Gods and Monsters: The Scientific Method Applied to the Human Condition - Book II Read online

  Chapter 8:

  The Search of the good of the individuals and his relationship with the search of the social good

  Locke affirmed the naturalness of the experience of the senses, not distinguishing between human nature and structural reality historical, the which human nature he identified, correctly anyway, in the source of the research of happiness (1).

  Hume identified the human nature with the search of the useful and of the pleasant, as action generated by a feeling that he put in opposed to selfishness, affirming the virtues implicit in these sensations (2). From these considerations it emerges as the term “selfishness” has acquired a negative connotation, having acquired the meaning of absence of the social dimension.

  Adam Smith recognized that there may be an identification between the search for the good of the individual and social factors, although, he recognize there might be the development of an inferior “selfishness”, and destructive, toward society and also of the self (3): if it is prevents at the other an equal “selfishness” and if it is prevented at the itself subject the expression of their own sociality, that is the need of the relationship with others, definable, also, as objective egoism (namely not based on the subject in itself, but on the needs of the relationship with each other: that is, with the object).