The backlash against China's high-speed train programme after last year's accident at Wenzhou, which provoked criticism and anger of a sort that Chinese leaders fear, would be dwarfed by what could be expected from a nuclear accident.A sincerely self-interested desire to avoid accidents, though, will not necessarily translate into a model regulatory infrastructure.
Later on in the tradition, Dai Zhen defended the legitimacy of self-interested desire as long as it is tempered by a proper concern for others (see Tiwald, 2011a; and section 2.8).
She believes that a certain type of thing morally ought to be done (and she is motivated to do that), but she also has a self-interested desire to perform an action of a type that is, in the circumstances, incompatible with her doing what she believes she ought to do.
Even for an immoralist, there is room for a clash between motivations stemming from self-interested desire and those stemming from other sentiments (admiration of one's heroes, for instance) — for a clash between the goods I would like to obtain and the sort of person I would like to be.
The self-interested desires to experience pleasure and to avoid pain have played an especially prominent role in the debate, since one version of egoism, often called hedonism, maintains that these are our only ultimate desires.
Whereas he elsewhere characterizes our moral commitment as vulnerable to self-interested desires, here he adds as well that our confrontation with "all the evils of poverty, illness, and untimely death" (5:452), could lead to moral despair.
Beau Willimon describes him as "remorselessly self-interested, desiring power for power's sake".
However, her self-interested desires do not amount to anything approaching a phobia against donating.
She feels these contra-moral self-interested desires with enough strength that it finally takes her considerable effort to write out her check" (p. 91).
Sorensen asks us to imagine a third agent, Lori, who performs the same kind of donation for the same reasons, but who exerts an amount of effort intermediate between that exerted by Janette and Nigel: "Lori feels a variety of self-interested desires to keep the money or spend it on something for herself.
