“the quality of being selfish, the condition of habitually putting one’s own interests before those of others”—wiktionary
I can imagine a super giant mega list of situations where that would be bad, even if selfishness is often a good thing. There’s a reason ‘selfishness’ has negative connotations.
I can imagine a super giant mega list of situations where love is a bad thing, too. Like when people kill themselves or others. That doesn’t mean its default connotations should be negative.
The reason “selfishness” has negative connotations are at least partly due to Western culture (with Christian antecedents in “man is fundamentally evil” and “seek not pleasure in this life”). They’re not objectively valid.
Point taken, I just think that it’s normally not good. I also think that maybe, for instance, libertarians and liberals have different conceptions of selfishness that lead the former to go ‘yay, selfishness!’ and the latter to go ‘boo, selfishness!’. Are they talking about the same thing? Are we talking about the same thing? In my personal experience, selfishness has always been demanding half of the pie when fairness is one-third, leading to conflict and bad experiences that could have been avoided. We might just have different conceptions of selfishness.
“the quality of being selfish, the condition of habitually putting one’s own interests before those of others”—wiktionary
I can imagine a super giant mega list of situations where that would be bad, even if selfishness is often a good thing. There’s a reason ‘selfishness’ has negative connotations.
I can imagine a super giant mega list of situations where love is a bad thing, too. Like when people kill themselves or others. That doesn’t mean its default connotations should be negative.
The reason “selfishness” has negative connotations are at least partly due to Western culture (with Christian antecedents in “man is fundamentally evil” and “seek not pleasure in this life”). They’re not objectively valid.
Point taken, I just think that it’s normally not good. I also think that maybe, for instance, libertarians and liberals have different conceptions of selfishness that lead the former to go ‘yay, selfishness!’ and the latter to go ‘boo, selfishness!’. Are they talking about the same thing? Are we talking about the same thing? In my personal experience, selfishness has always been demanding half of the pie when fairness is one-third, leading to conflict and bad experiences that could have been avoided. We might just have different conceptions of selfishness.