#unselfishness

3:5.7 (51.6) 2. Is altruism—service of one’s fellows—desirable? Then must life experience provide for encountering situations of social inequality.

3:5.8 (51.7) 3. Is hope—the grandeur of trust—desirable? Then human existence must constantly be confronted with insecurities and recurrent uncertainties.

3:5.9 (51.8) 4. Is faith—the supreme assertion of human thought—desirable? Then must the mind of man find itself in that troublesome predicament where it ever knows less than it can believe.

3:5.10 (51.9) 5. Is the love of truth and the willingness to go wherever it leads, desirable? Then must man grow up in a world where error is present and falsehood always possible.

3:5.11 (51.10) 6. Is idealism—the approaching concept of the divine—desirable? Then must man struggle in an environment of relative goodness and beauty, surroundings stimulative of the irrepressible reach for better things.

3:5.12 (51.11) 7. Is loyalty—devotion to highest duty—desirable? Then must man carry on amid the possibilities of betrayal and desertion. The valor of devotion to duty consists in the implied danger of default.

3:5.13 (51.12) 8. Is unselfishness—the spirit of self-forgetfulness—desirable? Then must mortal man live face to face with the incessant clamoring of an inescapable self for recognition and honor. Man could not dynamically choose the divine life if there were no self-life to forsake. Man could never lay saving hold on righteousness if there were no potential evil to exalt and differentiate the good by contrast.

[Unselfishness] just is not a virtue. Self-regarding action may be virtuous: for example, it is likely to be virtuous to expand one's own capacities of knowledge and appreciation even when the chance of using these capacities for the direct benefit of one's fellows appears slight. Contrariwise, unselfish, self-sacrificing action is often vicious. People have shown the greatest neglect of self, endurance of sufferings, heroism in the face of death, in the vilest of causes: like the young Nazi bleeding to death at the post of duty, his duty being the machine-gunning of helpless refugees. . . . Devotion to a cause is often mere wickedness, and the degree to which the devotee is prepared to sacrifice himself and endure suffering is merely an index of the hellish intensity of his malice. Devotion to an individual, too, can be mere filth and poison; a little experience of life is enough to show cases of a mutual love that is a living death; two people clawing and rending each other, like two cats whom a cruel boy has tied by the tails together and hung over a clothes line.

- Peter Geach, from The Virtues (Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 82 - 83. His summary from his analytical table of contents: