Wisdom and Ethical Decision-Making
The Jewish sage Hillel famously said, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am only for myself what am 'I'? And if not now, when?"
In other words: You're a person with needs and desires like anybody else. It's healthy to take care of yourself. But ultimately you have no right to deprive others of their rights or the systems that sustain them. Every decision we make has both personal and social effects. We can't simply do whatever we want without considering its impact on ourselves and others around us, both in the short term and over time.
We learn these lessons in childhood. The first time children have the feeling that they "don't have enough" is when their parents' needs for food, shelter and attention conflict with what the children want to do or need to do. As we grow older, this conflict persists; but it's now a complex mixture of our own needs for food, shelter and playground time, the need of our society for efficient social organization and efficient economies, and our civic responsibilities as citizens. We also become more aware that we are part of this whole web: that we are part of a larger system that sustains us and gives us basic rights like life ("don't kill") and liberty ("don't get kidnapped").
I was interested in the tension between this learning about our own needs and rights as individuals and our responsibility for the system that sustains us because I thought I'd discovered something unexpected ("Heh? This is a bit counterintuitive..."), but what's more interesting isn't what I didn't find, it's why I found it.
It turns out that the lesson is almost universal. First, there are some cases where you can't (or shouldn't) take care of yourself at the expense of others ("slavery" or other forms of inequality). But generally we're pretty good at balancing out our own needs against those of others. The only really difficult cases come when we're really close to confronting this balance. For example:
Public health: A disease is spreading through your community. The cure is expensive and not immediately available. You can either pay the cost yourself or commit funds to the cure for future years; but if you delay, the disease will get worse and you'll have a higher bill later ("too much of a short-term benefit in exchange for too little of a long-term benefit"). This is easy if it's just you, but if it's your family too, that makes this extremely hard even under normal circumstances (assuming that they have enough to eat); you're going to have to choose between them and the cure. And if the disease spreads further, it's not like you can just avoid the whole area ("why would I move to a different house?").
Healthcare: You're in an accident that leaves you with crippling pain. Health insurance protects you from the expense of hospitalization (and other medical services), but it also gives you a large financial incentive to avoid filing a claim (which incurs even more costs and could trigger other charges). In some cases this is the only protection available to people who need an expensive cure like surgery; but most of us don't need that. In other cases we could pay the expense ourselves, or defer it; but if you delay your finances will suffer too.
This is hard because the decisions require balancing your own needs against everyone else's: making trade-offs among long-term benefits, short-term benefits and future costs. We don't have much patience for anything involving such tight balances (we tend to want things very quickly and not delay them at all), so we have to learn it as children: either the whole system collapses (or gets really expensive) before you understand what's happening, or you make a mess of it yourself ("You screwed up…").
The other reason this is hard is that you can't just do what you want without considering the consequences. You're part of this whole thing; and if all you do is take care of yourself, without helping others or the system at large, it's not sustainable. What we're good at doing is doing our own thing within a system, acknowledging that the system sustains us too ("It just works…").
So why did I say there's something unexpected? Because we have this instinctive connection between our individual needs (food, shelter) and our society (it provides food and shelter); but we don't have a similar instinctive reaction to how costs differ over time. Our instinctive reaction is to pay more for something in the future than pay for it now. But this can't be right: we can't have a society that costs more tomorrow than today and expect its citizens to continue paying for it through the future. So we're going to have to learn the balance between our individual needs now and demands on the system, in a way that we don't need to balance individual needs against society at large.
This takes a little while, though. Children aren't yet able to make hard choices like paying more money now than later; what they're good at is taking care of themselves first rather than delaying their own needs until everyone else's are taken care of (they look after themselves before anyone else).