Reference reading
Selfishness
Creative freedom can become a name for somebody else’s unpaid inconvenience.
A persistent preference for one's own advantage or convenience over other people's legitimate claims.
Imagine this: A shared studio has a rotating task wheel. One participant has fixed the wheel so that the paintbrush always points toward their own work and the broom toward the colleague.
How the pattern works
Selfishness gives one’s advantage or convenience persistent priority over other people’s legitimate claims. In a creative household or collaboration, the rationale can sound principled: this work requires uninterrupted time, this talent needs freedom from administration, this temperament cannot endure routine. The claim may contain a real need while assigning everyone else’s needs less weight without adequate reason.
Fair arrangements need not divide every task equally. People have different capacities, commitments and resources, and freely offered support can be generous rather than exploitative. The question is whether the reasons give actual consideration to everyone’s legitimate claims, including the less glamorous work on which creative independence depends.
What it costs the work
Others inherit the interruptions, maintenance and emotional or practical labor that the exceptional person treats as beneath notice. The creative task becomes difficult to discuss honestly because asking for fairness is represented as hostility to art itself.
A distinction worth keeping
Greed pursues excessive gain; Selfishness can seek only a quiet afternoon at an unfair cost to someone else. Sloth avoids effort, whereas a selfish creator may work intensely. Callousness is indifference to suffering; selfish weighting can remain fully aware of others’ needs. Rest, disability, dependence and refusal of an unjust demand are not defects.
What a useful response can change
Make the actual work visible: preparation, cleanup, scheduling, correspondence and access as well as the finished artifact. A division cannot be assessed fairly if half its tasks disappear from the account.
Revisit the reasons for an unequal arrangement with the people who bear it. Consent and capacity can change; an emergency favor need not become a permanent entitlement.
A repair returns a fair share of responsibility or changes the undertaking to fit available resources. A grateful speech that preserves the same unfair priority may acknowledge the problem without correcting it.
Questions for reflection
- Whose uninterrupted time has made mine possible?
- Would the same reason justify a comparable claim from the other person?
Other perspectives
We have learned to recognize them as selfish, although we blame them not for the will which chooses to be selfish, but for a narrowness of interest which deliberately selects its experience within a limited sphere, and we say that they illustrate the danger of concentrating the mind on narrow and unprogressive issues.
Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Read the source
Addams links selfishness to a deliberately narrowed range of experience. The task wheel lets one person’s creative life count while the supporting labor disappears from view.
On questions of social morality, of duty to others, the opinion of the public, that is, of an overruling majority, though often wrong, is likely to be still oftener right; because on such questions they are only required to judge of their own interests; of the manner in which some mode of conduct, if allowed to be practised, would affect themselves.
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty · Read the source
Mill considers the position of those affected by conduct when forming a social judgment. His confidence in majorities is not adopted as a rule; affected people nevertheless have claims the convenient arrangement must hear.