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Summary
Ethical egoism is the normative ethical position that moral agents ought to act in their own self-interest. Ethical egoism holds, therefore, that actions whose consequences will benefit the doer are also ethical, as Alexander Pope demonstrated with his poem that personal and social interest are not mutually exclusive. Ethical egoism is a theory that treats “self-interest as the foundation of morality” The ethical theory known as ethical egoism states that we are always morally required to do what’s in our own self-interest. The view isn’t that we are selfish—this is psychological egoism —but that we ought to be. To be selfish is to have a kind of nasty dispositions towards other people and that is not what ethical egoism is all about. As a matter of fact, ethical egoism generally discourages that: such selfishness is rarely to our advantage, especially in the long run. It is the normative theory that the promotion of one’s own good is in accordance with morality. In the strong version, it is held that it is always moral to promote one’s own good, and it is never moral not to promote it. In the weak version, it is said that although it is always moral to promote one’s own well, it is not necessarily never moral to not. That is, there may be conditions in which the avoidance of personal interest may be a moral action.
