One (relatively) common image of the motivational struggle in the moral life, is that of a conflict between selfishness and selflessness. The delinquent is always just "looking out for number one" or indulging egocentric hedonistic sentiments, or is coldly, if cleverly, calculating the advance of his or her self-interest, or whatever.
However, once various moral questions are parsed to the level of philosophical detail, does this conflict remain center-stage or is the problem of being a good person, of having good motives, reformulated? Consider first the following example of the "default" of altruism, if you will, from John Rawls:
- ... suppose that in deciding what to do all vote to do what everyone else wants to do. Obviously nothing gets settled; in fact, there is nothing to decide. (AToJ, 2nd ed. s.30, pg. 165)
Abstract altruism can't serve as a basis for a meaningful moral attitude. But now if everyone ought to count equally, then we would say to count ourselves too, so moreover morality has a straightaway place for self-interest. And in Kant, for example, we speak of our obligations arising from our own will, our autonomy--from ourselves. Some reference to the intent or desire or whatever of the self will then factor in to our construction of our moral character in our will. There will even be a sense in which morality is "self-centered."
I suggest (not innovatively, mind you) that the real issue is not self-interest versus the interests of others, or at least this is not always the real issue. The self(!)-righteous fanatic might seem a type of the narcissist, but when I read Hannah Arendt's analysis of the French Revolution (read this among other things), I got an impression that could be expressed like so:
- Who would be the worse STAR WARS villain: a Sith Lord always devoted to the Dark Side, or a fallen Jedi who wanted to limit use of the Light Side only to the Jedi?
The fallen Jedi in the example is not self-interested in the normal(?) sense. Indeed, by acting for the sake of respect for the Light Side of the Force, he or she would seem to be acting on a very good motive in general. And even though the result of limiting the Force to the Jedi would result in the possibility of tyranny on the part of the Jedi, we can waive this fear in relation to the particular Knight of the Order in question, for the purposes of argument thence saying that this Knight exemplifies a profoundly evil attitude towards goodness, one so profound due to the subtlety of its corruptiveness.
Or something like that (Arendt's real-world examples were better but I don't have a copy of
On Revolution at hand to cite).
