Selflessness is not a virtue

Selflessness is not a virtue

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Most people take it for granted that selflessness is a virtue. In business, altruism—always putting others first, selfless service to a company,“servant leadership”—is praised as the ultimate expression of virtue. But this worship of selflessness is a mistake: selflessness is not a virtue (a principle defining the action required to achieve values). Quite the contrary, always putting others first destroys values. It harms both the sacrificer and the intended recipient of the sacrifice, both in business and in life in general. Let’s see why—and why people embrace the idea of self-sacrifice despite its destructiveness.

Selflessness means giving up—sacrificing—your values for the sake of serving the needs of others. You should forgo a job opportunity—because there is always someone else who needs it more. You should not attract the new client—because your competitor needs the revenue more. You should not eat that meal—there are others who are hungrier than you. To follow the principle of selflessness, you would need to give up all your values: job, clients, food, and the rest. But life, and business, requires gaining values, not losing them. If you give up all your values, you will die, or your company will go out of business. This possibility has occurred to the philosophers advocating altruism, such as John Stuart Mill, who advised us to take “just enough” for ourselves in order to maintain our strength to keep serving others. But how much is “just enough”? Altruism offers no answers.

We can’t keep serving others if we are dead or our business is bankrupt, so the recipients of our sacrifice will not benefit from it in the long term. When we run a company on the principle of altruism, we minimize the wealth it creates—and eliminate it altogether. But when a business fulfills its proper purpose and creates wealth, it benefits not merely its owners but all those with whom it trades: customers, employees, and suppliers. A wealth-creating, profit-seeking company benefits also its competitors by spurring them on to create more wealth themselves through increased efficiency and more innovative products and services. Wealth creation is not a zero-sum game. Pursuing self-interest—not selfless serving of others’ needs—is a plus-sum game in which all parties trade value for value and everyone benefits. Consider Bill Gates: by running Microsoft and creating wealth, he was benefiting others much more than he ever can through the charity work of the Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation.

If the selfish pursuit and trade of values (including helping those worthy of your help) is a win-win for everyone, why do people still embrace selflessness as the moral ideal? I see three primary reasons. First, many find the duty to serve others a comforting thought because they lack confidence in their minds’ ability to deal with the challenges life often poses. With altruism as the dominant moral code, they can depend on others to serve their needs, at the price of doing the same for others. Second, having been led astray by most philosophers since Aristotle, many do not understand the alternatives. They recognize that selfishness is the opposite of selflessness but view it as predatory, cynical exploitation of others. They fail to see the selfless sacrifice of oneself to others and the sacrifice of others to oneself as false alternatives. They do not realize that the true alternative to selflessness is rational selfishness, which rejects any sacrifice and advocates the life-enhancing pursuit and trade of values instead. Third, selflessness has been a dominant moral ideal for millennia, thanks to the above two reasons. Most people are second-handers: they do not question culturally prevalent values and follow what they have been taught: “Don’t be selfish”—“Give up what you value for others who need it”—“Who are you to elevate your interests above those of others?”

It is the selfless, altruist morality that we need to reject if we are to achieve our values—including success in business—and to be happy. Accepting selflessness as the moral ideal is a source of unearned guilt and irreconcilable with success and happiness. Many companies mix altruism and self-interest in their value statements, rendering them confusing to employees who recognize that contradictory values cannot be achieved. They want to know which values are the real guidelines. There is no proper compromise between selflessness and (rational) self-interest. Either we sacrifice values and undermine our companies’ success and our lives, or we pursue and trade values and thrive.

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5 Responses

  1. I suspect the majority of people who claim to behave like that don’t actually, but are just trying to convince others to sacrifice to them.
    In business, if you meant:
    – Employees, they’ll sneak and politick
    – Owners, those who claim to be all for others shouldn’t be trusted, it’s just a marketing scam.

    There are owners who use company funds for charitable purposes, much of that is for PR, I doubt they continue if facing financial failure. Some successful business people appear to feel guilty, they promote “compassionate capitalism” and contribute to questionable foundations that fund neo-Marxist activists. For some that guilt is valid – they were dishonest, for others altruism.

  2. I, too, have been searching for instances where selflessness and successful business co-exist, and my search has led me here. Very interesting and thought provoking article. My only issue with it is the use of the wold ‘happiness’.

    “Accepting selflessness as the moral ideal is a source of unearned guilt and irreconcilable with success and happiness”

    I too believe that altruism and successful business are mutually exclusive, but to assume that a person would be incapable of achieving happiness without business success is to assume that happiness is derived solely from the success of the business. This is obviously implied in the article, and in this context it seems a perfectly reasonable one, but I feel this assumption should have been clearly stated to avoid any conflict between happiness and altruism in the broader sense, which are obviously not necessarily mutually exclusive.

    1. Thank you for your comment. I disagree that happiness is derived solely from business success; the post does not imply that. I would argue, though, that each person needs purpose in life–some form of productive work–but that purpose does not have to come from business. There are many other lines of productive work outside of business. Engineers, artists, health care workers, even university professor can be happy, too!

      I also disagree that happiness and altruism ‘in a broader sense’ are compatible. Happiness is the state of consciousness that results from the achievement values (as per Ayn Rand’s definition). Altruism requires sacrifice of values for the sake of others, always putting others’ interests first and denying one’s own. Altruism is a morality of self-sacrifice that is utterly incompatible with achieving values and with happiness.

  3. I was taught in church (christian) that to sacrifice for the benefit of others was good. For some reason, I never felt comfortable with that concept. I did not know why as a young man, it just seemed wrong. As I matured I noticed how people used Altruism as a tool to manipulate others. Altruism is a powerful tool, especially when religious and government force is used.

    For me, building a profitable company where employees work and earn their own money does a lot more good than sacrificing yourself for others you may not even know. Personally, I believe that Altruism is not good and can bring harm to both the person that sacrifices and the person that receives the sacrificial gift.

    1. Thank you for your comment, Vic. I completely agree with you but will go even further: altruism is evil and it DOES bring harm both to the giver and the recipient of the sacrifice, without exception. The standard of value is human survival and flourishing, and that does not permit any kind of sacrifice among people, only voluntary trade of values (both material and spiritual). Kudos to you for questioning and rejecting altruism.

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Jaana Woiceshyn teaches business ethics and competitive strategy at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, Canada.

She has lectured and conducted seminars on business ethics to undergraduate, MBA and Executive MBA students, and to various corporate audiences for over 20 years both in Canada and abroad. Before earning her Ph.D. from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania, she helped turn around a small business in Finland and worked for a consulting firm in Canada.

Jaana’s research on technological change and innovation, value creation by business, executive decision-making, and business ethics has been published in various academic and professional journals and books. “How to Be Profitable and Moral” is her first solo-authored book.

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