Intrinsic selfishness

ARE HUMANS INTRINSICALLY SELFISH? In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Yochai Benkler attempts to debunk the idea that humans are naturally selfish in their dealings with each other. Certainly with regard to empathy, science seems to disagree to some extent. "If we simply say the word empathy, it sounds mushy. If a scientist like Tania Singer shows, using fMRI scans, that women’s brains light up in three places when they get electric shocks, and that when their partners are shocked, their brains light up in two of the same three places, we understand empathy not as a hard-to-define feeling but as something that people experience in a physical sense." Although I understand the concept of empathy, this still fails to convince me that we are not driven and motivated by the desire to accomplish things for ourselves. We prefer not to make a point of this, or incorporate it in our political or social rhetoric, because it's socially repulsive; it's not something particularly palatable in most settings. I get their point, but I don't know that I agree.