The “problem of altruism and egoism” constitutes one of moral philosophy's most enduring issues. A large part of the long-running dispute between Socrates and the Sophists, at least as recounted by Plato, can be characterised as an attempt to provide a satisfactorily altruistic response to the Sophists’ egoism. Similarly, at a much later period, both the philosophical egoism of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1678) and the more “worldly-wise” egoism of Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), presented the English language philosophers of the eighteenth century with their most stimulating challenge. What reply was to be made to the “sensible knave” of David Hume's Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), the easily imagined character who employs rational means to subvert moral obligations? Hume's sensible knave became the “rational egoist” of Henry Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (1874), a version revitalized a century later by Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (1984). In the context of economics and politics, the same difficulty takes the form of the free rider.

In the course of this long history, relatively little connection has been made explicitly between the philosophical problem of egoism and Christian ethics, although Christian moralists have often had something like philosophical egoism in their sights. The aim of this chapter is to make the connection explicit and to argue that a range of Christian virtues that philosophers have tended to discount, and even deride, can be shown to be pertinent to the problem's resolution.