Individualism

I keep talking to my classes about the choices we as a society have and about particular people (most obviously Jane Addams) who didn't believe their lives were worthwhile unless they had done something to make the world a better place. But I wonder if individualism has gone so far that my students don't really take it in; if they think about their lives only in terms of what they want. Do people vote on the basis of their own self-interest or some rather individual sense of who best matches their sense of right and wrong or do they have an image of the larger good, of where they want our society to go?