An unselfish act is impossible?

[vhawk01]

You need to define your terms extremely carefully...and once you do, the discussion becomes pretty meaningless. I mean, it is tautologically true that you cannot do something that you want to do, using certain definitions of 'want.' It is also obvious that what you want to do is what is in your own self-interest, at least immediately, so yes, the conclusion is, you cannot do an unselfish thing.

But that isn't really what people generally mean when they say something is unselfish. It is the 'selfish gene' approach to selfishness, and not the 'selfish bastard' approach.