self-servingness en · NOUN
Etymology
From self-serving + -ness. First use appears c. 1915. See cite below.
Meanings
-
(uncountable) The state of someone or something being self-serving.
Reducing it then to its proper level of a statement and no more, and annexing to it its self-appearing quality of self-servingness, and its incompetency to conclude one not served by it and a stranger to it, for aught that is shown, becomes clear, as we think.
1915, Ohio. Circuit Court, Vinton Randall Shepard (editor), Ohio Appellate and Circuit Court Reports, volume 23, page 5:The fact is that it's impossible to write about India without confronting head-on the narrowness and self-servingness of some of our lingering colonial assumptions about the nature of Indian society.
1982, Robert Bohm, Notes on India, page 3:Rather, she'd be exposed to a mixture of bluster, scapegoating, rationalization, self-servingness, face-saving, self-delusion, self-pity, and outright lie.
1987, John Wheatcroft, The Beholder's Eye, page 120:Goleman speculates about what evolutionary survival advantage the self-servingness and hence (implicitly and necessarily) self-deceptiveness of our beliefs might have, besides making life more fun and less scary.
2013, Heidi M. Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself, An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will:Sometimes the work of internal affairs divisions is compromised by their own corruption and self-servingness, thus feeding the very cynicism that is destructive of a genuinely professional service: Who watches those who watch the watchers?
1996, John Kleinig, The Ethics of Policing, page 224:discounting the self-servingness of his talk and the general edginess and uncertainty that must have accompanied the months before In Search of Excellence was in print, sold millions of copies , moved him out of that office into bigger ones, sent him traveling as one of America's highest-paid speakers on the lecture circuit
1986, Louise Bernikow, Alone in America, The Search for Companionship, page 158:
Synonyms
egomism · egoism · self-interestedness · self-servingness · self-centeredness · me-firstism · self-absorption · self-obsession · selfishness · solipsism · porkishness · philauty · egocentricity · self-centeredness · suicism · interestedness · self-obsession · selfhood · self-interestedness · hoggery