I think really the difference here is what you're doing with your selfishness. Are you just dedicating all your resources to yourself? I'd say that's within your rights. Are you extending your selfishness to behavior that affects other people beyond their access to your property? That, I'd say, is more of a problem. If you own a pool and you want to be selfish with your pool, fine. Nobody wants to swim with you anyway. If, on the other hand, you own a car and you like to be selfish about your travel on the road, that's a beast of a different color. Suddenly going the speed you want to go doesn't just mean you're moving slowly, it means you're making everyone behind you late. Finishing your breakfast sandwich instead of looking for a gap to turn into is no longer just a matter of you yourself, but a matter of the poor bastard behind you. When your selfishness causes you to take my possessions we again have a problem. Or when it means you leave your dog's shit in the middle of the sidewalk. Things like that. Basically, if your selfishness goes beyond just depriving others of your generosity and becomes actively mistreating or disregarding other people I'd say it's a problem. We ought to think about ourselves, though. If people can take care of themselves there are less areas where we need to rely on one another. To use a traffic metaphor again, consider the person who keeps letting people in front of them go, regardless of right of way or the natural flow of traffic. To their eyes they're being generous, they're making someone's day easier. Were they to pivot their heads, though (or just look in their rear view mirror for once) they'd see that they're complicating more people's lives than they're improving. Why? Because the flow of traffic is designed for people to concern themselves with their own passage in a timely manner. You're already doing the best thing you can do if you just drive to the place you're trying to go as quickly as you can. I think there's more that can be done socially than that, but it demonstrates how taking care of ourselves helps everyone by making things operate smoothly. Sorry for all the driving stuff, I spend a lot of time on the road. I think it gets the point across though.
Thank you for such a well-written definition: it makes the matter much clearer for me. However, there are areas where this definition might fail, and I believe it is important to think those through while we're on the topic. One example being a promotion for which you and one other person are eligible for. The promotion offers more work, for which you are ready, in exchange for considerably bigger pay. Both you and the other person are skilled enough to be deservant of it and are putting in around equal amount of work in while you're in the office, or wherever you are. One day, several days after announcing the potential promotion to you and the other person, your boss calls you in and, in a private conversation in his/her office, asks you whether you feel like you deserve the promotion more than the other person. Do you say you do, earning yourself a better place but leaving another person out of the opportunity?
That's true. Still, isn't it too selfish to claim myself a better fit? For all I know, the other person is doing as good as me - how am I to decide that I'm better if we both possess the around equal amounts of the skill and the discipline that the new position requires? Would it be more or less selfish to decline answering the boss' question or to answer it with "It musn't be up to me to decide" or "Let the results of our work decide for us"?He's got no reasonable expectation that you should do otherwise.
Do you believe both of those technologies to be a product of reasonable selfishness solely - or, rather, of advertising and selling oneself? It seems to me that either of those are used because they're a better alternative to something rather than simply better fit for everyone and everything. Certainly, there are situations where both bows and Hubski win - ranged combat and thoughtful conversations, respectively - but when declaring itself to be the better way rather than a better way for something, doesn't that make the declarers selfish beyond reason? In the same manner, does declaring oneself to be better than others or best publicly make one's selfishness somehow harmful to others? If your point is to sell yourself, telling about your overall goodness of a product might help you but will harm others, for they're now unable to sell themselves, - which is fine while reasonable selfishness is concerned, but what about lying about your qualities?
Well there's a difference between recommending yourself for a job and running around telling everyone you're superior to them. The point isn't to think you're better than everyone, it's to try to advance your own interests, often at the expense of someone else who was trying to do the same thing or something incompatible with what I'm doing. Everybody acts in their own interest competitively and we're generally left with the more feasible solution, though maybe not our favorite one. Not always, though, which again opens up vulnerability to those plans. I don't even think you'd get past foraging societies without this sort of selfishness. You certainly wouldn't have civilization on the scale that we see it today. Not in human beings anyway. For that matter, though, I don't even know that a mobile species can survive without some degree of selfishness.