"Are humans selfish?" I can't make sense of this question

One reason why you can’t make sense might be your definition of selfishness:

Quoting Skalidris

the behavior of an individual who takes actions affecting people with whom they have limited or inconsistent emotional resonance, or intentionally choose to ignore it

Not having emotional resonance, or even intentionally ignoring it, does not imply being selfish. I can tell you that in the past I helped a person who was in a very bad situation, and I spent a lot of energy and time. After that, a friend of mine asked me what I felt after this action. I felt embarassed, because I didn’t feel anything special, not any particular emotion, nothing, no emotional resonance. Nonetheless, I am 100% aware that I did something good.

I don’t think that emotional resonance has any important role in helping us to establish if somebody, even ourselves, is selfish or not.

Even the opposite can happen: people who are sincerely emotionally connected to other people, but at the end they don’t do anything, they just forget, they are distracted. Isn’t this a kind of practical selfishness, even if it is unintentional?

I think that, at the end, the most important thing is to consider that the concept of selfishness is a very shallow one: you can never tell if somebody, even you, is selfish, because nobody can judge the depth of our heart, our soul, our intentions, our unconscious. The concept of selfishness implies a judgement of the heart of the person, while actually nobody in this world is able to look deeply enough into any heart, even your own one.

Reply to Skalidris

Quoting Angelo Cannata

Even the opposite can happen: people who are sincerely emotionally connected to other people, but at the end they don’t do anything, they just forget, they are distracted. Isn’t this a kind of practical selfishness, even if it is unintentional?

I think Schopenhauer would directly disagree with this sentiment of selfishness. He thought it was completely a matter of character-inward stance towards people/the world and not outcome.

This quote should help. Think of egoism as the human's "selfish" tendency. This might give some clarity to the kind of distinctions you are looking for. But be warned. Schop's "compassion" is really a manifestation of his metaphysics. That is to say, with it, comes the notion that only when we reject our willful nature (that would lead to egoism and malice) are we to find ethical behavior. And even then, according to Schop, there are only a few people with the saintly character to truly act compassionately, as it is near impossible for many others to really act out of pure charity without some benefit to themselves. He believed in more of a "saintly" kind of compassion, that is reserved for truly rare individuals. At least, that is how I read Schop and his analysis of "character" as Platonically derived. That being said, his distinctions can be useful when asking about humans and selfishness.

Quoting Schopenhauer's Compassionate Morality- Philosophy Now

On the Basis of Morality asks the question: What can motivate individuals to overcome their egoistic tendencies? Surely not adherence to theistic commandments or the categorical imperative. Morality does not originate in human rationality, which is merely instrumental, concerned with the means towards some end which one already has in mind. For Schopenhauer, all moral actions can be expressed by the Latin phrase Neminem laede, imo omnes quantum potes, juva (“Injure no one; on the contrary, help everyone as much as you can”). Empirical investigation, he argues, shows that there are only three fundamental incentives that motivate human actions:

a) Egoism: the desire for one’s own well-being.
b) Malice: the desire for another’s woe.
c) Compassion: the desire for another’s well-being.

“Man’s three fundamental ethical incentives, egoism, malice, and compassion,” according to Schopenhauer, “are present in everyone in different and incredibly unequal proportions. In accordance with them, motives will operate on man and actions will ensue.” (On the Basis of Morality, p.29.)

One can see the Platonic influence in this threefold categorization. It is interesting that he does not discuss a fourth possibility, malice toward one’s own self – the topic of suicide was one that he was particularly sensitive about, as his own father had died mysteriously, and was rumored to have ended his own life – a rumor which his son always vehemently denied. Schopenhauer held that people will be stirred to actions by the motives to which they are primarily susceptible. For instance, should you wish to induce an egoist to perform an act of loving-kindness, you must dupe him into believing the act will somehow benefit himself. But unlike the egoist, who tends to make a great distinction between himself and all other humans – and indeed all other living things – and who lives by the maxim pereat mundus, dum ego salvus sim (“may the world perish, provided I am safe”), a person of compassionate character makes no such sharp distinction. Instead, he sees himself as fundamentally a part of and involved with the suffering world.

Quoting Angelo Cannata

I helped a person who was in a very bad situation

Why did you help them? You didn't feel bad for them at all in the beginning?

If selfishness isn't the disregard of other people's feelings, then what is it?
You say selfishness is related to intentions, but what should they be in order to be considered "selfish"?
Good intentions means that you intend to do good to people, meaning that they will feel positive emotions from your interactions with them. But why would you do that if you feel no emotional resonance ?

Some people help others because they are "used to it", or because they want to look good in front of others. But isn't that selfish?

Quoting schopenhauer1

He believed in more of a "saintly" kind of compassion

Maybe that's it, what's missing in the definition is that "holy" aspect of morality, of what's good and bad. If there is some kind of higher judgement that we don't have access to, we could question the nature of humans to see if it tends more towards the good or towards the bad, given the "clues" we have available.

So maybe there is a religious/spiritual connotation to this simple term used in everyday life, even for people who are atheist, since I believe, they could also understand the question "Are humans selfish?".

And maybe this is why I don't naturally understand it, I don't have a high sense of "morality", but would rather weight the potential positive and negative consequences.

What do you think?

Quoting Skalidris

Maybe that's it, what's missing in the definition is that "holy" aspect of morality, of what's good and bad. If there is some kind of higher judgement that we don't have access to, we could question the nature of humans to see if it tends more towards the good or towards the bad, given the "clues" we have available.

So maybe there is a religious/spiritual connotation to this simple term used in everyday life, even for people who are atheist, since I believe, they could also understand the question "Are humans selfish?".

And maybe this is why I don't naturally understand it, I don't have a high sense of "morality", but would rather weight the potential positive and negative consequences.

What do you think?

It could be, I can't speak for you about yourself :smile:.

I guess I can add though that indeed, I think a theme lately with my posts is the utilitarian/instrumental nature of people's general attitudes.

Survival itself necessitates a kind of selfishness. We must "get things done" and this means perhaps, having to be callous, mean, time-sensitive, and uncaring. We measure things in terms of hedonic calculus more-or-less, and cost/benefit.

I think Schopenhauer was immensely insightful in that the real cause of the problem is our very nature as willing beings. The religious sentiment is to focus on this and not the externals of economic output and having to be somewhere to get things done. That is in fact the problem.

Survival itself is just a manifestation of the willing nature of existence, perhaps.

Quoting Skalidris

If selfishness isn't the disregard of other people's feelings, then what is it?
You say selfishness is related to intentions, but what should they be in order to be considered "selfish"?

I think that selfishness shows just a need that some people have to judge other people, or even themselves, as selfish. “Selfish” does never say anything about the person it is referred to; all that it says is about the person who says it. If I say that somebody is selfish, I am saying absolutely nothing about that person; what I am saying is just who I am, my psychological need to define somebody as “selfish”.

I think that your questions show a similar need when you ask:

Quoting Skalidris

Why did you help them? You didn't feel bad for them at all in the beginning?

I mean, there is in each of us an instinctive need to make a distinction between good and evil, good people and bad people. It is the need to judge, because without judging we feel displaced, confused, disoriented.

Quoting schopenhauer1

according to Schop, there are only a few people with the saintly character to truly act compassionately

I think this is just a concept trick that Schopenhauer used to avoid to admit with himself that he didn’t know what he was talking about. Who are these few people, do you think that Schopenhauer would have been able to list them? Even if the answer is “yes”, on what basis did Schopenhauer feel able to judge the heart of those people?

What is the problem with admitting that we are unable to judge, unable to judge the heart of people, unable to define "good” and “evil”, unable to talk at all about selfishness?

I am not saying, like Wittgenstein, that, since these things cannot be properly defined, we should just never use them. Let’s talk about them, but in a context where we make clear that we are talking not about how things are or might be, how things work or might work, but about our free creative subjectivity, our desire to play with emotional words, like people do in art, in literature, in poetry.

Quoting Angelo Cannata

What is the problem with admitting that we are unable to judge, unable to judge the heart of people, unable to define "good” and “evil”, unable to talk at all about selfishness?

I don’t think Schop believed he had access to peoples inner character but I believe he had examples that I could find for you.

Good place to start @Angelo Cannata
Reply to Skalidris
He’s a great writer. Very clear.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Basis_of_Morality/Part_I

I think the concept of compassion only apparently makes things clear about selfishness.

Apparently, it makes things clear because we can describe it as a simple mechanism: for example, I see an animal suffering; I reproduce inside myself somewhat similar that makes me work out the suffering that that animal is feeling; once I have, somehow, “felt”, inside me, the suffering of the animal, it is easy to understand that this feeling will push me to give help to that animal. This mechanism seems even more convincing because we can refer it even to animals, in the sense that this way we can understand why an animal is able to help another animal.

I said “apparently”.

What about thinking, reasoning, meditating? These activities are, of course, connected with emotions. Can we make any definitive separation between emotions and reasoning? We can’t. We know that even saying 2+2=4 doesn’t happen in a human brain without absolutely any connection with emotions, unconscious and all other things that we have. Apparently, a computer is able to make calculations without emotions, but this is true only in so far we don’t realize that even emotions are just mechanisms that happen in our neurons, so that, at the end, there is no difference between a maths calculation and an emotion: they are both neurons activities.

If we conclude that compassion is just a mechanism of our brain, we must also conclude that selfishness does not exist, otherwise we should say that even a computer is able to be selfish or generous, because a computer is made of mechanisms as well.

This way we can realize that the concept of compassion is of no help to work out what selfishness is.

I think that all of this happens because, when we try to understand selfishness, this means wanting to understand in some mechanical way something that actually is a product of our emotional creativity. In other words, it is like wanting to scientifically understand how a flying horse works.

Reply to Angelo Cannata

Aside from judging, we categorize everything. Without that, there wouldn’t be any knowledge. I find it useful in my everyday life to be able to tell to what extend a person is considerate to other’s feelings or not (which is a big component of the term “selfish”). It’s not to judge their morality, but just to be able to understand them.

It’s a shame there isn’t a term like selfish without moral implication. It would be much more precise and not judgmental.

We can consider that even psychologists need to make use of the word “selfishness” because, as you said, there is no better word. But their context makes clear that they do not judge anybody, they just describe mechanisms.
Philosophy today is in this situation: it is some sort of mixing and ambiguity between scientific and literary/emotional language. If we try to clarify what field we want to use, then things become very simple and clear, because, at the end, we are just doing either science or literature.
So, in speaking about selfishness and compassion, what do we want to do? Do we want to make a scientific exploration? Or, rather, a free literary expression of our feelings, emotions, experiences, ideas? If not any of these two fields, what else?
I think there are ways of connecting both, but we need to clarify what criterions we want to use to make this connection.

Reply to Skalidris Reply to Angelo Cannata
I think Schop’s “egoism” is an apt term that has less of a judgmental connotation. It’s not malice. It’s not compassionate acts of altruism. It’s our everyday transactional or goal-seeking for self mode.