• Copernicus
    204
    The Beautiful Selfishness of Man: A Defense of Psychological Egoism


    Abstract

    This paper explores the proposition that all human actions — from the most virtuous to the most violent — are ultimately self-serving. Contrary to the moral ideal of altruism, it argues that selfishness is not a moral defect but the biological, psychological, and existential foundation of all motivation. Using interdisciplinary reasoning drawn from philosophy, psychology, biology, and sociology, this work defends psychological egoism and reframes “selfishness” as the organizing principle of both individual behavior and collective morality.


    I. Introduction

    Philosophy has long divided human action into the “selfish” and the “selfless.”
    Yet such a distinction may be more linguistic than real. Every deliberate human act is born from an internal desire — whether that desire seeks pleasure, avoids pain, fulfills duty, or maintains identity.

    If every action originates from the actor’s internal state, then no act can be wholly “selfless.” Even apparent self-sacrifice — the soldier dying for his country, the mother starving for her child, the philanthropist donating wealth — finds its roots in personal satisfaction, emotional fulfillment, or existential meaning.

    This paper therefore proposes a philosophical revaluation: that all human actions are motivated by self-interest, whether consciously or subconsciously, biologically or emotionally, materially or symbolically.


    II. The Psychological Basis: Self as the Center of Experience

    The mind is inherently solipsistic — it perceives the world only through itself. Every thought, feeling, or impulse is filtered through the self before it can be acted upon.

    Thus, when a person helps another, the cause is not the suffering of the other itself, but the internal feeling of empathy, duty, or moral satisfaction that drives them to act. The ultimate motivation, therefore, always resides within.

    Psychological studies confirm this. Acts of charity, generosity, and volunteerism are correlated with activation in the brain’s reward centers (ventral striatum, medial prefrontal cortex). Helping others feels good, biologically. The altruist experiences hormonal reinforcement through dopamine and oxytocin — demonstrating that “good deeds” literally reward the doer.

    This blurs the line between altruism and pleasure: the altruist helps others because it pleases him to do so.


    III. The Biological Basis: Evolutionary Selfishness

    From an evolutionary standpoint, life itself is a selfish process.

    Natural selection favors genes that promote their own replication. Organisms cooperate not from moral virtue, but because cooperation increases survival odds — and thus gene persistence.

    Parental care, often seen as the purest altruism, is genetically selfish: parents preserve their offspring because their offspring carry their DNA. Even self-sacrificial acts in social animals (like bees dying to protect the hive) ensure the survival of shared genetic material.

    Therefore, what humans call “love,” “loyalty,” or “duty” are evolutionary expressions of inclusive fitness — complex strategies for self-continuity.

    Human morality, in this sense, is evolution’s social software — a system that ensures individual genetic interests align with collective stability.


    IV. The Existential Dimension: Meaning as Self-Gratification

    The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that man is condemned to be free — forced to choose meaning in a meaningless world.

    But even that choice is selfish: one assigns meaning to preserve psychological stability, to avoid existential despair.

    Martyrs die not purely for others, but for the idea that gives their life coherence.
    Heroes fight not only for victory, but for the fulfillment of their identity as protectors.
    Even religious devotion, while directed toward God, offers personal peace, belonging, or hope — all forms of self-comfort.

    Thus, existentially, meaning is the highest form of self-satisfaction.


    V. The Moral Marketplace: Society as Transaction

    Every social act is transactional, whether the currency is material or emotional.

    Explicit — Buying goods — Money for product
    Implicit — Friendship — Companionship for loyalty
    Subconscious — Charity — Relief from guilt or joy of giving
    Symbolic — Heroism — Recognition, legacy, identity

    Even love, the most romanticized of all, is not free from this rule.
    A person loves another because they find meaning, comfort, pleasure, or completion in that relationship. Remove those feelings, and love withers.

    Thus, morality is not the suppression of selfishness — it is the refinement of it. Civilization itself is the art of mutually beneficial selfishness.


    VI. Objections and Responses

    • Objection 1: Genuine altruism exists.

    Some argue that true altruism exists when one acts without expectation of reward.

    • Response: The absence of conscious reward does not mean the absence of psychological reward.

    Even unacknowledged pleasure, moral peace, or self-identity serve as internal returns.
    Hence, unconscious egoism remains egoism.


    • Objection 2: Selfishness undermines morality.

    If all acts are selfish, then morality loses meaning.

    • Response: On the contrary — it gains clarity.

    Recognizing selfishness as universal makes morality pragmatic, not hypocritical. Ethics then becomes a negotiation of self-interests, where harmony arises when personal fulfillment does not harm others’ fulfillment.

    This transforms moral philosophy into a calculus of compatible self-interests, not a sermon on impossible self-denial.


    • Objection 3: Self-sacrifice disproves egoism.

    Martyrs, saints, and parents often act against their own survival.

    • Response: Yet they act for something — belief, love, identity, legacy — which provides deeper satisfaction than survival itself.

    The soldier who jumps on a grenade dies, but dies believing his death mattered.
    Meaning triumphs over mortality — and meaning is self-derived.


    VII. Implications: Ethics Without Illusion

    If every act is selfish, moral philosophy must shift from idealism to realism.
    Instead of demanding “selflessness,” it should cultivate enlightened self-interest — the alignment of one’s wellbeing with others’.

    The goal of civilization is not to destroy ego but to educate it.

    Cooperation, justice, empathy — these are not moral miracles, but strategies of sustainable selfishness.


    VIII. Conclusion

    Human beings are not angels corrupted by ego — they are egos discovering beauty through cooperation.

    Every act of kindness, every moral code, every love story is a negotiation between biology and meaning, desire and discipline, self and other.

    If selfishness is the foundation of existence, then goodness is not the absence of it, but its highest refinement.

    Self-interest, properly understood, is not the enemy of morality — it is its origin.


    Philosophical Identification

    This position aligns with a Psychological Egoist Realism — a synthesis of classical egoism (Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld), evolutionary naturalism (Darwin, Dawkins), and existential meaning theory (Sartre, Nietzsche).

    It may be further described as Ethical Realism of Self-Interest, emphasizing the natural harmony between enlightened egoism and moral order.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    4.2k


    This premise:


    If every action originates from the actor’s internal state, then no act can be wholly “selfless.”...

    The mind is inherently solipsistic

    ...seems to do all the heavy lifting. I'll allow that every intentional act involves desire. How could it not? But you seem to be arguing that:

    Desire is experienced by the self
    Therefore, action according to desire is always selfish.

    I don't think this follows though, at least not given the way the term "selfish" is normally used in moral discourse. This seems to be a case of equivocation to me. When we say that a person is being selfish we normally mean something like the Oxford definition:

    (of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.

    We do not mean:

    "An action having any relation to the actor" (which is clearly all action insomuch as it is attributable to anyone or any thing).

    Or:

    "Any action that is desired by the actor." (Indeed, people often talk about the ills of "selfish desires").

    You seem to be using the term "selfish" in this second sense to argue that all action is selfish, and then moving back to the common usage later in the argument. So, even if we grant the solipsistic premises (which I wouldn't) this appears to be an equivocation.

    Indeed, the gold standard for rational moral action tends to be something like: "doing what is known to be truly best." Now, in a sense, what is "best" is always in our own interest in that what is better is more choice-worthy than what is worse. When people decry selfishness, what they mean is that people choose the worse over the better because they are myopically focused on the self as a sort of false consciousness or because they are ruled over by their passions and lower appetites, or else ignorant of what is truly best out of negligence, due to the prior two factors.

    Let me give one of my favorite examples. In the middle of the Purgatorio, Dante sets up the key issue of human life as the proper ordering of loves (drawing on Saint Augustine here). Sin results from loving what is less truly desirable more, from confusing merely apparent goods with what is truly good. To focus on finite, worldly goods (both physical goods, but also status, sexual partners, etc.) is to focus on goods that "diminish when shared. These are not wholly "false goods." They are truly desirable to some extent. But their proper function is to act as a ladder up towards higher goods (consider here Plato's Ladder of Love in the Symposium). Spiritual goods, by contrast (beauty, contemplation, etc.) are "enhanced when shared." The pursuit of goods that diminish when shared sets up a dialectic of competition, and this is where selfishness comes into play.

    Due to historical accidents in the development of Western theology and science, most modern ethics starts here, within this dialectic of competition. Ethics and politics become primarily about "the individual (the selfish) versus society." But this isn't the only way to look at it. Much prior ethics focuses instead focuses primarily on the higher versus the lower, and the proper ordering of the appetites to what is understood as truly most desirable. This isn't "selfish" though in that the Good always relates to the whole and is itself diffusive.

    The ultimate motivation, therefore, always resides within.

    I don't see how this follows. Do our desires and experiences leap from the aether uncaused? If not, then the "ultimate" terminus of our desires lies outside of us. We might become relatively more or less self-determining vis-á-vis our own desires and their ordering (as Frankfurt's second-order volitions for instance, the effective desire to have or not have other desires). Yet our desires have causes that lie outside of us. An appealing meal can stir desire in us because of what it is, not solely because of what we are.

    Again, the "selfishness" claim relies on the redefinition of "selfish" to "having any relation to the self at all." But eros primarily relates to the erotic other, and agape flows outwards from the self. Although both obviously relate to the self in some way, they are not centered on the self. Your redefinition is, interestingly though, pretty much what Byung-Chul Han is talking about in "The Agony of Eros," the elimination of the other by an ever more inflated self. Yet to my mind though, this just shows that solipsitic philosophy, due to its errors, leads towards selfishness.

    Psychological studies confirm this. Acts of charity, generosity, and volunteerism are correlated with activation in the brain’s reward centers (ventral striatum, medial prefrontal cortex). Helping others feels good, biologically. The altruist experiences hormonal reinforcement through dopamine and oxytocin — demonstrating that “good deeds” literally reward the doer.Copernicus

    I don't think this shows much. Vision always involves activity in the occipital lobe. Does this prove that light always relates solely to the self? Our brains are always involved in everything we do. Does this mean that everything we do and know is actually about the brain (and so really, the self)? But if this was so, it would undercut the very epistemic warrant we have for believing in neuroscience, etc. in the first place, since we would actually never have access to "brains" or "fMRIs" only our own selves.

    IDK, it seems to me that all this shows is that all intentional behavior involves desire and that all things desire the good. To show that all intentional action is selfish would require that the good, that to which all things strive, never extends past the self. Yet this hardly seems true, and if it has to be justified by presupposing solipsism, that seems problematic as well.
  • Count Timothy von Icarus
    4.2k
    Anyhow, this reminds me of a common debate in contemporary analytic thought vis-á-vis their version of "Aristotle." The claim is that a focus on cultivating virtue is "selfish." This charge is leveled even more implausibly against Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, or early Christians, with the idea being that "becoming like God" is a "selfish goal."

    I think this is just a misunderstanding of older terms and concepts. If this "problem" was brought to the attention of these past thinkers, I think they would be perplexed. Surely the excellent person is a blessing to others, not a curse. To become like God is always to bless others, because the Good is itself diffusive and always relates to the whole, and it is the life of the sage and saint that is most desirable because it is the life that attains the greatest freedom and deepest joys. It's only in the context of an ethics already grounded in the dialectic of "goods that diminish when shared" that all inward pursuits become selfish.

    That is, it is precisely the epistemic presuppositions that absolutize the individual in solipsistic bubbles that make it impossible for the Good to be recognized as diffusive (because the "desirable" just becomes "whatever is currently desired by an individual). It becomes impossible to know the Good (particularly in a naturalist frame where teleology is stripped out) and so what we really have is emotivism established by axiomatic presupposition, with the "Good" now demoted to a sort of procedural ideal for the allocation of an irreducible multiplicity of goods sought by individuals. But this isn't the result of logical necessity or any empirical finding, but simply flows from axiomatic epistemic assumptions.
  • Copernicus
    204
    IDK, it seems to me that all this shows is that all intentional behavior involves desire and that all things desire the good.Count Timothy von Icarus

    Desire for/from oneself. That's the thing. Selfishness is self-interest, not self-supremacy, at least in my definition.
  • Harry Hindu
    5.7k
    If one does not attend to one's own needs first, how can they ever hope to help others with their needs?

    Do we expect the poor and the sick to contribute to the community? If not, are they being selfish?

    It is those in better circumstances that provide the capacity to help others. The issue is whether or not they have the compassion to do so, or the wisdom that helping others out of a hole might mean they could provide some useful benefit to me or the rest of the community in the future.
  • Copernicus
    204
    are they being selfish?Harry Hindu

    Well, everyone is. Whether it's a refined one or not.
  • Harry Hindu
    5.7k
    I don't know. It seems you are defining "selfish" in such a way that makes it meaningless, as there is no contrast to what "selfishness" is not.
  • Copernicus
    204
    what "selfishness" is notHarry Hindu

    Whatever goes against you (want/desire/interest/feelings).
  • Harry Hindu
    5.7k
    Provide a real world example because if the source of whatever "goes against" me is another person's want/desire/interest/feelings then we have not found ourselves outside of your definition of "selfish".

    Say someone was born with the need to help others, sometimes to the detriment of other wants and needs, but if one of their needs is to help others, and they find satisfaction in helping others, then would that fall into your definition of "selfish"?
  • Copernicus
    204
    because it's giving them a good feeling, at least, if no other transactional motive is present.
  • NOS4A2
    10k


    That is, it is precisely the epistemic presuppositions that absolutize the individual in solipsistic bubbles that make it impossible for the Good to be recognized as diffusive (because the "desirable" just becomes "whatever is currently desired by an individual). It becomes impossible to know the Good (particularly in a naturalist frame where teleology is stripped out) and so what we really have is emotivism established by axiomatic presupposition, with the "Good" now demoted to a sort of procedural ideal for the allocation of an irreducible multiplicity of goods sought by individuals. But this isn't the result of logical necessity or any empirical finding, but simply flows from axiomatic epistemic assumptions.

    That’s the thing, though. The Good is not diffusive. Until the communitarian comes to terms with the fact of our separateness, of our individuation, the communitarian Good can never be imagined in any other sense as individual, selfish desire. He wants conformity to certain ancient ideals, to return us to ancient ways of life, and so on.
  • Copernicus
    204
    Selfishness is self-interest (serving the self, whether by violating other selves or not, or whether putting others above, below, or at equal level or not).

    The self is caged in the solipsistic bubble and can only act from within.
  • Nils Loc
    1.5k
    Whatever goes against you (want/desire/interest/feelings).Copernicus

    What if our "self" is not really unified in its wants/desires. Say it wants two contradictory things, like a composite being composed of conflicting drives. That we must eventually act as we do doesn't mean we desire the consequence of that action.

    I desire to eat but I want a six pack set of abominals. I want to have the high from exercise but don't want to put in the time. I crave sugar but I'm diabetic. In what sense can the "self" be against itself?
  • Copernicus
    204
    I desire to eat but I want a six pack set of abominals. I want to have the high from exercise but don't want to put in the time. I crave sugar but I'm diabetic. In what sense can the "self" be against itself?Nils Loc

    Whatever you choose ultimately serves your self. You choose which is the higher calling for you (eating—desire, packs—health).

    And each of the options serves the self. The idea itself serves your purpose. Eating serves happiness, exercising or dieting serves good health.

    If you wish to harm yourself, you serve your sadism. If you wish to prevent that, you serve your well-being. If you remain undecided, you serve your procrastination.
  • Paine
    2.9k
    Framing the matter as either selfish or selfless, there is no way to compare behavior that involves a range of values. In La Rochefoucauld, for instance, demonstrates the scope of self-love and the influence of organic disposition but does not make it the last word on human experience. Our virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses are measured against the ubiquity of self-love as a condition. So, for example, Maxims like these are prominent in the text:

    339.—We only appreciate our good or evil in proportion to our self-love.

    336.—There is a kind of love, the excess of which forbids jealousy.

    267.—A quickness in believing evil without having sufficiently examined it, is the effect of pride and laziness. We wish to find the guilty, and we do not wish to trouble ourselves in examining the crime.
    La Rochefoucauld, Maxims and Reflections

    The problem with your bubble is that the generality of the explanation renders any particular instance useless for inquiry. Distinctions without a difference.
  • Copernicus
    204
    The problem with your bubble is that the generality of the explanation renders any particular instance useless for inquiry. Distinctions without a difference.Paine

    Care to elaborate?
  • Outlander
    2.8k
    Explicit — Buying goods — Money for product
    Implicit — Friendship — Companionship for loyalty
    Subconscious — Charity — Relief from guilt or joy of giving
    Symbolic — HeroismRecognition, legacy, identity
    Copernicus

    What about unknown anonymous self-sacrifice? Say, jumping on a grenade thrown at your platoon? No, that's not quite the same because he would be remembered. But, say some sort of hypothetical secret act to make the world a better place, by someone without children or family, who therefore has nothing to gain from making said world a better place? :chin:
  • Ludwig V
    2.2k
    Philosophy has long divided human action into the “selfish” and the “selfless.”
    Yet such a distinction may be more linguistic than real. Every deliberate human act is born from an internal desire — whether that desire seeks pleasure, avoids pain, fulfills duty, or maintains identity.
    Copernicus
    Well, we can all agree that every action has a motivation of some kind and that motivation "moves" the agent. To conclude from that that every action is selflish is just playing with words. What matters is what moves the agent. If I respond to pain with sympathy and the attempt to help, or take my children to the sea-side because their delight gives me pleasure, those is at least a candidates for a selfless action

    If every action originates from the actor’s internal state, then no act can be wholly “selfless.” Even apparent self-sacrifice — the soldier dying for his country, the mother starving for her child, the philanthropist donating wealth — finds its roots in personal satisfaction, emotional fulfillment, or existential meaning.Copernicus
    Very few actions originate from the actor's internal state. Most of them are a response to the world around us. All the people you mention - the soldier, the mother, the philanthropist - are responding to the situation they are in, in the world they are in.
    But you miss the point when you write off those actions as equal to the arms trader who sells the weapons, the black marketeer who hoards the food, and the entrepreneur who hoards person wealth. There's nothing wrong with personal satisfaction, emotional fulfilment and existential meaning in themselves. It's about what gives you personal satisfaction, emotional fulfilment and existential meaning.

    Every act of kindness, every moral code, every love story is a negotiation between biology and meaning, desire and discipline, self and other.Copernicus
    There's truth in that. Where does the meaning, the discipline, the other come from?

    Until the communitarian comes to terms with the fact of our separateness, of our individuation, the communitarian Good can never be imagined in any other sense as individual, selfish desire.NOS4A2
    Maybe. But the individualist who cannot imagine goods that are shared by everyone will never understand individuals. For better or worse, we are social beings. Arguably, we all benefit from that. But perhaps you can't recognize the benefits. We (mostly) respect each other's property, and as a result, I can enjoy my property (mostly) in peace. Because people mostly respect the rule about driving on the left or right, everyone can drive more safely. Because people mostly respect their own promises, everyone can do their business. These things are not oppressions, they are enablers.

    Say someone was born with the need to help others, sometimes to the detriment of other wants and needs, but if one of their needs is to help others, and they find satisfaction in helping others, then would that fall into your definition of "selfish"?Harry Hindu
    because it's giving them a good feeling, at least, if no other transactional motive is present.Copernicus
    The virtue lies in the good feeling. The difference between someone who gets pleasure from the pleasure of others is different in important ways from the person who gets pleasure from the pain of others. The one spreads pleasure, the other spreads pain. Who would you prefer for your next-door neighbour?

    The self is caged in the solipsistic bubble and can only act from within.Copernicus
    Oh dear, you will have to find your way out of that cage on your own - unless someone helps you. On the other hand, if you can recognize that solipsism is a cage, there is some hope for you.
  • Outlander
    2.8k
    or take my children to the sea-side because their delight gives me pleasure, those is at least a candidates for a selfless actionLudwig V

    But they're still your children. It benefits your family and existence directly to have happy children who live productive lives, possibly earning lots of money, holding you in high regard, esteem, and favor, and then taking care of you when you're enfeebled.

    It also makes you look good to, shoot, just about anyone and everyone.

    I don't see you going around adopting random children or spending your hard earned money on other people's children.

    Great post, just that one line sticks out to me as something that others might gloss over thus prematurely proving the OP's premise as valid.
  • Paine
    2.9k

    By excluding all senses of "self-less" or not-for-yourself as a motive for action, there is no way to model particular behavior as relative to others. It makes La Rochefoucauld's observations useless because he was mainly interested in the differences of motivations behind similar appearances, not turning them into one goo.

    The claim that all moral claims in the past were based upon this proposal of the single motivation of selflessness is taking a presumption for a fact. That kicks a lot of moral philosophy of the past to the curb.

    If one grants your solipsistic bubble, how do we get to the model you present here:

    Every act of kindness, every moral code, every love story is a negotiation between biology and meaning, desire and discipline, self and other.Copernicus

    Solipsists don't usually let themselves out for weekends on the town.
  • Ludwig V
    2.2k
    Great post, just that one line sticks out to me as something that others might gloss over thus prematurely proving the OP's premise as valid.Outlander
    Thanks for that.

    But they're still your children.Outlander
    There's a case for considering generosity to one's children is a kind of selfishness. But that just reveals that what counts as selfishness is not necessarily obvious. What do we make of the virtue of looking after one's family? In the context of wider society, it can look like selfishness. In the context of traditional individualism, it is altruism.
    Think of benefactors of your town or city or of art rather than homelessness.

    I could spend my money and time on my personal pleasures and leave the kids without. Would that not be selfish? Is helping out my friends and neighbours not generous, because they are my friends and neighbours? Yet, I agree that exclusive attention to my kids, neglecting my partner, would be wrong.

    It benefits your family and existence directly to have happy children who live productive lives, possibly earning lots of money, holding you in high regard, esteem, and favor, and then taking care of you when you're enfeebled.Outlander
    Yes, but the point is that I consider those happy children to be a benefit and not a drag. The rest of it is far from guaranteed. However, if my generosity to them was predicated on those happy outcomes. that would undermine my claim to generosity.
  • Copernicus
    204
    say some sort of hypothetical secret act to make the world a better place, by someone without children or family, who therefore has nothing to gain from making said world a better place? :chin:Outlander

    You serve your vision of a better world.
  • Copernicus
    204
    those is at least a candidates for a selfless actionLudwig V

    No.

    There's nothing wrong with personal satisfaction, emotional fulfilment and existential meaning in themselves.Ludwig V

    Exactly. Everything is about that one way or another.

    Where does the meaning, the discipline, the other come from?Ludwig V

    The self.

    The difference between someone who gets pleasure from the pleasure of others is different in important ways from the person who gets pleasure from the pain of others.Ludwig V

    Not.

    if you can recognize that solipsism is a cage, there is some hope for you.Ludwig V

    No one escapes it.
  • Copernicus
    204
    It makes La Rochefoucauld's observations uselessPaine

    I fail to see where that's my problem.

    Solipsists don't usually let themselves out for weekends on the town.Paine

    I do.
  • Ludwig V
    2.2k
    You serve your vision of a better world.Copernicus
    You miss the point where the distinction arises. If your vision is of peace and justice for everyone, it is altruistic. If your vision is of your own well-being and prosperity alone, it is selfish.

    No.Copernicus
    Thanks. Very helpful.

    Exactly. Everything is about that one way or another.Copernicus
    You only read part of what I said. You will surely not see what you choose not to look for.

    No one escapes it.Copernicus
    How would you know?
  • Copernicus
    204
    Great post, just that one line sticks out to me as something that others might gloss over thus prematurely proving the OP's premise as valid.
    — Outlander
    Thanks for that.

    But they're still your children.
    — Outlander
    There's a case for considering generosity to one's children is a kind of selfishness. But that just reveals that what counts as selfishness is not necessarily obvious. What do we make of the virtue of looking after one's family? In the context of wider society, it can look like selfishness. In the context of traditional individualism, it is altruism.
    Think of benefactors of your town or city or of art rather than homelessness.

    I could spend my money and time on my personal pleasures and leave the kids without. Would that not be selfish? Is helping out my friends and neighbours not generous, because they are my friends and neighbours? Yet, I agree that exclusive attention to my kids, neglecting my partner, would be wrong.

    It benefits your family and existence directly to have happy children who live productive lives, possibly earning lots of money, holding you in high regard, esteem, and favor, and then taking care of you when you're enfeebled.
    — Outlander
    Yes, but the point is that I consider those happy children to be a benefit and not a drag. The rest of it is far from guaranteed. However, if my generosity to them was predicated on those happy outcomes. that would undermine my claim to generosity.
    Ludwig V

    @Outlander was right. You seem to fail to grasp it.
  • Copernicus
    204
    You miss the point where the distinction arises. If your vision is of peace and justice for everyone, it is altruistic. If your vision is of your own well-being and prosperity alone, it is selfish.Ludwig V

    No, and no.

    You only read part of what I said. You will surely not see what you choose not to look for.Ludwig V

    I'm selfish. (P.S. I did read)

    How would you know?Ludwig V

    As a solipsist, that's the core of my worldview.
  • Banno
    28.8k
    As a solipsist, that's the core of my worldview.Copernicus
    You're a bit of a dill, arn't you.
  • Copernicus
    204
    You're a bit of a dill, arn't you.Banno

    Depends on perspective.
  • Ludwig V
    2.2k
    As a solipsist, that's the core of my worldview.Copernicus
    Well, I'll just leave you to it. There's not much fun to be had here.
  • Copernicus
    204


    Reality is subjective, dependent upon stimulus reception and intellectual perception.
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