The Ayn Rand Principle and the Two Senses of Self

Is Ayn Rand correct when she declares that the pursuit of self-interest is the primary motivating force of our lives, and that a fulfilling sense of human ethics can be built around the honest recognition of the pursuit of self-interest?

First, there is the individual self, which might also be called the absolute self, or maybe the atomic self. In this sense, "self" refers to a single person. I am an individual self. You are an individual self. An individual self, or individual person, is clearly bounded in time and space. At the risk of over-generalization, it seems safe to say that every individual self has a name, a birthday, a functioning heart, a functioning brain. Every individual self was born with two parents, and will die. This is the first widely understood meaning of the commonly used term "self".

The second might be called the functional self, or the relative self, or perhaps (taking the chemistry metaphor further) the molecular self. We refer to this type of self constantly in our everyday lives. "How'd we do?", I ask a fellow Mets fan on the streets of Queens. Whenever you are in a transaction with another party, then the "self" relative to this transaction is the sum existence of the group of people who are doing this transaction with you. These selves, these wholes are ethically alive; they exist for themselves, as themselves.