Is Self-Interest a Virtue or a Vice?

Recently, I was sitting in one of our chapel services when the guest pastor began discussing political issues. Typically, I enjoy a good political discussion, but I was growing wary of the fact that he was doing little more than paying lip-service to key figures on the right, rather than engaging conservative ideas. However, he caught my attention when he made the following statement (paraphrased):

Christians should not run for-profit businesses, as profit-seeking is inherently immoral.

At the end of the week, one of our professors of economics wrote a response to his sermon explaining the role of profit in a free market economy. Obviously, the economics of profit-seeking garners a lot of discussion. However, I would like to focus this article on a deeper issue—self-interest.

Is self-interest a virtue, or a vice?

The knee-jerk reaction is, that seeking after your own interest is a vice. After all, if the greatest of the three theological virtues is charity, then self-interest seems to run counter to morality. If we are seeking after our own good, then we must necessarily be neglecting others, right?

However, maybe the way we think about self-interest is wrong. If we’re are meant to live in community, as the classical philosophers tell us, then our own self-interest should include consideration of the well-being of the individuals with whom we commune. This would then imply that our exclusive conception of self-interest is twisted. C.S. Lewis noted it well in his essay The Weight of Glory:

…it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

The problem, then, seems to be not the fact that we seek our own self-interest, but the subject of that interest. In the Republic, Plato realized that if the soul was perfectly ordered, then the interest of the individual would complement, rather than detract from, the interests of those surrounding him. Our task, then, should be to maintain order in our souls so that we can prevent this virtue from turning vicious.