Doing a Google search today for the phrase 'Enlightened Self Interest', it came up at 35,300 hits. Yet most people who I say it to look at me blankly.
To me it is one of the founding principles of my ethics. While many of my ethics come from my Christian upbringing, I am by nature a person that likes to understand the why and the how. 'Enlightened Self Interest' (ESI) answers both these questions.
What is it?
'Enlightened Self Interest' is the understanding of the boundary where selfishness stops being productive and starts being harmful. Applying enlightened self interest means a lot of thinking, it means that you strive to see where short term selfishness will lead to long term self harm, it means that you work hard to understand the other people around you in order to be able to choose those with who to cooperate to mutual benefit and on a wider scale you have to grasp how your actions impinge on society and how they will cause society to impinge on you.
A little selfishness leads you not to give away your ability to support yourself and so not become a burden on others.
As a philosophy it is a little less than inspiring, the acknowledged ideal is to be perfectly selfless. Unfortunately that ideal only works if everyone around you is equally selfless. A selfless person encountering a selfish person has no defence.
As a simple example, enlightened self interest can address the basic tenet of most societies. 'Thou shalt not kill.', the short term benefit of killing someone in order to gain some advantage is outweighed by the long term risk that it becomes alright for anyone to kill you. In modern society this fact is (dangerously?) less obvious, in older societies a killer became an outlaw and thus fair game for others to kill.
I would ask everyone to consider applying ESI to their everyday lives and ethical decisions, as it allows one to approach the ideal of selflessness, promoting cooperation while still protecting you and society from the selfish.
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