Reference reading
Selfishness
Giving one’s own convenience an unfair first claim on the shared undertaking.
A persistent preference for one's own advantage or convenience over other people's legitimate claims.
Imagine this: Before a shared break, one colleague gathers every chair cushion into a splendid tower on their own seat.
How the pattern works
The problem with the cushion tower is not that comfort is undesirable. Every person using the room has a similar modest interest. Selfishness gives one person’s interest an automatic priority without supplying a reason others could reasonably accept. The person may fully notice the bare chairs and still regard the arrangement as satisfactory.
In working life the resource may be quieter than a cushion: the convenient shift, the credit for a joint result, an uninterrupted afternoon or permission to leave the tedious finishing work. The pattern becomes visible in who must keep adjusting. A compromise repeatedly means that somebody else absorbs the inconvenience, while the favored person describes their own need as the natural starting point.
What it costs the work
An undertaking becomes harder to share when its burdens are predictable and its benefits are privately claimed. Colleagues may stop volunteering useful help because help has become an invitation to be taken for granted. The loss is not simply goodwill; the work loses contributions that depended on reasonable reciprocity.
A distinction worth keeping
Selfishness concerns the weighting of interests. Greed centers on acquiring more; Callousness on indifference to another’s suffering. A person can recognize someone’s discomfort and still give their own minor convenience an unjustified priority. Equally, protecting time, refusing an unfair demand or attending to a serious personal need is not selfish merely because an employer would prefer a different answer.
What a useful response can change
An arrangement can be described from every affected position: what each person receives, what each gives up and which differences justify unequal treatment. Equal treatment is not always fair, but unexplained preference is not a reason.
A person who has quietly taken an extra share can restore the share before asking to be understood. Explaining why the convenient arrangement developed is useful; treating that explanation as an entitlement continues it.
Shared work can make recurring burdens explicit rather than depend on whoever is least willing to complain. A visible rotation or a genuinely negotiated exception gives people something firmer than an appeal to generosity.
Questions for reflection
- Whose adjustment has become invisible because it happens so regularly?
- Would I accept the same reason if another person received the advantage?
Other perspectives
If I ought not to go to my group feeling that I must give up my own ideas in order to accept the opinions of others, neither ought I to go to force my ideas upon others.
Mary Parker Follett · The New State · Read the source
In Follett’s account of a group, contribution requires neither surrendering one’s judgment nor imposing it. Cooperation needs room for personal interests without giving one participant automatic precedence.
To be held to rigid rules of justice for the sake of others, develops the feelings and capacities which have the good of others for their object.
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source
Mill connects concern for others with the development of capacities that purely private convenience leaves unused. This concerns fair obligations, not a demand that a worker meet every request.