THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH SELF-INTEREST (…

provided it’s enlightened.)

by Marvin C. Katz, Ph.D.

Follow this reasoning with me, please, and tell me if it

makes sense…..okay? To begin I’ll ask: What makes
something good? Then I’ll explore What makes a
person good; but first we have to know what it means to
call an item “good.”

What makes anything ‘good’? Take a chair, for

example. You have a picture in your mind as to what
features a chair could have; and if this chair has all
those qualities you’d likely call it a good one. So a
‘good chair’ has everything a chair is supposed to have.
Of course, everyone might have a different picture with
different qualities in mind, but the basic idea is that what
makes anything good is for it to be ‘all there’ under the
name you put on it.1

Now that we know what the word “good” means, we can

ask the question about what makes a good person.
Who is a good person? Well, it would be someone who
is ‘all there.’ A good person would have all the attributes
that a person ought to have. That person, it is fair to
say, would have moral value, would avoid selfishness.
Let’s describe such a person and see if you would call
such an individual ‘good.’

That person is one who educates himself, or herself,

to do what is truly in his self-interest and who is able
to see that “selfishness” is something distinctly
different than “self-interest.” Allow me to explain.

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Wisdom is knowing others and enlightenment is
knowing yourself [The point to notice is that ethics is
not just ‘a matter of opinion,’ and ‘totally subjective,’ as
some would try to tell you. It can be objective and
universal.]

As Dr. Stephen Pinker says, “In many areas of life two

parties are objectively better off if they both act in a
nonselfish way than if each of them acts selfishly. You
and I are both better off if we share our surpluses,
rescue each other’s children in danger, and refrain from
shooting at each other, compared with hoarding our
surpluses while they rot, letting the other’s child drown
while we file our nails, or feuding like the Hatfields and
McCoys.”

“Granted, I might be a bit better off if I acted selfishly at

your expense and you played the sucker, but the same
is true for you with me, so if each of us tried for these
advantages, we’d both end up worse off. Any neutral
observer, and you and I if we could talk it over rationally,
would have to conclude that the state we should aim for
is the one in which we both are unselfish.” (emphasis
added.) It’s in the nature of things that if we educate
ourselves enough we come to develop this insight about
our true self-interest. We reach this understanding.
Does that make sense?

And do you agree with this? {Also a quote from Dr.

Pinker}: “If I appeal to you to do anything that affects
me – to get off my foot, or tell me the time, or not run me
over with your car -- then I can’t do it in a way that
privileges my interests over yours (say, retaining my
right to run you over with my car) if I want you to take

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me seriously. I have to state my case in a way that
would force me to treat you in kind. I can’t act as if my
interests are special just because I’m me and you’re not,
any more than I can persuade you that the spot I am
standing on is a special place in the universe just
because I happen to be standing on it.”

That last concept is what we might name “The

Consistency Principle in Ethics.” It means No double
standards…one for us and one for the other guy. Can
you agree with this?

The person who sees his true self-interest knows these

things. For we are all, in this world, just trying to make a
life for ourselves. Referring to those who do know
what’s in their interest, Professor Appiah, put it this way:
“We want to make a life for ourselves.
We recognize that everybody has a life to make and that
we are making our lives together. We recognize value in
our own humanity and in doing so we see it as the same
humanity we find in others. If my humanity matters, so
does yours; if yours doesn’t, neither does mine.

We stand or fall together.” Can we come together

on this? Do we agree? Isn’t it so that I’m better off if
you’re better off; and you are better off if I am better off?
Seeing that idea is having “enlightened self-interest.”
One who operates on that principle that each of us does
better if we all do better is fulfilling his/her true self-
interest.

“I’ll do better if you do better,” that is to say, “…if

you develop your gifts and talents.” My obligation to
you is to develop mine -- to get where I’m excellent in

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some way; and will thus be able to express my gifts,
give them to the world; perhaps artistically, perhaps in
an entertaining way to fascinate and amuse, or just to
use some skill I have to make the world a better place.
And also my obligation is to see that by arranging
conditions that facilitate this I help you have the
opportunity to do the same – to develop your talents
and gifts and get to a point where you would want to
give yourself, to express some responsibility. For what
are the qualities of a good person?

A good person would be one who has everything you

would want a person to have: integrity, authenticity,
responsibility, honesty, empathy, compassion, kindness,
etc. Such an individual would be morally good. He or
she would possess morality. For "morality" may be
defined as: Moral value.
Hence everything known about value would help us
understand morality. .

What is known about value? It is a matter of degree. It

has dimensions (on a spectrum.)2 The word ‘value’
refers to the process, the activity, known as evaluation,
which itself is a matching process.

One of the sub-topics of Ethics is justice. Let's examine

its opposite for a moment. An injustice is a mismatch
(between someone's happiness and what we take to be
their merit). For example, a crook must not live high
while his victim suffers. In every injustice something is
out of balance.

Justice requires giving others their due.

Reparation is a name for the obligation we have to

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compensate others for past wrongs or for a previous
wrongful act. The highest form of justice is
reconciliation or rehabilitation. [Vengeance is the lowest
form.]

To sum it all up, someone who cares, who has self-

respect and enough sense to respect others, would
focus upon the facilitating institutions and social
arrangements so that human beings are not placed in
situations where they will act badly.

For, as Dr. K. A. Appiah, of The Princeton University

Center for Human Values, has written "It's good to feel
compassion; it's better to have no cause to."

Let's all of us, pursuing our real self-interest, and

avoiding selfishness, do what we can to arrange the
circumstances in which our excellences can be elicited
-- the conditions in which we can flourish.

That will be true justice.

{The plan is to get this lesson and its concepts taught in elementary and
high-schools as part of their standard curriculum. Can you facilitate this
project? Can you restate it in simpler language that even a child would
understand? Can you provide an illustration, some imagery, or a story?}
____________________
1) If the item had a few less features we can predict a person may call it
‘fair’ or ‘pretty good’ or ‘not bad.’ If it has only half of those you’re looking
for, you’d likely speak of it as ‘average’ or ‘so-so’ or ‘mediocre’. If it had
less than half, we’d call it ‘bad’ or ‘not so good’; but if lacked one of the
features that define what a chair in fact is, then we will evaluate it as ‘lousy’
or ‘terrible.’ What is the definition of a ‘chair’? It’s a ‘knee-high structure
with a seat and a back.’ If it was missing by having a big hole where the
seat should be, we might say “it’s simply awful.” It’s terrible. (But
under another name, say, ‘a prop for a juggler to balance’ it could be
‘good’! So whether something is ‘bad’ or ‘good’ all depends upon the name
we put on it. A good nag is a bad horse. A bad residence could be ‘a good
slum dwelling.’ The gift of the optimist is to name things so we can call

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them “good.”. Optimism is a wonderful quality to have. It’s an asset.
Pessimism is a lack of vision. It’s a deficit. The pessimist is out of kilter
and is the killer of hope and encouragement. We need more optimists in
this world. Every true realist has to be part optimist.)
2) See Marvin C. Katz, ETHICS: A College Course, Chapter 3 to learn more about
the value dimensions.
The central thing that people are up to is the ethical
task: each of us making a life. We each want to flourish,
to develop our gifts, to rise through all the needs in
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs ‘till we are in a position to
express our needs for achievement, romance,
appreciation, for beauty, truth, justice, for full
self-realization.

Because making life is an activity, we hope to learn from

experiments in living life morally, i.e., taking seriously
our obligations to others to see that they have the
opportunity to develop their talents, to express their art,
to be excellent (even a ‘champion’) in some respect, to
flourish in every way they can, without deepriving
ourselves of the same opportunity.

As philosophers of ethics we want “not only to study

the good life but to sustain what’s good in our lives.”

For us students of ethical theory and practice the

central question is: What are out obligations to others?
That is what traditionally has been understood by the
term ‘morality.’ In my book, ETHICS, I discussed that in
Chapters 6 through 12. http://tinyurl.com/2mj5b3
Regarding that enterprise in system building, let me
make the following meta-theory observations:

In writing it, I strove for theoretical minimalism, for the

elegant reduction, for parsimony. I am aware that
everything is more complicated than we think it is. But

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then I asked: Does it all have to be this complicated? So
I offered 12 major questions and a tentative answer for
each. I believed that, after the first, each of the chapter
topics, shown on the Contents page, follow logically
from the preceding topic. It is to be read in its entirety if
it doesn’t seem to make sense at some point, for
eventually it will all come together, giving the student of
the system an insight into the grand synthesis. (If a
reader finds the first two chapters to be too technical, all
the reader has to do is skip over them, and read the
rest.) When I wrote this book I was unaware of the
progress - now accelerating - in the science of Moral
Psychology; hence I offered only one or two
experiments relevant to the field of study. At present
there are dozens and dozens.

Mill’s insight, in On Liberty, is that it matters what kind

of people we are and not just what we do.
Thus in chapters 7 and 11 this theme is emphasized.

Th e definist approach I employ in that treatise is non-

naturalist in G. E. Moore’s sense. Yet the underlying
ethical ontology relies on human nature since it is
human individuals who behave ethically, or fail to. It is
the theory which is non-naturalist, and theory is not to
be confused with practice, for they are on differing
levels of abstraction. The meta-ethics is non-naturalist;
the ontology deals with substantial beings who exist
and who have the ability to project reality.

The ideal is to see many perspectives at once and to see

the web of relationships in the universe; and be
conscious that if you touch the web in one place it will
vibrate throughout. In Appendix Three of the book, Dr.
Heise helps us to see at least three perspectives.

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Once you actually do read that text, I'd like to hear your
critique. The whole effort is a work-in- progress, ready
to be improved and upgraded.

Liberty (extrinsic- freedom) is a high value indeed.

Without liberty can a person function morally? That is to
say, can we by our behavior 'correspond with an
improving self-image' and meet our obligations to
others (and to ourselves) to bring out their gifts which
will enhance the over-all quality of human life on Earth?
To deprive anyone of liberty (with the exception of
unrehabilitated criminals such as murderers and
rapists) is to commit an ethical fallacy. (This is explained
in Chapter 6 of the textbook.)

Among many other findings, my book on ETHICS does

in fact conclude that added value is gained if we are
decent toward one another, and use words that heal, not
words that hurt.