What did Ayn Rand do with this sorry mess?
First, she analyzed how far the concept selfishness had sunk in its common form—one that simply took the academic version to its logical conclusion. InThe Virtue of Selfishness she wrote:
The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word “selfishness” is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual “package-deal,” which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.
In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.
Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.
This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.
I cannot help commenting that the dictionary meaning Miss Rand quotes is the one the OED lists for self but did not include for selfishness. Her dictionary must have picked up a development in the latter concept missed by the OED.