I believed this about a year ago and thought myself well and properly cynical.
Then it was pointed out to me that humanity is the minimally conscious and intelligent population such that, with some random genetic shuffling, you wind up with 2-5% capable of taking over the planet, and pulling the rest up with them.
I did mean the population, since of course we have rather significant variation in personal intelligence.
It's... hopeful to think of these qualities as evolved forms of intelligence - and that as we progress away from the "cusp of general intelligence" towards a more veteran status of intelligence, we will exhibit more of these qualities naturally.
I do not believe in altruism as a proper virtue. One can cause damage trying to help people. Intention is not good enough.
I also believed that humans are intrinsically self-interested even if human beings couldn't exist without other human beings. No man is an island but every man is an individual worthy of respect and dignity.
A father risks his life to save his daughter. Did he do it for his daughter? Or did he do it because it made him feel better? Or to avoid feeling terrible if he didn't act? Or because genetics compels him to take care of offspring sharing, on average, 50% of his genetic distinctiveness?
There may be a causal chain in these things, genetics -> love -> joy of helping, fear of loss from not helping -> acting on behalf of another.
But we lose much of our descriptive, analytic and predictive powers if we insist on only looking at what we think are the first movers in this chain. It's not productive to try and predict the weather on the basis of quantum theory; for practicality, we look at the system at higher levels of abstraction, with their own conceptual bundles, and yes, their own names.
So I can agree with you that, in the most facile and base senses, altruism is not a "proper virtue", and that humans are "intrinsically self-interested". But I can also say that some humans are more altruistic than others, and that some humans are less self-interested than others, because saying these things expresses more information than trying to describe how one human seems to have a causal chain whose self interest leads him to seem paradoxically less self-interested and more altruistic, etc. etc.
In other words, I'm talking about personality at the conceptual level of personality, using its generally accepted meanings of words, rather than pedantically hammering away at first principles of selfishness.
This satisfies both the commonplace meaning and the annoying but correct sophomoric objection.
It all adds up to normality.
> I also believed that humans are intrinsically self-interested even if human beings couldn't exist without other human beings. No man is an island but every man is an individual worthy of respect and dignity.
Agreed to an extent, and your last point is why a lot of altruists want to help the poor and downtrodden instead of just the individuals they happen to like. It's a straw-man form of "altruism" that treats individuals as scum.
You might say but they do not have consciousness. I do not think we actually know that. As for intelligent, they manage to survive and live in groups and communicate and have structures.
The question is: we are more intelligent that a monkey but perhaps not enough intelligent to not destroy our planet.
I've been pondering this issue lately independently. Humans are basically the minimally conscious and intelligent creatures that could take over a planet. We're barely able to hold together our current society, and there's no particular guarantee that we're even necessarily capable of that (see the vanityfair article about Greeks currently on the homepage and remember they're the same species as every other human). A relatively morbid thought in some ways, even though it isn't a guarantee that we can't go further yet.