Self-Interest and Well-Being: Consider the Asshole

Abstract

No one fully appreciated my worry that self-interest and well-being were importantly distinct until I started writing about assholes. But we need to talk about assholes anyway, because we live in an asshole world. Assholes dominate our politics (both parties), our economy, and our culture. And they’re willing to use their ill-gotten power to ensure that they stay on top. In response, we need to develop an ethical vocabulary for our time that begins with the firm conviction that being an asshole is very bad for you, and not just in the self-interested terms the asshole himself might recognize. 

But first, who is the asshole? Aaron James argues that in social settings, the asshole:

1) allows himself to enjoy special advantages 

2) out of a sense of self-entitlement (he treats himself as morally special)

3) which immunizes him against our complaints (Assholes: A Theory, 5-6)

Being an asshole isn’t a matter of what you do, but how you reason. It’s about your pattern of concern: what you care about and how you care about it.

Crucially, the asshole’s pattern of concern is too narrow to fully appreciate the ultimate value of others, or even himself. The asshole likes himself, but he lacks the resources to truly love himself because of the outsized role that self-interested reasons play in his pattern of concern. (Even when he does heed any other sorts of reasons, it tends to be because they are merely useful for promoting his own self-interest.) Thus, the asshole fixates on the value that emanates from himself and is reflected back onto him by our usefulness for him. He fetishizes his own self-interest so much that well-being drops off his radar, and so he comes to live in a world sucked dry of almost all its value. In the limit, the asshole lives cosmically alone, surrounded (in his eyes) by more or less useful objects. And that is really bad for his well-being.