People do want to benefit themselves, but nobody wants to thinks of themselves as the bad guy either. In the simplest case, they invent a justification where their actions are actually positive or they're a victim, in more complex cases they tell themselves they're doing something for an innocuous reason even though there is a huge moral hazard and self-interest ends up winning.
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Thats a misapplication of the aphorism. People don't start off trying to do wrong, they start off trying to benefit themselves.
And an ignorant, unstructured, or illegal approach to benefiting yourself often hurts other people.
People do want to benefit themselves, but nobody wants to thinks of themselves as the bad guy either. In the simplest case, they invent a justification where their actions are actually positive or they're a victim, in more complex cases they tell themselves they're doing something for an innocuous reason even though there is a huge moral hazard and self-interest ends up winning.