РАЗУМНЫЙ ЭГОИЗМ ТЕОРИЯ

Reasonable Egoism, Theory of

A theory in ethics advanced by the Enlighteners of the 17th–18th centuries, based on the following principle: correctly understood private interest should coincide with social interest. In the ethics of Helvetius, Holbach, Diderot, Feuerbach the theory of reasonable egoism expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie in its struggle with ascetic religious morality and served as the ideological preparation for bourgeois revolutions. The Enlighteners proceeded from the possibility of a harmonious combination of private and social interests while preserving private property. In their view, the theory of reasonable egoism reflected the practice of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, free enterprise, private initiative, and their "social interest" was in fact the class interest of the bourgeois.

Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, and other Russian revolutionary democrats used the theory of reasonable egoism to justify the struggle of the toiling masses. In their ethics private interest as the motive of human behaviour was filled up with social content. They saw the significance of life and the criterion of man's action in unselfish service of the people, in their emancipation from the chains of serfdom, in the revolutionary transformation of reality in the name of the "popular good". Although the theory of reasonable egoism played a historically progressive role, it was metaphysical, for it appealed to man in general, to his abstract "eternal" nature.