I think the real point is that the question here isn’t “Can someone do a truly altruistic act,” but rather “What is altruism?” Why is “self-interest” a dirty word? What is so dirty about it? The interest? The self? Sure selfishness is a vice, but is it such a vice that we have to run the other way screaming? Oh! Screaming — that’s a word that begins with s. Perhaps we should ban the letter s.
Of course! You are only motivated to do things that you are motivated to do. Duh. Literally, that is all that self and interest when put together refer to. The real question here is a lot harder to articulate — is everyone being selfish? Or, something like that, except we don’t really know what that means, do we? We already know that people only do things that they are somehow personally motivated to do, the question is how to separate “good” personal motivations from “bad” ones.
Taking it for granted, then, that selfishness is a vice, what all is entailed in selfishness? Is just anything you do that benefits you “selfish”? Of course not (blah blah blah). We hardly need to wax too philosophical to get that far, I think. But then, to really settle the matter of just where the vice begins is sufficiently philosophically vague that there are infinitely many borderline cases that must be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. So, to really nail it down “once and for all” is really quite impossible. Instead one just has to pick particular cases that are interesting for some reason to them and deal with them on a case-by-case basis.
