Describe a specific situation in which human behavior might not be guided primarily by self-interest. Discuss what you think determines when human behavior is guided primarily by self-interest and when it is not.

If I am not for me, then who will be? A question asked by Rabbi Hillel years ago resounds to this day. Self-assertion is a survival imperative. In a state of feast or famine, we must call out for company to improve upon opportunity (whether meager or abundant) and evade starvation and worse. In that sense, self-interest motivates self-care and acts as a fundamental and final guarantee that the basic needs of all members of a community are met.

Yet if the proximate cause of human behavior is self-interest, the primary cause—the overarching cause that leads to sustained effort—is the enlightened interest. Few are so solitary as to make their decisions primarily for their own narrow good. Service and sacrifice each require self-abnegation, a willful choice to set aside our own needs for a time so that those whose needs are greater may find succor in our communal relation. We as human beings draw our sense of place and meaning from our service and sacrifice to larger communities, starting with the family and extending outward in ever greater circles of empathy. The most obvious case is of a father, a mother and a child. The mother and father sacrifice sleep and sanity to raise a youth to adulthood. For their sacrifice, the parents gain membership into an unbroken chain of descent and inheritance that every ancestor to date had devoted themselves to guarding. Life itself is a debt to generations past and generations-to-come.

The degree to which the primacy of decision-making rests on self-interest and self-assertion alone is a function of the size of a woman’s and man’s soul. Empathic self-extension into a greater community can extend the soul, leading to a deep devotion to the enlightened interest, whether as a subcomponent or superset of self-care.