Were the founding fathers selfless or selfish?

Answer 1

It would depend on what you mean in the use of the words selfless and selfish. There is a misperception that pervades our society in regards to the word 'selfish' which is, in my opinion, quite intentional and it's motivation insidious. Most people immediate assume the word selfish to mean specifically 'irrational selfish' or a desire for that which is unearned. But a desire for that which one has earned is in no way irrational and is virtuous by contrast. Similarly too with the word 'greed' which falls prey to similar assumptions.

To say that the founding fathers were selfless in what they did is to misunderstand what they represented. They all benefited greatly from the new freedoms that resulted from the revolution and they all were wise enough to accurately predict that they would if such a revolution was successful. While many of them spoke of notions of 'sacrifice' and 'duty', their concepts of sacrifice entailed what they were each individually willing to risk to achieve each of their own desired ends. Each sought the ends based on their own motivations and virtually all of them would have resisted any notion that they were duty bound simply by virtue of their geography or current place of residence, the whims of their neighbors or the opinions of the other members of their society.

When commenting on 'duty', the context is quite consistently specific to the ideologies that these men revered and found virtuous. What they refer to in the Declaration of Independence as 'self evident truths', originally phrased in the rough draft as inherent in the 'laws of nature' and not even specific to the 'creator' as the final draft was later compromised to say to gain support of the religious members of the original continental congress.

In other words, these men perceived the notion of 'duty' in the context of their own individual principles and ideals. That if they 'held these truths to be self evident', to be inconsistent to the truths they each perceived around them would represent being inconsistent to reality (the laws of nature). In other words, this sense of duty is a sense of duty to following the truth as proscribed by evident reality according each man's own ability to perceive it. I don't know how you can describe such a concept other than as a (rationally) selfish notion.

While the states themselves sometimes instituted 'drafts' (conscription) based on local decision making during the Revolutionary war, the founders themselves did not seek to 'force' others to join them, and in fact, the war itself was fought by less than 11% of the population in the 13 colonies at the time and something like 70% of the population either abstained from supporting either side or in fact, supported the tory sentiments favorable to the English crown.

In the modern vernacular, if this amounted to a 'selflessness', the founders would have followed the whims of the majority and either abstained from a revolution entirely or sided with the Tories who outnumbered the actually active revolutionaries by a margin of about 3-to-1.

So selfless or selfish? I would say rationally selfish and virtuously so! They knew what was right in their own minds and hearts and acted consistently in regards to what they each, individually, knew to be true. And they all ultimately benefited as a result - as they predicted they would. Nothing could be more admirably selfish than that. The fact that others (predictably) benefited as well was just icing on the cake.