self-servingness

From self-serving +‎ -ness. First use appears c. 1915. See cite below.

self-servingness (uncountable)

1. The state of someone or something being self-serving.
   • 1915, Ohio. Circuit Court, Vinton Randall Shepard (editor), Ohio Appellate and Circuit Court Reports‎^[1], volume 23, page 5:

     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.

   • 1982, Robert Bohm, Notes on India, page 3:

     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.

   • 1986, Louise Bernikow, Alone in America, The Search for Companionship, page 158:

     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

   • 1987, John Wheatcroft, The Beholder's Eye, page 120:

     Rather, she'd be exposed to a mixture of bluster, scapegoating, rationalization, self-servingness, face-saving, self-delusion, self-pity, and outright lie.

   • 1996, John Kleinig, The Ethics of Policing, page 224:

     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?

   • 2013, Heidi M. Ravven, The Self Beyond Itself, An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences, and the Myth of Free Will:

     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.