Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. To build a society in which individuals co-operate generously and unselfishly… you can expect little help from biological nature. The word selfish clearly has its normal, negative sense here because he has just written that, if we wish In this discussion - which is quite distinct from his account of "gene-selfishness" – he writes flatly that "we are born selfish" – we ourselves, not the genes. It is rather striking that Richard Dawkins, when he treats of human motives in The Selfish Gene, bypasses these suggestions entirely and reverts to full-scale Hobbism. A s he put it, "Thus the social instincts – the prime principle of man's moral constitution – with the aid of active intellectual powers and the effects of habit, naturally lead to the golden rule, 'As ye would that men should do unto you, do ye to them likewise' and this lies at the foundation of morality". Darwin derived morality, not just from our extra intelligence but from the combination of that intelligence with the strong affectionate and co-operative motives which we share with other social animals, and related these to our evolutionary history. Prominent among these analyses is Charles Darwin's very interesting discussion of the origin of morals in The Descent of Man. These people have therefore sketched out more plausible accounts of the complex motives involved. Accordingly, many sensible critics – Hume, Rousseau, Butler, Kropotkin – have pointed out that Hobbes's reductive approach does not explain how morality works but only claims that it isn't really there at all. The gap between the demands of justice or gratitude and those of self-interest is simply too wide, so wide that no amount of enlightened foresight will bridge or remove it. So he argued that virtue does serve for self-preservation, so long as the State is still functioning efficiently. He just wanted to stop people using morality against their own interests, especially in futile revolts or religious wars. He did not actually want to get rid of the virtues. Hobbes's trouble here was that he was not actually an immoralist. We act virtuously only because this is part of the social machine which keeps us alive… If so, however, it is surely odd that we should ever have begun to pretend that anything else was involved? Why have we invented concepts such as mercy, loyalty, justice and friendship which often conflict with our interests and will surely deceive nobody? And why, despite everything, do these concepts often actually influence our behaviour? To explain the appearance of disinterested behaviour he focussed on enlightened self-interest, explaining that what looks like altruism is really only a shrewd insurance-policy. This was a central problem for Hobbes, who went to great trouble to prove that, in all our acts, our real aim is always our own interest. Selfishness cannot, then, be a universal condition. As things are, however, we notice that some people do consider others less than most of us, and we use words like selfish or mean to record this fact We wonder how, if this is so, the word could ever come to be invented at all? Just as there would be no word for white if everything was white, there could surely be no word for selfish if everyone was always selfish. And it raises a difficulty for theorists who want to say that self-interest is, in some sense, the core of all human motivation. This being usually seen as a fault, the word serves chiefly as a term of abuse. It means "not promoting other people's" or, as the dictionary puts it, "devoted to or concerned with one's own advantage to the exclusion of regard for others". It does not mean "prudent, promoting one's own interest". Selfish is an odd word because its meaning is almost entirely negative.
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