Selfishness

Can an ethical egoist be selfish? Of course, there are times when all of us are selfish, and there are times when all of us are selfless and generous.

To espouse ethical egoism or its alternative, ethical altruism, is to espouse by proclamation and intent, a system of values intended to guide our behavioral choices over a lifetime.

To live as a good person under either ethical system, and both systems are ethical and good (more or less) one must practice what one preaches.

The ethical egoist that believes it is noble and even one's duty as an individual to live by the primary  (not sole motive) motive of pursuing one's enlightened self-interest. Enlightened self-interest would include such things at individuating, painting pictures, serving humanity on a heroic level, building a business empire.

The pursuit of this self-interest is not a communal concern. It involves the individual and his life, his happiness, his property and his liberty.

Now, if he speeds up on the free way and cuts off an entering car to the point of running that car into the ditch, he endangers those in the car. That is selfish and dangerous, and its involves others. The individuating driver would let one care in for the sake of all, but also because he is fair, square, moderate, reasonable and equitable--giving others a chance to enter the freeway is safer, better for all. The suicidal desperate move to always be #1 with all other cars behind him is selfish, ruthless, unsafe and vicious. Still, this selfishness is a social phenomenon, with law of the jungle implications, for how a selfish brute misbehaves in his interactions with others. He is mostly a nonindividuator and a joiner. Therefore, selfish misbehavior is more often an offshoot of group-living and altruist immorality than it is an outgrowth of individual-living, egoist morality and courteous treatment of neighbors.

If I own the only neighborhood grocery store in a poor neighborhood where people walk to my store because they have no transportation, and I know this, and I have a monopoly on their business, and I gouge them by tripling prices on goods to maximize my profits, my cunning is a selfish, base cunning. I am misbehaving ethically and perhaps criminally, but my selfish behavior is a communal concern,  not an individual concern. Again, selfishness is between people, not a relation of the self towards to self, ordinarily.