Chapter 7: Ethical Egoism

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community, it becomes a destructive vice. — Erwin Schrodinger

But egoism is more than this. It is the realization by the individual that he is above all institutions and all formulas; that they exist only so far as he chooses to make them his own by accepting them. — John Buchanan Robinson

If any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to reject. — Ayn Rand

Egoism is the very essence of a noble soul. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Our first objective ethical theory is a form of consequentialism, i.e. it considers the rightness or the wrongness of a moral choice to be dependent upon the consequences or outcomes of the decision. In the case of Ethical Egoism, the concern is for consequences to the person making the decision, “what is in it for me?”

Why Are We Selfish And How To Stop (6:20)

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PPSC PHI 1012: Ethics for Thinking People Copyright © by Daniel Shaw, PhD is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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