| | Chris,
Others have chimed in with good questions. Let me be more exacting.
The idea that there are no conflicts of interests between rational men for example is part of a beautiful world view. Steve gave 2 good examples (mortgage payments & hand waving) where your interests were best served by following a moral prescription which included the interests of others. If you have a counter-example besides parent-child relations (below), please bring it up.
On parent-child relations
So is the idea that you can reconcile the two notions of a parent naturally being obligated to his child, and the idea that each individual must live for his own sake. Just as there are bad folks who enter into contracts (and transgress in some way), so there are bad folks who become parents. Some of these parents mistreat or neglect their children. From the outside, one might explain the behavior of the bad parents as "selfish" -- but this is not a philosophically-mature view of selfishness. For details, see the (Ayn Rand) Lexicon link that I provided above.
Let's say that a parent likes to watch football games, and that an infant child in the other room becomes hungry and cries. The "selfish" (bad) parent might just continue to watch the football game, closing the door on the crying infant to reduce the noise -- instead of leaving the television set in order to feed the child. In ignoring the child for the game, the parent is following a whimsical desire (a 'brute' or 'raw' feeling).
The parent is practicing behavior most-commonly associated with being "selfish" -- but, as the following Lexicon quotes show, this is wrong:
...the values required for human survival—not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the “aspirations,” the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes... Recap:
It's not truly selfish (selfish in a good way) to have values that conflict with human survival. Folks who do are being less human than they can be, less moral than they can be. Humans sometimes choose to live on an "animal" level of existence (rather than a human level). The truly selfish man is rational and aligns his values not with whimsical desires (like animals), but with a "human" kind of survival. Here is Rand making this very point:
There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level ... And:
This is said as a warning against the kind of “Nietzschean egoists” who, in fact, are a product of the altruist morality and represent the other side of the altruist coin: the men who believe that any action, regardless of its nature, is good if it is intended for one’s own benefit. Just as the satisfaction of the irrational desires of others is not a criterion of moral value, neither is the satisfaction of one’s own irrational desires. Morality is not a contest of whims . . . .
A similar type of error is committed by the man who declares that since man must be guided by his own independent judgment, any action he chooses to take is moral if he chooses it. One’s own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one’s actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation: only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one’s choices.
Just as man cannot survive by any random means, but must discover and practice the principles which his survival requires, so man’s self-interest cannot be determined by blind desires or random whims, but must be discovered and achieved by the guidance of rational principles.
So the answer to your parent-child question is that there's no conflict between a parent's selfishness and the care of a child. The parents who mistreat or neglect their children aren't being selfish in the mature sense -- they aren't even looking after their own interests very well. So, not being truly selfish in the first place, these examples (of parents neglecting children) do not give rise to the question that you asked.
It only appears like a paradox (for a parent to care for a child) when one doesn't yet understand the correct view of human selfishness -- i.e., what living "for your own sake" really means. When you understand what it means for you (a human) to live for your own sake, then this paradox dissolves.
Ed
Related:
An essay I wrote about human happiness
(Edited by Ed Thompson on 10/28, 4:34am)
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