- Ethical Egoism is a philosophical theory that suggests that when you act in self-interest, you do more morally correct things.
- One's self is, or should be, the motivation and the goal of one's actions.
- Everyone pursuing his own self-interest is the best way to promote the general good.
- Adam Smith suggests that when individuals single-mindedly pursue “the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires” they unintentionally benefit society as a whole because people generally are the best judges of what is in their own interest, and they are much more motivated to work hard to benefit themselves than to achieve any other goal.
- In that way, it's also right to help others, because it helps one's self interest.
- However, with any philosophical theory, it's not as black and white as it sounds, and it can sometimes be contradictory.
- Society functions on relationships and large-scale cooperation. ([[Sapiens - Yuval Harari]]) If everyone looked out for themselves, people wouldn't cooperate with one another, and many societal functions would break down.
- If the world was constructed to contain just one single human being, pursuit of morality would be the same as the pursuit of self-interest - what is good for the self is the same as what is in the self's interests. Then there will never be an occasion when the person ought not to pursue self-interest in favor of another morality, unless he produces an alternative ethical system in which he ought to renounce his values in favor of an imaginary self, or, other entity such as the universe, or God etc.
- Faced with a situation of limited resources, a person interested in only the self would consume as much of the resource as they could, making the overall situation worse for everybody. And if the situation becomes worse for everybody, that would include the selfish person, so it is not in their rational self-interest to take things to such extremes, either.
- If it is about benefitting the most number of people, it's not as much ethical egoism as it is [[utilitarianism]] because you're trying to help others by helping yourself, not exclusively yourself.
- So there's benefits in believing the world revolves around you, because it has inadvertent favourable outcomes for others as well. But, at the same time large scale ethical egoism may not work.