TheJournal of Value lnquiry 30:325-328 (June 1996) 9 1996 Kluwer AcademicPublishers. Printedin the Netherlands. Forum Zorba: Justifying ethical egoism KIM-CHONG CHONG Department of Philosophy, National University of Singapore, 10 Kent Ridge Crescent, Singapore 119260 In an essay published in this journal, "Ethical Egoism and the Moral Point of View,''11 discussed examples to show the intelligibility of egoism as an "ethi- cal" position. One example was Zorba. 2 Given harsh, nasty, and brutish con- ditions, and his experiences with the cruelty and injustices of which people are capable, Zorba comes to hold a normative position that "one ought al- ways and only to act in one's own interests." In a recent critique of my essay, Wim J. van der Steen3has argued that Zorba's position, though universalizable, fails to justify ethical egoism. He puts it this way: We are dealing with a universal principle that remains to be justified, or with a principle which, though justified, is non-universal because it is person-relative. Alternatively, Chong's line of reasoning could be taken to show, more sensibly, that acting along the lines prescribed by ethical egoism is justi- fied in circumstances of a particular kind (cf. the "background" mentioned by Chong). This would leave us with a thesis which is justified and uni- versal, but clearly less general than unqualified egoism as originally de- fined by Chong. Either way ethical egoism as an overarching doctrine remains to be jus- tiffed. Chong implicitly assumes, mistakenly so, that justifiability is pre- served under universalization.4 Van der Steen allows that Zorba's position is a universalizable one, but doubts its generality. This would not make it fit the definitions of ethical egoism I borrowed from Richard Brandt and Jesse Kalin? These are, respec- tively, (x) (y) (x ought to do y if and only ify maximizes x's utility); and (x) (y) (x ought to do y if and only if y is in x's overall self-interest). However, the problem as I stated it, was to make sense of"ethical" egoism, that is, to clarify how egoism may be a normative ethical position, and not a meta-ethi- cal theory providing an absurd re-definition of morality, such that, for exam-