If longing to be happy is selfish, then the entire population of earth are very selfish. There is no reason to believe trying to happy is selfish.
In other words, one must be unselfish only at one's convenience. But whether a quality is a virtue or not ought not to depend on how many people possess it, or how easy or difficult it is to acquire it.
It is self serving, but unless it is at the expense of someone else's well being then I don't think that it's really selfish. Both partners give each other happiness in this case, and hopefully nobody has suffered because of it.
I think being happy, or at the very least not miserable, is often a pre-requisite for effectively helping others. If you are drowning in the depths of depression you can't be there for a friend who needs you; you just don't have the reserves to give part of yourself to them. So trying to find personal happiness may be necessary for some altruistic and charitable deeds to be carried out, and this spreads the positivity through the people you help, onto people they may come to the aid of later.
To spread the love, maybe you have to have some within you first? Also I'm aware that altruistic actions often make us feel all warm and contented inside, meaning that they are not truly selfless acts at all, they also help us feel happy. Might have to ask that question... "Is any action truly altruistic?"
But any action (or indeed inaction) can be interpreted as harming someone in some way. If I bought the last sandwich at a bakery, and as I was leaving, a homeless man accused me of depriving him of food, would I be obliged to give the sandwich to him? What if there was other food at the bakery that he could afford? What if the man accusing me was well off? What if I was starving?
If you saw a man drowning, would you be morally obliged to help him, even if you risked dying?
It is clear that those who derive a sense of happiness from helping others are not truly being "selfless". And people who help others because they want to extort gratitude from them (like Luzhin in Crime and Punishment) are contemptible.
But what would one say of someone who helps others and is unhappy for it? Maybe I do not want to part with my money, but I give it to charity under duress, or because I have a vague idea that that is what is expected of me. Surely I would not be considered virtuous for that?
And could you hold, as Mother Teresa did, that suffering is a virtue? Could you hold, as Mahatma Gandhi did, that poverty is a virtue? Certainly, if sacrifice be considered noble, a world without poverty and suffering would have no need for sacrifice, and unselfish people would consequently no longer be virtuous for being unselfish.
"So trying to find personal happiness may be necessary for some altruistic and charitable deeds to be carried out, and this spreads the positivity through the people you help, onto people they may come to the aid of later."
If this is suggesting that one ought to be happy in order to help others, then one could justify any amount of selfishness by claiming that one was pursuing happiness only in order to be able to help others. A billionaire could claim that he has amassed a vast fortune only because he wanted to give something to charity. And that would make him virtuous.
The virtue of being selfless, it would seem, lies in being miserable and helping others in spite of it. A world filled with virtuous people would be one in which everyone helps everyone else without pursuing his personal interests. That is why you find people inveighing against acquiring wealth, and against everything that a wealthy person does with his own money, including giving it to charity (maybe he doesn't have the right eleemosynary spirit, or maybe he doesn't give as much as he can "afford" to give).
Observe that a virtuous person is supposed to give up everything but what he needs (and only because he would not be able to be altruistic to the best of his ability otherwise) in order to fulfill others' wants (which include their needs). In other words, a virtuous man must perforce be surrounded by vicious people, for it is only they who want more than they need.
But one must have in order to give. So a virtuous man must pursue things beyond his needs in order to be virtuous. It seems that a world in which every man pursues his own self-interests would achieve the same theoretical end in a much simpler way. After all, who but me would know what I want?
Would I be obliged to accept a virtuous person's charity with gratitude, even if I knew that what he offered was not something I needed or wanted? Would it be selfish to reject his charity on the ground that I was too proud to seek what I wanted except by my own effort?
But a virtuous man cannot be virtuous unless he gives, and it is only a vicious man who accepts. Thus we reach the same conclusion: that the virtuous cannot exist without the vicious. Vice is necessary.
It depends on your definition of happiness. If happiness means getting more possessions and money, or getting drunk every day, then yes, it is selfish. But real happiness comes when you do for others, not the self. Happiness grows by making others happy. In this case it is not selfish, since one's main concern is to make others happy, then their own happiness just grows naturally, not through seeking it through attachments or cravings.
What, then, is the kind of happiness one is called upon to give others? Is it virtuous, for instance, to help an alcoholic get drunk, if that is what he truly wants? Or would one want to give him the more virtuous type of happiness, and say that it is virtuous to help others help others (and so on, ad infinitum), regardless of what that person wants? Maybe the alcoholic truly just wants to get drunk, and one is forcibly teaching him that he can be happy only through helping others. One will have made him unhappy.
Finally, consider what happens if a virtuous man is put on the receiving end of another virtuous man's kindness. Since he is a virtuous man who does not pursue his own self-interests or his own happiness (by definition), he must reject the other virtuous man's offers of kindness. By doing so, he prevents the other virtuous man from performing virtuous deeds. The virtuous man seeks to prevent others being virtuous.
In other words, virtue seeks to punish virtue and reward vice.
(The author was only half trolling.)
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