Self-interest Sentence Examples

They brought to the support of that instrument "the areas of intercourse and wealth" (Libby), the influence of the commercial towns, the greater planters, the army officers, creditors and property-holders generally, - in short, of interests that had felt the evils of the weak government of the Confederation, - and alsc of some few true nationalists (few, because there was as yet no general national feeling), actuated by political principles of centralization independently of motives of expediency and self-interest.

From the outset, Washington's atomic program was driven by self-interest.

I would settle even for an appeal to rational self-interest.

Behavior is based on self-interest and motivated by who can help children get what they want or who is hindering that process.

Much of Shaftesbury's career, increasingly so as it came near its close, is incapable of defence; but it has escaped most of his critics that his life up to the Restoration, apparently full of inconsistencies, was evidently guided by one leading principle, the determination to uphold the supremacy of parliament, a principle which, however obscured by self-interest, appears also to have underlain his whole political career.

Motives of self-interest may have lurked in them - otherworldly motives of buying salvation for a little price, or worldly motives of achieving riches and acquiring lands.

On the whole, his moral attitude is cynical, and he is inclined to regard self-interest as the best criterion.

This he modifies by explaining that self-interest is based on the relationships of life; a man needs money for the sake of his children, his friends and the state whose general prosperity depends on the wealth of its citizens.

For this reason their interest in ethical speculations was all the keener; their great thinkers were endlessly engaged in settling what the relation ought to be between duty and self-interest.

From the Greek sophists they borrowed ingenious ways of playing off one duty against another, or duty in general against self-interest - leaving the doubter in the alternative of neglecting the one and being a knave, or neglecting the other and being a fool.

By this principle Ferguson endeavours to reconcile all moral systems. With Hobbes and Hume he admits the power of self-interest or utility, and makes it enter into morals as the law of self-preservation.

The act linked the land-owning class in Canada and the church by ties of self-interest to the British cause.

The natural instinct of animated life, to which man also is originally subject, is self-preservation and self-interest.

Self-interest led his ministers to make serious preparations to meet the attacks of Antiochus III.

But if individuals might be guided by self-interest, why should that privilege be denied to associations of men?

His phlegmatic and persistent egotism, his sacrifice of truth and honour to self-interest, his acquiescence in the worst conditions of the world, if only he could use them for his own advantage, combined with the glaring discord between his opinions and his practice, form a character which would be contemptible in our eyes were it not so sinister.

The fire of human enthusiasm burnt low in the 18th century, and theologians shared the general conviction that self-interest was the ruling principle of men's conduct.

Enlightened self-interest was doubtless combined with honest conviction in ranking him among the followers of Pitt.

But the same texts which draw the line between the two classes make it clear that there were no other guarantees to the maintenance of the rights of the superior rustics than the moral sense and the self-interest of their masters.

Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Abraham Lincoln, that slavery was to be overthrown under the constitution and in the Union, by forbidding its growth and trusting to an awakened conscience, enforced by an enlightened self-interest.

His judgments may be held with greater confidence, which is an intellectual advantage; and, standing in his mind not so much an edifice as a natural growth, they cannot be so readily abandoned at the call of ease or self-interest.

But the directors were driven by self-interest to new adventures abroad.

Objections, both general and special, might be urged by a Hobbist against these modes of formulating man's natural pursuit of self-interest; but the serious controversy between Hobbism and modern Platonism related not to such principles as these, but to others which demand from the individual a (real or apparent) sacrifice for his fellows.

We have seen that in the latter's system the " moral sense " is not absolutely required, or at least is necessary only as a substitute for enlightened self-regard; since if the harmony between prudence and virtue, self-regarding and social impulses, is complete, mere self-interest will prompt a duly enlightened mind to maintain precisely that " balance " of affections in which goodness consists.

Butler does not deny this, so far as mere claim to authority is concerned; 1 but he maintains that, the dictates of conscience being clear and certain, while the calculations of self-interest lead to merely probable conclusions, it can never be practically reasonable to disobey the former, even apart from any proof which religion may furnish of the absolute coincidence of the two in a future life.

It was not his place, as a practical philanthropist, to dwell on the defects in this coincidence; 2 and since what men generally expect from a moralist is a completely 1 This list gives twelve out of the fourteen classes in which Bentham arranges the springs of action, omitting the religious sanction (mentioned afterwards), and the pleasures and pains of self-interest, which include all the other classes except sympathy and antipathy.

He shows elaborately how the pleasures and pains of " imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense " are developed out of the elementary pleasures and pains of sensation; by the coalescence into really complex but apparently single ideas of the " miniatures " or faint feelings which the repetition of sensations contemporaneously or in immediate succession tends to produce in cohering groups.

On the contrary, he tries to prove elaborately that they (as well as the pleasures of imagination, ambition, self-interest) cannot be made an object of primary pursuit without a loss of happiness on the whole - one of his arguments being that these pleasures occur earlier in time, and " that which is prior in the order of nature is always less perfect than that which is posterior."

A struggle, motived by self-interest, no doubt; but a struggle, too, of opposing principles.

He far exceeded all other statesmen in the art of drawing together, without the seduction of self-interest, the concurrence and co-operation of various dispositions and abilities of men, whom he assimilated to his character and associated in his labours."

The Lord is to be approached by faith (bhakti) - dis- interested devotion and surrender of self in perfect love, and all actions are to be purified of self-interest in contemplation of Him.

It is, he believes, not altruism but self-interest that will facilitate change.

Should we assume that people are motivated by altruism or self-interest?

What you see in Job is self-interest, not true holiness.

Hain is a shining example of youthful idealism being replaced by cynical self interest in later life.

Even more importantly, deep conflicts of value and perceived self-interest are at stake.

It has seen that the UK can gain from a safer world, not just from promoting a narrow national self-interest.

Like the false shepherd, the hireling has self-interest.

Capitalism as an ideology is the belief that if everyone pursues self-interest, the outcome will be common good.

Debate motivated by self-interest is better than no debate at all.

He did so because party unity was essential if he were to remain prime minister, but he was not actuated by mere self-interest.

In fact, " enlightened self-interest " is, I would argue, the goal to which modern British foreign policy must be directed.

In the narrow self-interest of the Computer Laboratory the sooner Plot C is complete the better.

Again, these two countries ' policies have always been based on mutual self-interest.

Certainly, most economic analysis is based on the self-interest hypothesis, which assumes that all people are exclusively motivated by their material self-interest.

Although this argument has the support of such great names as Butler and Kant, yet it will repel many minds as an appeal to the motive of self-interest.

Pinto and some of the Jesuit biographers, who have pilloried Ataide as actuated solely by malice and self-interest.

Justice (e.g.) is regarded by Mill as essentially resentment moralized by enlarged sympathy and intelligent self-interest; what we mean by injustice is harm done to an assignable individual by a breach of some rule for which we desire the violator to be punished, for the sake both of the person injured and of society at large, including ourselves.

Besides the plunderers, very various people, some drawn by curiosity, some by official duties, some by self-interest--house owners, clergy, officials of all kinds, tradesmen, artisans, and peasants--streamed into Moscow as blood flows to the heart.

There 's a strong amount of self-interest involved in the voting patterns of the professions.

From the outset, Washington 's atomic program was driven by self-interest.

Naked self-interest soon focused the discussion on the question will it be us?

All we do leads back to the self-interest of the company.

It may well be that defining thinking skills in a narrow way often reflects the experience and self-interest of a particular social group.

In other circumstances the self-interest of the parties would normally operate to ensure transactions take place on an arm 's length basis.

Although the system has expanded far beyond the university, the self-interest of Net users perpetuates this hi-tech gift economy.

The ultimatum game demonstrates that people will always make choices according to their self-interest.

Marketisation undermines co-operation and trust and promotes competition and vested self-interest in their place.

The issue of bias and self-interest does not weaken the credibility of these witnesses ' testimony, it strengthens it.

Dr. Zemel, the head researcher of this particular clinical trial, has been criticized for the outcome connecting reduction in body weight with dairy products because the questionable corporate self-interest of the Dairy Council.

The restraints of religion were to be replaced by an education developing an enlightened self-interest.