Which crew members? I think they have very different motivations and thoughts about what they're doing.
Jayne, for example, is clearly motivated almost entirely by profit. It doesn't mean he doesn't have friends or ever do anything altruistic, but when he does, he kinda surprises even himself.
Book, on the other hand, doesn't condone the crimes and draws from his more spiritual outlook. He does what he does to help people. Sometimes he gets involved (War Stories), but it's clearly not for the cash. He's about prophet, not profit.
Then there are "grey area" characters like (anti)hero Mal. He has to keep his ship in the sky and his people paid/fed, not to mention trying to keep himself from starving, too. There's a pragmatic aspect here where he can't just rob from the rich and give it *all* to the poor. Of course, we also see that he will make a bad business decision to uphold what he considers moral imperatives (The Train Job).
All this is to say that the characters don't have one shared motivation, and often times they have multiple motivations or ideals that they're juggling. As others have said, they're complex characters and aren't as cut-and-dry as most TV land people.
If you want to boil it down, which is doing the writing a disservice, frankly, I'd say that they're mostly thinking of their actions as a "job" like any other - just trying to scrape by and doing what they can to survive. So, more selfish than "Robin Hood". But that's too simplistic for the show's cast of characters and their rich inner lives.
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