Reference reading
Selfishness
Taking convenient automation while disregarding other people's legitimate claims to privacy, credit or fair treatment.
The summary is convenient. The private details belong to everyone else.
A persistent preference for one's own advantage or convenience over other people's legitimate claims.
A legitimate personal benefit is not itself selfishness.
How it takes hold
The summary saves a few minutes. The private information belongs to people never asked whether that saving justified its use. Convenience is counted closely while their claims remain outside the calculation.
Selfishness persistently prefers personal advantage or convenience over legitimate claims. Easy production does not make a displaced claim disappear.
Others bear exposure, correction work or lost credit so the user receives a tidy result. A real benefit can still depend on an unfair distribution of burdens.
Finding the distinction
Illustrative situation: private correspondence would simplify a personal summary.
Too selfish: available material is used without regard for others' claims.
Fitting: purpose, permission and alternatives are considered.
Overcorrection: every personal convenience is suspect.
Greed centers excessive acquisition; selfishness can protect a tiny convenience. Callousness disregards suffering, while selfishness can acknowledge a concern but give it unjustifiably little weight.
Personal benefits are legitimate. Purpose, consent, alternatives and actual claims matter.
Counterfeit of Frugality: A convenient summary is celebrated as economy while other people's privacy bears its cost. Genuine Frugality considers fitting use across the actual undertaking.
A response that restores something
A fair account includes what the convenient action requires: information, labor, attention or surrender of a boundary. It may reveal a less intrusive alternative.
Permission, limited material or another process can preserve both useful work and the other person's claim.
Fairness does not demand unlimited sacrifice. It refuses automatic priority for whichever convenience happens to be one's own.
Other perspectives
consuming the time and energy of another adult
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics
Addams examines hidden costs of service, apt to convenience assembled from other people's work or information.
the qualities most useful to others
Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Smith identifies a positive outward orientation; the useful account asks whose interests the convenient result serves.
Read and compare
Whose legitimate claim is missing from this solution?
Fairness · Benevolence · Integrity
These are constructive virtue readings, not a list of automatic opposites. This reference article does not score character or assign a vice to its reader.