On selfishness

There was a conversation in IRC today about wanting and not wanting children and selfishness thereof. Why is that so many people equate selfishness with badness and apparently believe that people should not be selfish, or even that people could be somehow un-selfish?

Selfishness is not bad or good, it's human nature. Everything we do is selfish and will always be. We do things for ourselves. When we do thing for others those others tend to be an extention on ourselves in some way: either the people we know and care about, or the people we care about because we can identify with them somehow, or the people we care about in some other way. Every time we do something for somebody else it is because it makes us feel happier. Everything we ever do is, ultimately, for ourselves.

Corollary 1: Declaring selfishness to be a bad thing is a good way to declare everybody to be a bad person.

Corollary 2: Making people really believe that selfishness is a bad thing is a good way of making them always feel guilty.

All bad things are done out of some selfish motive, but that's not why they are bad. All the good things are also done out of some selfish motive, but that's not why they are good, either.