for them and screw everyone else.

I know that, I for one, try to put myself at the bottom of my priority list, but despite my efforts, I slip up a lot, too. It's just part of being human. Of being alive, even. You see animals in the wild- greedy and self-absorbed. It's part of staying alive.

I don't know, I think we have to be the top priority spot, but others have to matter. Actually though, with other animals, it seems to be a recurring theme that the strongest hunt, the others care for each other and organize the group, and everyone eats. Our far away ancestors did that too, I'm just wondering why it changed so much.

Did it really change so much? Altruism is a myth, and always has been. Every action that we willingly (perhaps even unwillingly) undertake benefits us in some fashion. When we go out of our way to be nice to someone, we are attempting to gain the benefits of their affection. When we donate to a charity, we are rewarded both by knowledge that a cause we care about is bettered and we gain an improved sense of our own benevolence, boosting our self-esteem.

Playing by the "rules" of society, not hurting others in order to benefit ourselves, may limit the immediate gains we make, but has the long-term good of allowing us to continue to reap the benefits of good relationships and being a part of society.

The best action a man can take is the one that gives him the greatest final benefit. Man, whether consciously or self-consciously, always chooses to do what he perceives (note, perceives) to be the best action. If he thinks that flouting another person's rights (which are but another social conception) in order to better himself will provide both greater benefit than harm and greater benefit than any other action that would not violate said rights, he will do so.

Man is selfishness. And there is nothing inherently immoral about selfishness. Selfishness only becomes immoral when acts compelled by that selfishness deprives others of their rights through force.

What you said was well presented and I completely understand. However, I don't think the problem lies with the fact that we act out of self interest, but where in fact we perceive as you said. When our ancestors benefited from affection and the entire group doing well, those weren't exactly the most selfish "gains" if you will.

Now our society puts much more emphasis on monetary gains than say, using our time to help others in need. Why is community service something needed for a resume and not something done from the heart? Things like that bother me more than the fact that we simply act out of self interest.

Our far away ancestors would've acted on primal instinct, hunting to gather food so they could survive. Nowadays, all you have to do is walk down to the local food market and you've got food that might've taken our ancestors an hour obtain. I see it as 'the more luxuries we are given, the more likely we will become selfish'.

Take the giant food companies (this is for Australia) Coles and Woolworths. Both obtain their produce from Australian farmers. Those farmers might be paid something like 35 cents per kg of mandarins, yet the shops sell these mandarins for $2 per kg. (This is an example, I can't quite remember how much the farmers are paid, but I know it's below $2 per kg)

Here's the thing, though; I don't recognize that there are degrees of selfishness, per se. Everything that one does is selfish, in that it is the action one thinks will be best for oneself. When we say that someone is being more or less selfish, what we really mean is that that person has made a decision to benefit themselves, causing injury to another. Again, this is not immoral in itself. If I go to a vending machine and see that there is one last Twix bar left, am I being immoral for choosing to buy it, ensuring that someone else cannot? No; it would, however, have been immoral for me to physically take the candy from someone who had bought it.

And Jimi, you are absolutely correct. In terms of morality, it is not the man who is selfish that is immoral, but the man who is injured so little by using force to injure or deprive others that it becomes the best course of action for him to do so. Our morality can effectively be measured by the personal or psychological pain we suffer when we do such acts. In a vacuum where such actions would have no other consequence than personal, the man who is more moral will require much higher gains to warrant an action as the most gainful. In contrast, the man who is less moral is psychologically injured so little by being immoral that he will injure others for less gains than the more moral man.

In your example of the farmers, apz, the food companies are doing nothing "selfish"; or as we've now more clearly defined, they are not forcing the farmers at the barrel of a gun to sell for such low prices. The farmers, for a variety of reasons, percieve it to be the best course of action to sell for such low prices, perhaps due to economic demands, competition among other provider farms, or any other reason. Thus, they take the best, and therefore selfish, action to sell. If they thought it would be best to charge higher costs, that would be equally selfish. Selfishness is subjective to the perception of the individual.

Going back to perception of selfishness that we touched on, do we really see society as more selfish than it used to be? In the days of humans organized into small tribes and families, caring for one another was the most selfish action that one could take; it ensured that the numbers of the tribe stayed at a high margin, and that people who had skills that one (and perhaps by extension, the rest of the tribe) needed, or perhaps even merely had an emotional attachment. As society today has created massive cities and networks of supplies and skills spanning the globe, so has the need for that close-knit tribe of skilled persons vanished. The only things holding most families together are emotional, and perhaps even economic bonds.

On the decrease in interest in helping others, its really quite self-evident given all this; as society has expanded, decreasing our reliance on the good graces of others, taking actions benefiting them has yielded less gain. At some point, the only rewards one gain from doing so are to have it to impress resume readers and the psychological benfit of helping others in need. Clearly, this latter reason is no longer sufficient for a large number of people to balance out the detriments of doing the volunteering in time and energy.

Your very last sentence is the one that saddens me the most. Unfotunately... that is so right that it hurts. However, I'm not content with the current luxuries that we have and wish others weren't either. Yes, I do enjoy a plethora of consumer products that are unecessary, but I am still bothered by how many children are born into poverty and never have a chance.

Do you think it's immoral to know this goes on and not do anything about it?

There is one thing in this world which, in the realm of the moral principles I have outlined above, is evil; that thing is selflessness (sweet raptor jesus, I hate -lessness words).

A man has rights to his property and his ideas. They belong to him, and he is free to do with them as he so wishes, according to what he judges to be best, and will most benefit him. A person who attempts to tell him that it is his "duty" to give to others without benefit to himself is evil. He tries to defy the nature of man itself, making him act against his own interest.

If you have an interest helping starving children, perhaps feel an emotional pain at their plight that helping them can alleviate, then by all means do so. For anyone to tell you, however, that you must give of yourself in order to help them in order to be a moral person is to violate your own right to be selfish.

Though I'm arguing all this from an Objectivist standpoint. Very black-and-white moral stuff.