I put to yall we have no moral obligation beyond taking care of ourselves and our own. That we owe the world and everybody else nothing and vice versa and i fear and loathe any person that says otherwise for it signals to me a gross sense of entitlement and sanctimony. Heres the more articulate too long to read for version [spoiler] Some say we have a moral obligation to help others and that not doing so is selfish and reprehensible even. Helping others is all well and good but whats wrong with being selfish? Nothing of course but not the way there using the word. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is usually a synonym of evil; the image conjured up is of one who actively pursues there own interests at the cost of others, who cares for no living being other than there own. Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: to concern with one’s own interests. Note this definition does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil by itself; nor does it tell us what constitutes ones’s actual interests. I think most will agree there is a fundamental moral difference between a thief and a salesmen. Both pursue there own intersts but one seeks to take from others while one seeks to exchange with others so while both could be called selfish only one is outright immoral. The immorality of the theif does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as his own interest (the possesions of others) and how he pursues them (theivery). So you see there is nothing inhearnatly wrong with being selfish but why has it been framed as such? As poles of good and evil are often taught in our postmodern world we are offered two choices: selfishness and altruism. Selfishness in this context again is negative and held to mean the sacrifice of others to self while Altruism—the sacrifice of self to others is positive. This thinking shackles us all irrevocably to one another and leaves us with nothing but a choice of pain: our own pain for the sake of others or pain inflicted upon others for the sake of ourselves. In short many of us have been forced to accept masochism as an ideal—under the idea that sadism is the only alternative. But this is simply not true and is a belief in which dependence and suffering are toted as fundamentals of life. In reality they dont have to be and our choice is not one of self-sacrifice or domination but of independence or dependence. So what moral obligation do we owe to our fellow men? None—except the obligation owed to ourselves. The obligation to mind ourselves, to be self sufficant, to ensure our problems do not become the problems of others, to deal with others by means of cooperation instead of coercien, to seek or desire nothing from them except relations as they care to enter of their own voluntary choice for our own self-interest and when they decide that our interests coincides with theirs but if they dont to let them go their own way and not to stear from our own. [/spoiler]