Speaking of altruism and selfishness, one can hardly neglect to bring up the philosopher Ayn Rand. In one of her books, "The Virtue of Selfishness" the co-author of the book, Nathaniel Branden held a topic discussing on whether or not humanity can only do things that they 'want,' or 'choose' to do. He refutes the commonly held belief that people do indeed do this by claiming that people are confusing the words selfishness and egoism. He claims that if one is selfish, they will only perform acts that benefit themselves. Egoism, on the other hand states that people perform all actions because they 'want' to. In this manner, a selfish person would never engage in a behavior which would cause him harm, while an egoistic person could.
However, could this just be changing the words of the debate? Instead of saying selfishness versus altruism, and we now say egoism versus altruism, are we just changing words?
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