Self-Interest Rightly Understood

This is a pretty contentious topic, and I will confess that the view to follow is probably not a “politically correct” opinion. Nowadays this admittedly is not the most popular view to argue for, but I hope to stir up some good debate, especially with those who disagree.

The issue here is that of the obligation to uphold certain positive rights, and in particular for this post, the right to be free from hunger; perhaps it does not even warrant the title “right,” but giving it that higher station helps the opponent and, in good faith, I will give them the best argument they can muster. On a Google search, including quotation marks, the “right to be free from hunger" yields 573,000 results, and similarly, the “right to food” gets 642,000 hits. By clicking on any of these links, your heart will undoubtedly be moved by the pictures of terribly skinny children and touching appeals to save the world from starvation. Resources are scarce there, but very abundant for you here. So give a small donation and do your part to help out a little. Have a heart; it’s your duty as a human being – you owe it to those less fortunate than yourself.

And they are absolutely right in this regard. Do not yet misunderstand me: starvation is bad, and giving to charity is good. I’m not advocating complete solipsistic selfishness. Where the argument fails is after all of that. In the more extreme realms, some people and organizations out to do good call for the upholding of the right to be free from hunger by redistributing wealth, especially in the wealthy United States. The problem is that this makes the free choice of giving however much to who or what an individual decides and takes that liberty from them, now forcing whoever has an excess to share the wealth with those who have a deficit. Opponents may argue that force (or bribery with tax breaks, for that matter) is needed, for otherwise most people would not logically choose to part with their earnings. How cynical a view of humanity this is indeed! I do not believe altruism to be so foreign and unnatural an idea to many people. Though there is merit to the idea that people will give more when encouraged, governmental force is not the right way, either by our own country’s taxation or by even more remote demands placed upon the country as a whole by global organizations like the UN. (What is the right way, you may be asking? I’ll leave that for you to decide, or perhaps address it in a later post)

The extremists like to say that all lives are equal, that I’m not any more valuable or worthy to eat and have prosperity than someone over in Africa just because I was born here. We can’t really be about justice and equality if we think otherwise, right? We’re all equally deserving of the goods that any person or nature produce; it’s a small world and we’re all the same after all. I do not believe that all the do-gooders are really wishing for such total equality out of great desires of personal self-sacrifice or good will. Some (I’ll call them the Lip-Service Extremists) say such magnanimous things, self-deprecating and diminishing themselves by denying their extra-special worth. In their better-than-thou way, Lip-Service Extremists want to argue that, of course, I’m awesome, and you’re awesome, and everyone else in the whole world is just equally awesome human beings, aren’t we great? Because we’re all so awesome, we should not deny material things to those just as awesome as us. We’re not just accidents living between two abysses; we are capable of doing good for all humanity and we can have a wonderful utopia where everyone is worth the same and no one will be too wealthy and no one will starve or be bothered by thinking about pesky things like the rights to property and prosperity. But, really, our Lip-Service Extremists want to feel important themselves. By claiming that everyone is significant, they’re claiming that they too are significant. The more value they give all others, the more they attribute greater and greater worth to the whole human species, including more value for themselves. By saying that he is just as worthy as I am to live in equal prosperity, you’re implying that you yourself are really something special. Yet extreme equality does nothing to bolster the value of humanity as a whole. Quite the opposite, in fact, all redistributing the wealth does is work to equally devalue the individual. The irreducible, irreplaceable individual is not really unique anymore, he is no longer irreplaceable; his worth is no longer dependent on what he does or who he is.

People are not equal. You are (presumably) a better, more valuable human than, say, your average serial killer. It is simply a detrimental lie to revert to equalizing, and thus devaluing, everyone (Orwellians will attest to this). Your worth doesn’t depend on making another or all others equally awesome! There is, in fact, quite a contradiction with the very notion of equal awesomeness. You can still be important, caring, and unique without valuing all others as equally deserving of all things. Your worth is not contingent on anyone else, and you shouldn’t make it so – such dependence only works to devalue the distinctiveness of your individuality.