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palladias comments on Beeminding Sin - Less Wrong
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My understanding of the Christian notion of sinful pride is that it's all about paying too much attention to yourself. If you spend your time thinking about how great you are, or how awful you are, that's Pride; if you admire something only because it's yours, or because it makes you feel good, that's Pride. (I think I got this way of thinking about it from C S Lewis; it may be partly his invention.)
A further generalization might say that the underlying failure mode is simply treating oneself differently from others, and that the complete absence of this would mean something like perfect altruism -- caring as much about any other person's welfare as about one's own. Of course that no longer seems to fit the term "pride" very well.
From C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce, the character who embodies Pride has this dialogue with an angel on the threshhold of Heaven:
You can be altruistic to others and still be prideful. One way I fall into it is preferring World A (where my suffering is greater, but I know that I have some responsibility for any respite I get) to World B (where I'm doing much better, but I'm not at all the cause of my good fortune). It's not bad to delight in using the talents you have and sharing them with others, but it is a problem for Christians to be possessive of those gifts or to need others to be dependent on you.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I didn't mean that the total absence of pride-in-this-sense is exactly the same thing as perfect altruism, only that the latter would be a consequence of the former.