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What is "self-interest"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
self-interest
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
economic
▪ Will his ideology make him close the border, or will economic self-interest keep it open, at least for a time?
▪ Rose Tsai and Julie Lee and their like-minded neighbors on the west side are pushing issues that smack of conservative economic self-interest.
▪ Presumably the interplay of political and economic self-interest of government in industry will bring us to their goal.
enlightened
▪ Perhaps sensibly, Mr Bush's campaign appeals more to enlightened self-interest than to self-sacrifice.
▪ One, deriving from Hobbes and Locke, regards the consent given as an expression of rational enlightened self-interest.
■ VERB
enlighten
▪ Or should we politicize the principle of altruism on the grounds that it is no more than enlightened self-interest?
▪ Certain information is desired for enlightened national self-interest.
▪ An alternative view, however, suggests that enlightened self-interest is more likely than regulatory compulsion to bring about truly sustainable activities.
▪ Family support may be the twenty-first-century form of enlightened self-interest.
▪ For most people, paying tax was a kind of enlightened self-interest.
▪ We will only succeed if we start to develop a doctrine of international community based on the principle of enlightened self-interest.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
naked truth/self-interest/aggression etc
▪ And that's the naked truth Yes that's the naked truth.
▪ Lonrho itself is authority for the view that pursuit of naked self-interest by criminal means can never amount to conspiracy.
▪ Revealed ... the naked truth about Paul McCartney.
▪ The aristocracy of this period has been castigated for its naked self-interest and expediency.
▪ With their banshee wails, squalling guitars and naked aggression, they are baring their souls and they are angry.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Advertising is most effective when it appeals directly to people's self-interest.
▪ Our country's role in the world must be determined by economic self-interest.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ But such self-interest might prove misguided.
▪ But there were other considerations, too, of which self-interest was only one.
▪ Certain information is desired for enlightened national self-interest.
▪ In practice, however, motives for intervention are rarely entirely pure, and an element of self-interest usually obtrudes.
▪ Or should we politicize the principle of altruism on the grounds that it is no more than enlightened self-interest?
▪ The conservative is led by disposition, not unmixed with pecuniary self-interest, to adhere to the familiar and the established.
▪ They also wondered if Morris's strategic thinking was unhinged from financial self-interest.
▪ Too many leaders, motivated by self-interest, had failed to rise to the occasion.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Self-interest

Self-interest \Self`-in"ter*est\, n. Private interest; the interest or advantage of one's self.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
self-interest

also self interest, 1640s, from self- + interest (n.). Related: Self-interested.\n\n[Self-interest] is a doctrine not very lofty, but clear and sure. It does not seek to attain great objects; but it attains those it aims for without too much effort. ... [It] does not produce great devotion; but it suggests little sacrifices each day; by itself it cannot make a man virtuous; but it forms a multitude of citizens who are regulated, temperate, moderate, farsighted, masters of themselves; and if it does not lead directly to virtue through the will, it brings them near to it insensibly through habits.

[Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America"]

Wiktionary
self-interest

n. One's personal interest or advantage, especially when pursued without regard for others.

WordNet
self-interest

  1. n. taking advantage of opportunities without regard for the consequences for others [syn: opportunism, self-seeking, expedience]

  2. attempting to get personal recognition for yourself (especially by unacceptable means) [syn: egoism, egocentrism, self-concern, self-centeredness] [ant: altruism]

Wikipedia
Self-interest

Self-interest generally refers to a focus on the needs or desires (interests) of the self. A number of philosophical, psychological, and economic theories examine the role of self-interest in motivating human action.

Usage examples of "self-interest".

Peter the Hermit, Calvin, and Robespierre, each at an interval of three hundred years and all three from the same region, were, politically speaking, the Archimedean screws of their age,--at each epoch a Thought which found its fulcrum in the self-interest of mankind.

This callous treatment of the Banabans in the 1920s and 1930s, like that of the Nauruans on a similar island 250 kilometres to the west, is a demonstration of the self-interest of colonial governments when there was a sufficiently valuable resource worth exploiting.

It evidently proves that men are at all times moved by the same motivenamely, self-interest.

She would try to untangle the threads of self-interest that ran through her brethren and sistern in the United Nations and get the answers they both needed.

His agents are already here, organizing the newcomers and playing on the national self-interests of a number of vulnerable hexes that might on their own support him.

Dyspepsia would not weaken their poignant outcries, or self-interest check their fainting fits.

Perhaps the offer to save Boba Fett's life from whatever might be waiting for him in realspace had been genuine, even if motivated by Voss'on't's own self-interest.

Sometimes their reason-at other times their prejudices or superstitions: often their social affections, not seldom their antisocial ones, their envy or jealousy, their arrogance or contemptuousness: but most commonly, their desires or fears for themselves-their legitimate or illegitimate self-interest.

But they were not: Deposing Saddam was in the self-interest of the United States.

The Martian economic system must reflect both these facts, balancing self-interest with the interests of society at large.

These enthusiasts do not scruple to avow their opinion that a state can subsist without any religion better than with one, and that they are able to supply the place of any good which may be in it by a project of their own-- namely, by a sort of education they have imagined, founded in a knowledge of the physical wants of men, progressively carried to an enlightened self-interest which, when well understood, they tell us, will identify with an interest more enlarged and public.

For the same reason you mentioned why your customers don't swipe singles out of that box down there: enlightened self-interest.

They had learned the enlightened self-interest meme here, and picked up the idea of a loyal opposition.

I think we may justly cite the recently announced Beninia project as an undertaking which combines to the highest degree enlightened self-interest with the support of the deserving.

In the sweet silence, the mental processes look about for a new leader, and the leader most prompt to appear whenever the conscience is stilled, Enlightened Self-interest, _does_ appear.