thumb|upright|An appeal to self-interest during World War II Self-interest generally refers to a focus on the needs or desires (interests) of one's self. Most times, actions that display self-interest are often performed without conscious knowing. A number of philosophical, psychological, and economic theories examine the role of self-interest in motivating human action. Individuals may have a self-serving bias towards their self-interest.
thumb|upright|An appeal to self-interest during World War II Self-interest generally refers to a focus on the needs or desires (interests) of one's self. Most times, actions that display self-interest are often performed without conscious knowing. A number of philosophical, psychological, and economic theories examine the role of self-interest in motivating human action. Individuals may have a self-serving bias towards their self-interest.
==In philosophy== Philosophical concepts concerned with self-interest include: Enlightened self-interest, a philosophy which states that acting to further the interests of others also serves one's own self-interest. Ethical egoism, the ethical position that moral agents ought to do what is in their own self-interest. Hedonism, the school of ethics which argues that pleasure is the only intrinsic good. Cyrenaics, the Aristippean pre-Socratic original. Epicureanism, a philosophical system related to hedonism. Individualism, a philosophy stressing the worth of individual selves. Rational egoism, the position that all rational actions are those done in one's self-interest.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).