Now let’s add something to that question. "Is self-sacrifice the highest, most moral thing a person can do ... if it means sacrificing oneself by purposely crashing an airplane into a building, killing thousands of people, including oneself?" The same people who previously answered yes would now say no.

But why is that? Certainly the terrorists who committed the atrocity of Sept. 11 sacrificed their own lives, but their action was still one of the most "evil" acts that anyone could perform.

I would have been much happier if terrorists had chosen to be "selfish" if being "selfish" meant that they continued to live and support themselves and their own families without killing anyone. That sort of selfishness would have been morally superior.

So I think we should re-examine our old notion that self-interest is always immoral and self-sacrifice is always benevolent.

Ordinarily, people believe that "selfishness" means benefiting oneself at the expense of others, behaving like Napoleon or the mafia. But the depravity of thieves and murderers isn’t that they look out for themselves per se, but that they harm others to do so.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with living for oneself, working for one’s own profit, when it does "no harm" to others, such as many productive entrepreneurs have done. The real problem isn’t "pro-self-ism," but "anti-others-ism."

Now, wouldn’t you resent it if someone tried to steal from you or maul you? If yes, then I ask: Why are you so selfishly concerned about your own welfare?

If you wanted to be truly altruistic, meaning that you put the interests of everyone else (and, now, thanks to politically-correct environmentalism, every endangered sea-slug) above your own, that would mean that it’s wrong for you to assume that you have a higher claim to your own property and life than the criminals trying to exploit you.

The crooks are "other people" after all, so "everyone else" includes "them." If you really believed that self-sacrifice was the greatest form of morality, you’d let others rob and murder you. "Others" could gain from it.

So the moral ideal should be neither self-sacrifice nor the sacrifice of others to self, but rational self-interest. That means that one can live for oneself and those whom one cares about (because these other people have personal virtues one values out of one’s own selfishly independent preference), without hurting anyone else.

Many believe that selfishness is antithetical to compassion and charity. But the opposite is true. Any time you hand food to a starving child, you are promoting rational selfishness. This is because you are satisfying that child’s rationally selfish desire to eat and live another day. Kindness entails respecting the selfishness of others.

And, when you give money to someone you deem deserving, such as the families of the victims of Sept. 11, instead of donating $5,000 to the terrorists, you are asserting your own selfish interests, particularly if giving money away makes you happy.

In your own estimate, the victims’ families deserve your charity more than do mass murderers. Thus, when you care for the former group rather than the latter, you are selfishly serving your own personal values.

Genuine self-sacrifice would mean that you betray your own sense of justice and give away money, not for the selfish purpose of making yourself feel good, but for the unselfish aim of making yourself feel miserable and guilty. Giving alms to those wishing to butcher you and your family is the "real" self-sacrifice, because it means sacrificing your own values and endangering the very life of yours that you selfishly cling to.

Let’s face it. There’s nothing immoral about being rationally selfish -- living for oneself while respecting the selfish right and selfish desire of others not to be harmed.

What’s truly immoral is the popular dogma stating that the ethical ideal is to destroy oneself for others’ benefit. A far greater moral paradigm is one that acknowledges that people in general deserve to be happy, which means that each person has a moral right to, borrowing Thomas Jefferson’s words, the selfish pursuit of his or her own happiness.

Contrary to one of the world’s most enduring philosophic fallacies, rational selfishness, egoism and self-interest are good. And, yes, of course I care about others, which means that I approve of their own selfish concerns for their own welfare.

Stuart K. Hayashi is the president of the Reason Club of Honolulu and an undergraduate in Entrepreneurial Studies at Hawaii Pacific University, though his opinions do not necessarily reflect that of either institution. He can be reached at radical_individualist@hotmail.com

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