Imagine, if you will, a crowded,
standing-room only subway car during rush hour. Even though people are
standing, a seated passenger keeps his backpack on the seat next to his. It would
be difficult upon seeing such a sordid display of selfishness not to reflect on
the person’s values and character. The flipside of selfishness would be obvious:
an indifference towards other people, including that which might benefit them.
Instead, selfishness, which is self-love that is oriented teleologically to the
person’s own benefit (i.e., private benefit) at the expense of benefits to
other people and even a society as a whole. The shift from the ethical domain
to that of religion may seem easily done—people of bad character are likely to go
to hell rather than heaven—but not so fast, lest we presume to be omniscient (i.e.,
all-knowing) and capable of promulgating divine justice. It is indeed
very tempting to relegate selfish people to hell.
John Calvin, a Protestant
reformer in the sixteenth century, held that by absolute sovereignty, God has
predestined an elect who are saved. Although he viewed wealth as a sign of God’s
approval of the elect, it was not until the next century that Calvinists
considered industriousness to be a Christian virtue.[1]
All this contradicts Jesus’s statement in the Gospels to the rich man that
unless he gives up his fortune, he would not enter the kingdom of God; it would
be easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle. Furthermore, wealth
as a sign of divine favor leaves out the divine favor that could be supposed to
be lavished on monks such as Cuthbert and Godric of Finchale, who lived
intentionally impoverished lives so to be worthy of being saved. Wealth
as a sign of divine favor also flies in the face of the preachments of such
religious notables as St. Francis of Assisi and Luther, both of whom can be
interpreted as attempting to apply brakes to the emerging and maturating
Christian pro-wealth paradigm of their respective times.[2]
Much less problematic is the attribution
by observing selfishness of someone not being among the elect saved by the
shedding of blood by the Son of God, for, as Paul and Augustine both claimed,
God is love and it emanates not only in a person’s love directed to God,
but also to one’s neighbors in benevolentia universalis. Intentionally depriving
another subway passenger on a crowded train of a seat by taking one up with one’s
backpack is antipodal to benevolence, which manifests divine love according to
Christianity.
In fact, Samuel Hopkins, who was a
protégé of the New England theologian and philosopher, Jonathan Edwards, claims
in his book on holiness that the essence of the kingdom of God is kindness and
acts of compassion oriented to the humanity of people who dislike one or whom
one dislikes.[3] Literally
“rubbing shoulders” with another passenger on a subway car is much less
inconvenient than being charitable towards adversaries. The root of the word charity
is love rather than philanthropy.
In his book on virtue, Edwards himself distinguishes selfishness from “compounded self-love,” which differs from simple self-love because benefits are intentionally extended to other people rather than limited to oneself.[4] Similarly, Pierre Nicole, a seventeenth-century Jansenist Catholic priest and theologian, claims that the inherently sinful self-love can nonetheless be cleverly manifested as courtesy—but not interior kindness!—to other people because more can be gotten from laying out honey than from the stinginess of selfishness. Had the subway passenger moved his backpack, who knows, perhaps a person who might have been useful might have sat in the suddenly empty seat?
Nevertheless, Hopkins, Edwards, and Nicole were all very clear in that even if self-love can have intentional beneficial consequences, which are in a person's self-interest, the root is still a sin. Needless to say, this point applies to the naked underlying narrow selfishness of the baker and the consumer in Adam Smith's theory of a competitive market, where not even moral sentiments can be assumed to be in the calculus of either participant. In relying on market-level unintended beneficial consequences of selfish economic pursuits by the crucially price-based impersonal mechanism of the proverbial "invisible hand," Smith does not even acknowledge or rely on intentional benefits for others from the enlightened or "compound" self-interest of market participants. Smith's view of human nature in the economic domain is thus relatively pessimistic. I submit that the business world empirically bears this out, as evinced, for example, by how corporations market their marketing under the subterfuge of "corporate social responsibility." Even attempts to reconcile organizational and societal norms are not ethical in nature, given Hume's notion of the naturalistic fallacy, which states that ethical principles are necessary to get from "is" to "ought." I submit that still another fallacy is instantiated by conflating the ethical and theological domains. In short, God transcends and thus is not limited to "ought." The profane world of business greed is oceans of time from the realm of godliness.
As preferable as damning selfishness
is to reckoning a rich person as being favored by God, distinguishing the
ethical domain from that of salvation is important because the two domains are,
I submit, qualitatively different even though they do interrelate. Hence
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling distinguishes the universally-accessible
moral domain from that of the divine command that only Abraham receives. What is attempted murder (of Abraham’s son,
Isaac) in moral (and legal) terms is a sacrifice in religious terms. Both
domains are valid in themselves and their respective meanings, and they relate
to each other, as in the story of Abraham, but attempted murder and religious sacrifice
are qualitatively different. This point is also clear in the Book of Job, as
Job is a righteous man and thus does not deserve to be made to suffer by the
devil even as a test sanctioned by the Old Testament deity. Abstractly stated,
divine omnipotence (i.e., all-powerful) means that divine command cannot be
constrained by human ethical principles. Regarding the five Commandments that have
ethical conduct, it is explicitly based on divine command, and thus on divine
will, and thus is not a constraint on the deity. This does not mean that the ethical
itself is theological in nature.
So while it is tempting to relegate
a selfish person to hell as a sordid reprobate, especially as selfishness is
antithetical to benevolentia universalis, which is a manifestation of “God
is love” in Christianity, both our own finite nature as judges and the distinction
between acting unethically and being saved or damned mitigate against making such
a hasty and wholly convenient category mistake as superimposes stuff of our
realm onto God. It could be, for example, that the man on the subway suffers
from PTSD and thus God has mercy on such a trifling thing as the man taking up
an extra seat. Furthermore, it could be that the man was on his way to care for
his sick grandmother and triggering his social anxiety on the train would
compromise the care he could give.
