> I personally don't consider it a dishonorable type of selfishness.
I think the idea is that there are some advantages that aren't considered good for society. For some historical examples: "regardless of your potential or the quality of your work, you were born to a nobleman/peasant so you'll be a nobleman/peasant". For a more modern example: "regardless of your potential or the quality of your work, you were born in country X so we will erect barriers to prevent you from reaching your productivity potential".
By contrast, "you have an advantage because you are much more productive at this task than that guy[0]" is an advantage that's decidedly not arbitrary, since choosing you means less wasted potential and more wealth for society at large. This is the kind of advantage that can't really be removed without ending up in some sort of Harrison Bergeron type situation, where you pull high-achievers down instead of removing unnecessary impediments to low-achievers (thus increasing total achievement).
The distinction between these two types of advantages should be obvious: fostering the "unfair" advantages benefits nobody but the people being arbitrarily protected, and allowing the "fair" ones is good for pretty much everyone.
> This is simple self-preservation.
We're not monkeys. Presumably we should have the ability to understand whether an advantage is just or not. To use a dramatic example: by your stated logic, it's not "dishonorable" to fight for segregation or for limiting opportunity based on race (if one is in the favored race). Do you really believe that, or is there some unexpressed nuance in your view that would somehow exclude the race-based example but not the country-of-birth example?
[0]Yes, I realize that this is dependent on similarly arbitrary factors like who you were born to (and thus what your education was like), but that's an upstream problem.
If you find a group of peasants better than local peasants at task X you can import them and the locals will either move to do task X elsewhere, accept lower salaries or switch to task Y.
Task Y can pay less and make a lot of pissed off cynics. Task Y may be harmful to society at large, like crime or Wall St quant voodoo. Wall St attracts quants because A students were promised respectable jobs, but because of STEM oversupply or whatever, many of those jobs pay 30K.
So you can't force one narrow interest, superior performance at task X, without consequences. Everything must be done in moderation, even it means inferior quality X. Task Y may destroy all the productivity gains of task X, like middle management, crashing economy for 3 years, etc.
True, but we are often driven by biological influences that cannot altogether be considered "reason".
>> it's not "dishonorable" to fight for segregation or for limiting opportunity based on race
Fighting for advantages, being the disadvantaged, is simply the other side of the coin, behaviorally, from the advantaged holding on to their advantages.
I think the idea is that there are some advantages that aren't considered good for society. For some historical examples: "regardless of your potential or the quality of your work, you were born to a nobleman/peasant so you'll be a nobleman/peasant". For a more modern example: "regardless of your potential or the quality of your work, you were born in country X so we will erect barriers to prevent you from reaching your productivity potential".
By contrast, "you have an advantage because you are much more productive at this task than that guy[0]" is an advantage that's decidedly not arbitrary, since choosing you means less wasted potential and more wealth for society at large. This is the kind of advantage that can't really be removed without ending up in some sort of Harrison Bergeron type situation, where you pull high-achievers down instead of removing unnecessary impediments to low-achievers (thus increasing total achievement).
The distinction between these two types of advantages should be obvious: fostering the "unfair" advantages benefits nobody but the people being arbitrarily protected, and allowing the "fair" ones is good for pretty much everyone.
> This is simple self-preservation.
We're not monkeys. Presumably we should have the ability to understand whether an advantage is just or not. To use a dramatic example: by your stated logic, it's not "dishonorable" to fight for segregation or for limiting opportunity based on race (if one is in the favored race). Do you really believe that, or is there some unexpressed nuance in your view that would somehow exclude the race-based example but not the country-of-birth example?
[0]Yes, I realize that this is dependent on similarly arbitrary factors like who you were born to (and thus what your education was like), but that's an upstream problem.