Abstract
The article is dedicated to clearing out the question, whether any egoism manifestation contradicts the morality norms. With this aim, the author firstly separates two types of situations, in which our representations concerning the moral values of actions can change significantly. Consequently, such types of (extreme as a rule) situations, as well as the moral conclusions based on them cannot be regarded as reliable for an ordinary everyday life. Next, the author searches for the daily life situations, in which an egoistic behavior of an individual could possibly contradict to the moral norms and values. Doing that, the author of the paper uses not only theoretical discourse, but also demonstrates the experimental results of his own longitudinal investigations conducted with the help of the Experience Sampling Methods (ESM). Within the daily blanks, among others, we used the so-called “egoism scale” (“good, benefit for oneself”) and the “altruism scale” (“good, benefit for other people”). We have found out, that the situations with a big predominance of the egoistic scores over the altruistic ones have really the signs of the egoistic individual behavior, but do not contradict to morality norms, since they are not connected to doing harm to other people - in distinction to some other hypothetical situations. The author strengthens his theoretical discourse with numerous illustrative examples. In general, he demonstrates and proves that negativel connotations a priori used by some moral philosophers in the notion of egoism are one-sided and erroneous to a large degree, not corresponding to the reality. Continuation of the discussion is planned.
Published Version
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