Selfishness v. selflessness

One of our commenters is having a discussion about selfishness on a board somewhere. He sent us the exchange to see if we wanted to add any of our 2 cents....

OUR BLOG COMMENTER WROTE:

Selfishness has gotten a bad rap. We are all selfish. Nobody ever does a single purely unselfish act. If you feed, clothe and shelter the poor 24/7 you are helping yourself feel good about yourself through your acts of generosity.

If we didn't look out for our own best interests nobody would. But not to worry, it's an automatic process. Nobody can do anything that doesn't serve their self interest in some way. It's actually impossible to be purely selfless.

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THE OPPONENT’S REPLY:

Bah! This is just semantics. If we are to accept that all acts are selfish, then we're going to have to make a distinction between two kinds of selfishness -- selfishness that helps others and selfishness that only helps one's self. But, wait, we already have terms that could do this. We could, thus, redefine altruism as acting from self-interest to help others (Because it feels good), and redefine selfishness as self-interest that only helps oneself. There are other complications with this, but I won't bother to get into them.

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OUR BLOG COMMENTER WROTE:

I prefer to make the distinction between rational selfishness where you are mature
and responsible enough to act in life-affirming ways that do no harm to yourself or others and that of irrational selfishness where you (for example) substance abuse or engage in behavior that is harmful to yourself or others. But I stick to my assertion that we always behave selfishly. No need to split semantic hairs. We only have one perspective from which to act, that of our own wants and needs which are what drive our behavior.


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THE OPPONENT’S REPLY:

I reject your definitions on the grounds that they're unnecessarily a pain in the @$$. And because I think it's silly to broaden the meaning of words with negative connotations so that they can be applied to anyone and any action. And, consequently, require another descriptive term (so that they can be used coherently), i.e. a distinction between rational and irrational selfishness.

I also think your distinction fails to account for a specific behavior people need a term to describe-- selfishness (I'm using it for the sake of argument) that helps others ( not just selfishness "that do[es] no harm to yourself or others"). Your "rational selfishness" label is not specific enough for this. I think we can just use the term we've used all along: altruism. All it needs is a slight tweak in definition to quell the egoist's cherished argument that everyone is selfish.