Selfishness is typically associated with amoral, predatory behavior. It’s a word used to describe people like Bernard Madoff or Attila the Hun. Selflessness or altruism is by contrast generally celebrated and aligned with friendship and love. In this talk, Peter Schwartz, ARI Distinguished Fellow, offers a radically different view of selfishness and altruism.

Schwartz argues that the rational egoist is committed to moral principles and lives an honest, productive and self-respecting life. He refutes the ethics of self-sacrifice and shows that friendship and love are acts, not of self-sacrifice, but of self-interest. This talk, further, explains why you have a moral right to exist for your own sake, rather than a moral duty to serve the needs of others.

Recorded at the Hilton Orange County/Costa Mesa in Costa Mesa, California, on June 17, 2015.

Previous talks in this series:

• Amanda Maxham — Why GMOs Are Good [Video]
• Rituparna Basu — Fifty Years Later: The Impossible Math of Medicare [Video]
• Yaron Brook — Free Speech and The Battle for Western Culture [Video]
• Onkar Ghate — Religion vs. Freedom [Video]
• Steve Simpson — Cronyism, Corruption and Government Power [Video]
• Don Watkins — End the Debt Draft: How the Welfare State Is Exploiting Millennials [Video]
• Keith Lockitch — The Sacred Self: Ayn Rand On Abortion, Foreign Policy and Environmentalism [Video]

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