hat they are exceptional, peculiar, entitled to
pre-eminence--this is virtually equivalent to your original
proposition. The respect in which your interests seem different from
all others either enters into your definition of interest, in which
case it becomes general; or it is some adventitious circumstance that
does not belong to your interests as such, some accident of proximity
which may have psychological or instrumental importance, but cannot
rightly affect your judgment of good. For goodness lies in {61} the
objective bearing of your action on such things as interests; precisely
as the diagonal is a line connecting the vertices of opposite angles in
a square, independently of all circumstances that do not affect the
generic character of the square.

In the second place, you may affirm that _for you there are no
interests but your own_. But this is an equivocal proposition. It may
mean that _in your opinion_ there are none, in which case you admit the
probable falsity of your judgment through contrasting it with the
consensus of opinion; through attributing it to your narrowness and
false perspective. Your offering it as your opinion gives the
proposition at best a tentative form; the question of its truth remains
to be adjudicated. I need only present other interests answering your
description of an interest to prove you mistaken. And if you were to
generalize your proposition and say that each man thinks his own
interests the only interests, you would be doubly wrong, in that the
generalization would be unwarranted, and the opinion imputed to each
man false.

Or, your claim that for you there are no interests but your own, might
be taken to mean that in some sense you must confine your endeavors to
the fulfilment of your own interests. Otherwise, you may argue, the
practical situation would {62} reach a dead-lock, a state of hopeless
confusion in which each individual neglected his own proper affairs for
the sake of those he had neither the means nor the competence to serve.
Now this is indisputably true, but it is not egoism. The judgment that
each individual must labor where he may do so most effectively, that he
must assume not only a general responsibility for all interests
affected by his action, but also a special responsibility for those
with whose direct execution he is charged, is an impartial judgment.
It expresses a broad and intelligent view of the total situation. In
the fable of the fox