Every Act is a Selfish Act
[b]The Beautiful Selfishness of Man: A Defense of Psychological Egoism[/b]
Abstract
This paper explores the proposition that all human actions from the most virtuous to the most violent are ultimately self-serving. Contrary to the moral ideal of altruism, it argues that selfishness is not a moral defect but the biological, psychological, and existential foundation of all motivation. Using interdisciplinary reasoning drawn from philosophy, psychology, biology, and sociology, this work defends psychological egoism and reframes selfishness as the organizing principle of both individual behavior and collective morality.
I. Introduction
Philosophy has long divided human action into the selfish and the selfless.
Yet such a distinction may be more linguistic than real. Every deliberate human act is born from an internal desire whether that desire seeks pleasure, avoids pain, fulfills duty, or maintains identity.
If every action originates from the actors internal state, then no act can be wholly selfless. Even apparent self-sacrifice the soldier dying for his country, the mother starving for her child, the philanthropist donating wealth finds its roots in personal satisfaction, emotional fulfillment, or existential meaning.
This paper therefore proposes a philosophical revaluation: that all human actions are motivated by self-interest, whether consciously or subconsciously, biologically or emotionally, materially or symbolically.
II. The Psychological Basis: Self as the Center of Experience
The mind is inherently solipsistic it perceives the world only through itself. Every thought, feeling, or impulse is filtered through the self before it can be acted upon.
Thus, when a person helps another, the cause is not the suffering of the other itself, but the internal feeling of empathy, duty, or moral satisfaction that drives them to act. The ultimate motivation, therefore, always resides within.
Psychological studies confirm this. Acts of charity, generosity, and volunteerism are correlated with activation in the brains reward centers (ventral striatum, medial prefrontal cortex). Helping others feels good, biologically. The altruist experiences hormonal reinforcement through dopamine and oxytocin demonstrating that good deeds literally reward the doer.
This blurs the line between altruism and pleasure: the altruist helps others because it pleases him to do so.
III. The Biological Basis: Evolutionary Selfishness
From an evolutionary standpoint, life itself is a selfish process.
Natural selection favors genes that promote their own replication. Organisms cooperate not from moral virtue, but because cooperation increases survival odds and thus gene persistence.
Parental care, often seen as the purest altruism, is genetically selfish: parents preserve their offspring because their offspring carry their DNA. Even self-sacrificial acts in social animals (like bees dying to protect the hive) ensure the survival of shared genetic material.
Therefore, what humans call love, loyalty, or duty are evolutionary expressions of inclusive fitness complex strategies for self-continuity.
Human morality, in this sense, is evolutions social software a system that ensures individual genetic interests align with collective stability.
IV. The Existential Dimension: Meaning as Self-Gratification
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that man is condemned to be free forced to choose meaning in a meaningless world.
But even that choice is selfish: one assigns meaning to preserve psychological stability, to avoid existential despair.
Martyrs die not purely for others, but for the idea that gives their life coherence.
Heroes fight not only for victory, but for the fulfillment of their identity as protectors.
Even religious devotion, while directed toward God, offers personal peace, belonging, or hope all forms of self-comfort.
Thus, existentially, meaning is the highest form of self-satisfaction.
V. The Moral Marketplace: Society as Transaction
Every social act is transactional, whether the currency is material or emotional.
Explicit Buying goods Money for product
Implicit Friendship Companionship for loyalty
Subconscious Charity Relief from guilt or joy of giving
Symbolic Heroism Recognition, legacy, identity
Even love, the most romanticized of all, is not free from this rule.
A person loves another because they find meaning, comfort, pleasure, or completion in that relationship. Remove those feelings, and love withers.
Thus, morality is not the suppression of selfishness it is the refinement of it. Civilization itself is the art of mutually beneficial selfishness.
VI. Objections and Responses
Objection 1: Genuine altruism exists.
Some argue that true altruism exists when one acts without expectation of reward.
Response: The absence of conscious reward does not mean the absence of psychological reward.
Even unacknowledged pleasure, moral peace, or self-identity serve as internal returns.
Hence, unconscious egoism remains egoism.
Objection 2: Selfishness undermines morality.
If all acts are selfish, then morality loses meaning.
Response: On the contrary it gains clarity.
Recognizing selfishness as universal makes morality pragmatic, not hypocritical. Ethics then becomes a negotiation of self-interests, where harmony arises when personal fulfillment does not harm others fulfillment.
This transforms moral philosophy into a calculus of compatible self-interests, not a sermon on impossible self-denial.
Objection 3: Self-sacrifice disproves egoism.
Martyrs, saints, and parents often act against their own survival.
Response: Yet they act for something belief, love, identity, legacy which provides deeper satisfaction than survival itself.
The soldier who jumps on a grenade dies, but dies believing his death mattered.
Meaning triumphs over mortality and meaning is self-derived.
VII. Implications: Ethics Without Illusion
If every act is selfish, moral philosophy must shift from idealism to realism.
Instead of demanding selflessness, it should cultivate enlightened self-interest the alignment of ones wellbeing with others.
The goal of civilization is not to destroy ego but to educate it.
Cooperation, justice, empathy these are not moral miracles, but strategies of sustainable selfishness.
VIII. Conclusion
Human beings are not angels corrupted by ego they are egos discovering beauty through cooperation.
Every act of kindness, every moral code, every love story is a negotiation between biology and meaning, desire and discipline, self and other.
If selfishness is the foundation of existence, then goodness is not the absence of it, but its highest refinement.
Self-interest, properly understood, is not the enemy of morality it is its origin.
Philosophical Identification
This position aligns with a Psychological Egoist Realism a synthesis of classical egoism (Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld), evolutionary naturalism (Darwin, Dawkins), and existential meaning theory (Sartre, Nietzsche).
It may be further described as Ethical Realism of Self-Interest, emphasizing the natural harmony between enlightened egoism and moral order.
Abstract
This paper explores the proposition that all human actions from the most virtuous to the most violent are ultimately self-serving. Contrary to the moral ideal of altruism, it argues that selfishness is not a moral defect but the biological, psychological, and existential foundation of all motivation. Using interdisciplinary reasoning drawn from philosophy, psychology, biology, and sociology, this work defends psychological egoism and reframes selfishness as the organizing principle of both individual behavior and collective morality.
I. Introduction
Philosophy has long divided human action into the selfish and the selfless.
Yet such a distinction may be more linguistic than real. Every deliberate human act is born from an internal desire whether that desire seeks pleasure, avoids pain, fulfills duty, or maintains identity.
If every action originates from the actors internal state, then no act can be wholly selfless. Even apparent self-sacrifice the soldier dying for his country, the mother starving for her child, the philanthropist donating wealth finds its roots in personal satisfaction, emotional fulfillment, or existential meaning.
This paper therefore proposes a philosophical revaluation: that all human actions are motivated by self-interest, whether consciously or subconsciously, biologically or emotionally, materially or symbolically.
II. The Psychological Basis: Self as the Center of Experience
The mind is inherently solipsistic it perceives the world only through itself. Every thought, feeling, or impulse is filtered through the self before it can be acted upon.
Thus, when a person helps another, the cause is not the suffering of the other itself, but the internal feeling of empathy, duty, or moral satisfaction that drives them to act. The ultimate motivation, therefore, always resides within.
Psychological studies confirm this. Acts of charity, generosity, and volunteerism are correlated with activation in the brains reward centers (ventral striatum, medial prefrontal cortex). Helping others feels good, biologically. The altruist experiences hormonal reinforcement through dopamine and oxytocin demonstrating that good deeds literally reward the doer.
This blurs the line between altruism and pleasure: the altruist helps others because it pleases him to do so.
III. The Biological Basis: Evolutionary Selfishness
From an evolutionary standpoint, life itself is a selfish process.
Natural selection favors genes that promote their own replication. Organisms cooperate not from moral virtue, but because cooperation increases survival odds and thus gene persistence.
Parental care, often seen as the purest altruism, is genetically selfish: parents preserve their offspring because their offspring carry their DNA. Even self-sacrificial acts in social animals (like bees dying to protect the hive) ensure the survival of shared genetic material.
Therefore, what humans call love, loyalty, or duty are evolutionary expressions of inclusive fitness complex strategies for self-continuity.
Human morality, in this sense, is evolutions social software a system that ensures individual genetic interests align with collective stability.
IV. The Existential Dimension: Meaning as Self-Gratification
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that man is condemned to be free forced to choose meaning in a meaningless world.
But even that choice is selfish: one assigns meaning to preserve psychological stability, to avoid existential despair.
Martyrs die not purely for others, but for the idea that gives their life coherence.
Heroes fight not only for victory, but for the fulfillment of their identity as protectors.
Even religious devotion, while directed toward God, offers personal peace, belonging, or hope all forms of self-comfort.
Thus, existentially, meaning is the highest form of self-satisfaction.
V. The Moral Marketplace: Society as Transaction
Every social act is transactional, whether the currency is material or emotional.
Explicit Buying goods Money for product
Implicit Friendship Companionship for loyalty
Subconscious Charity Relief from guilt or joy of giving
Symbolic Heroism Recognition, legacy, identity
Even love, the most romanticized of all, is not free from this rule.
A person loves another because they find meaning, comfort, pleasure, or completion in that relationship. Remove those feelings, and love withers.
Thus, morality is not the suppression of selfishness it is the refinement of it. Civilization itself is the art of mutually beneficial selfishness.
VI. Objections and Responses
Objection 1: Genuine altruism exists.
Some argue that true altruism exists when one acts without expectation of reward.
Response: The absence of conscious reward does not mean the absence of psychological reward.
Even unacknowledged pleasure, moral peace, or self-identity serve as internal returns.
Hence, unconscious egoism remains egoism.
Objection 2: Selfishness undermines morality.
If all acts are selfish, then morality loses meaning.
Response: On the contrary it gains clarity.
Recognizing selfishness as universal makes morality pragmatic, not hypocritical. Ethics then becomes a negotiation of self-interests, where harmony arises when personal fulfillment does not harm others fulfillment.
This transforms moral philosophy into a calculus of compatible self-interests, not a sermon on impossible self-denial.
Objection 3: Self-sacrifice disproves egoism.
Martyrs, saints, and parents often act against their own survival.
Response: Yet they act for something belief, love, identity, legacy which provides deeper satisfaction than survival itself.
The soldier who jumps on a grenade dies, but dies believing his death mattered.
Meaning triumphs over mortality and meaning is self-derived.
VII. Implications: Ethics Without Illusion
If every act is selfish, moral philosophy must shift from idealism to realism.
Instead of demanding selflessness, it should cultivate enlightened self-interest the alignment of ones wellbeing with others.
The goal of civilization is not to destroy ego but to educate it.
Cooperation, justice, empathy these are not moral miracles, but strategies of sustainable selfishness.
VIII. Conclusion
Human beings are not angels corrupted by ego they are egos discovering beauty through cooperation.
Every act of kindness, every moral code, every love story is a negotiation between biology and meaning, desire and discipline, self and other.
If selfishness is the foundation of existence, then goodness is not the absence of it, but its highest refinement.
Self-interest, properly understood, is not the enemy of morality it is its origin.
Philosophical Identification
This position aligns with a Psychological Egoist Realism a synthesis of classical egoism (Hobbes, La Rochefoucauld), evolutionary naturalism (Darwin, Dawkins), and existential meaning theory (Sartre, Nietzsche).
It may be further described as Ethical Realism of Self-Interest, emphasizing the natural harmony between enlightened egoism and moral order.
Comments (188)
This premise:
...seems to do all the heavy lifting. I'll allow that every intentional act involves desire. How could it not? But you seem to be arguing that:
Desire is experienced by the self
Therefore, action according to desire is always selfish.
I don't think this follows though, at least not given the way the term "selfish" is normally used in moral discourse. This seems to be a case of equivocation to me. When we say that a person is being selfish we normally mean something like the Oxford definition:
[I](of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.[/I]
We do not mean:
"An action having any relation to the actor" (which is clearly all action insomuch as it is attributable to anyone or any thing).
Or:
"Any action that is desired by the actor." (Indeed, people often talk about the ills of "selfish desires").
You seem to be using the term "selfish" in this second sense to argue that all action is selfish, and then moving back to the common usage later in the argument. So, even if we grant the solipsistic premises (which I wouldn't) this appears to be an equivocation.
Indeed, the gold standard for rational moral action tends to be something like: "doing what is known to be truly best." Now, in a sense, what is "best" is always in our own interest in that what is better is more choice-worthy than what is worse. When people decry selfishness, what they mean is that people choose the worse over the better because they are myopically focused on the self as a sort of false consciousness or because they are ruled over by their passions and lower appetites, or else ignorant of what is truly best out of negligence, due to the prior two factors.
Let me give one of my favorite examples. In the middle of the Purgatorio, Dante sets up the key issue of human life as the proper ordering of loves (drawing on Saint Augustine here). Sin results from loving what is less truly desirable more, from confusing merely apparent goods with what is truly good. To focus on finite, worldly goods (both physical goods, but also status, sexual partners, etc.) is to focus on goods that "diminish when shared. These are not wholly "false goods." They are truly desirable to some extent. But their proper function is to act as a ladder up towards higher goods (consider here Plato's Ladder of Love in the Symposium). Spiritual goods, by contrast (beauty, contemplation, etc.) are "enhanced when shared." The pursuit of goods that diminish when shared sets up a dialectic of competition, and this is where selfishness comes into play.
Due to historical accidents in the development of Western theology and science, most modern ethics starts here, within this dialectic of competition. Ethics and politics become primarily about "the individual (the selfish) versus society." But this isn't the only way to look at it. Much prior ethics focuses instead focuses primarily on the higher versus the lower, and the proper ordering of the appetites to what is [I]understood[/I] as truly most desirable. This isn't "selfish" though in that the Good always relates to the whole and is itself diffusive.
I don't see how this follows. Do our desires and experiences leap from the aether uncaused? If not, then the "ultimate" terminus of our desires lies outside of us. We might [I]become[/I] relatively more or less self-determining vis-á-vis our own desires and their ordering (as Frankfurt's second-order volitions for instance, the effective desire to have or not have other desires). Yet our desires have causes that lie outside of us. An appealing meal can stir desire in us because of what it is, not solely because of what we are.
Again, the "selfishness" claim relies on the redefinition of "selfish" to "having any relation to the self at all." But eros primarily relates to the erotic other, and agape flows outwards from the self. Although both obviously relate to the self in some way, they are not [I]centered[/I] on the self. Your redefinition is, interestingly though, pretty much what Byung-Chul Han is talking about in "The Agony of Eros," the elimination of the other by an ever more inflated self. Yet to my mind though, this just shows that solipsitic philosophy, due to its errors, leads towards selfishness.
Quoting Copernicus
I don't think this shows much. Vision always involves activity in the occipital lobe. Does this prove that light always relates solely to the self? Our brains are always involved in everything we do. Does this mean that everything we do and know is actually about the brain (and so really, the self)? But if this was so, it would undercut the very epistemic warrant we have for believing in neuroscience, etc. in the first place, since we would actually never have access to "brains" or "fMRIs" only our own selves.
IDK, it seems to me that all this shows is that all intentional behavior involves desire and that all things desire the good. To show that all intentional action is selfish would require that the good, that to which all things strive, never extends past the self. Yet this hardly seems true, and if it has to be justified by presupposing solipsism, that seems problematic as well.
I think this is just a misunderstanding of older terms and concepts. If this "problem" was brought to the attention of these past thinkers, I think they would be perplexed. Surely the excellent person is a blessing to others, not a curse. To become like God is always to bless others, because the Good is itself diffusive and always relates to the whole, and it is the life of the sage and saint that is most desirable because it is the life that attains the greatest freedom and deepest joys. It's only in the context of an ethics already grounded in the dialectic of "goods that diminish when shared" that all inward pursuits become selfish.
That is, it is precisely the epistemic presuppositions that absolutize the individual in solipsistic bubbles that make it impossible for the Good to be recognized as diffusive (because the "desirable" just becomes "whatever is currently desired by an individual). It becomes impossible to know the Good (particularly in a naturalist frame where teleology is stripped out) and so what we really have is emotivism established by axiomatic presupposition, with the "Good" now demoted to a sort of procedural ideal for the allocation of an irreducible multiplicity of goods sought by individuals. But this isn't the result of logical necessity or any empirical finding, but simply flows from axiomatic epistemic assumptions.
Desire for/from oneself. That's the thing. Selfishness is self-interest, not self-supremacy, at least in my definition.
Do we expect the poor and the sick to contribute to the community? If not, are they being selfish?
It is those in better circumstances that provide the capacity to help others. The issue is whether or not they have the compassion to do so, or the wisdom that helping others out of a hole might mean they could provide some useful benefit to me or the rest of the community in the future.
Well, everyone is. Whether it's a refined one or not.
Whatever goes against you (want/desire/interest/feelings).
Say someone was born with the need to help others, sometimes to the detriment of other wants and needs, but if one of their needs is to help others, and they find satisfaction in helping others, then would that fall into your definition of "selfish"?
Thats the thing, though. The Good is not diffusive. Until the communitarian comes to terms with the fact of our separateness, of our individuation, the communitarian Good can never be imagined in any other sense as individual, selfish desire. He wants conformity to certain ancient ideals, to return us to ancient ways of life, and so on.
The self is caged in the solipsistic bubble and can only act from within.
What if our "self" is not really unified in its wants/desires. Say it wants two contradictory things, like a composite being composed of conflicting drives. That we must eventually act as we do doesn't mean we desire the consequence of that action.
I desire to eat but I want a six pack set of abominals. I want to have the high from exercise but don't want to put in the time. I crave sugar but I'm diabetic. In what sense can the "self" be against itself?
Whatever you choose ultimately serves your self. You choose which is the higher calling for you (eatingdesire, packshealth).
And each of the options serves the self. The idea itself serves your purpose. Eating serves happiness, exercising or dieting serves good health.
If you wish to harm yourself, you serve your sadism. If you wish to prevent that, you serve your well-being. If you remain undecided, you serve your procrastination.
Quoting La Rochefoucauld, Maxims and Reflections
The problem with your bubble is that the generality of the explanation renders any particular instance useless for inquiry. Distinctions without a difference.
Care to elaborate?
What about [s]unknown[/s] anonymous self-sacrifice? Say, jumping on a grenade thrown at your platoon? No, that's not quite the same because he would be remembered. But, say some sort of hypothetical secret act to make the world a better place, by someone without children or family, who therefore has nothing to gain from making said world a better place? :chin:
Well, we can all agree that every action has a motivation of some kind and that motivation "moves" the agent. To conclude from that that every action is selflish is just playing with words. What matters is what moves the agent. If I respond to pain with sympathy and the attempt to help, or take my children to the sea-side because their delight gives me pleasure, those is at least a candidates for a selfless action
Quoting Copernicus
Very few actions originate from the actor's internal state. Most of them are a response to the world around us. All the people you mention - the soldier, the mother, the philanthropist - are responding to the situation they are in, in the world they are in.
But you miss the point when you write off those actions as equal to the arms trader who sells the weapons, the black marketeer who hoards the food, and the entrepreneur who hoards person wealth. There's nothing wrong with personal satisfaction, emotional fulfilment and existential meaning in themselves. It's about what gives you personal satisfaction, emotional fulfilment and existential meaning.
Quoting Copernicus
There's truth in that. Where does the meaning, the discipline, the other come from?
Quoting NOS4A2
Maybe. But the individualist who cannot imagine goods that are shared by everyone will never understand individuals. For better or worse, we are social beings. Arguably, we all benefit from that. But perhaps you can't recognize the benefits. We (mostly) respect each other's property, and as a result, I can enjoy my property (mostly) in peace. Because people mostly respect the rule about driving on the left or right, everyone can drive more safely. Because people mostly respect their own promises, everyone can do their business. These things are not oppressions, they are enablers.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting Copernicus
The virtue lies in the good feeling. The difference between someone who gets pleasure from the pleasure of others is different in important ways from the person who gets pleasure from the pain of others. The one spreads pleasure, the other spreads pain. Who would you prefer for your next-door neighbour?
Quoting Copernicus
Oh dear, you will have to find your way out of that cage on your own - unless someone helps you. On the other hand, if you can recognize that solipsism is a cage, there is some hope for you.
But they're still your children. It benefits your family and existence directly to have happy children who live productive lives, possibly earning lots of money, holding you in high regard, esteem, and favor, and then taking care of you when you're enfeebled.
It also makes you look good to, shoot, just about anyone and everyone.
I don't see you going around adopting random children or spending your hard earned money on other people's children.
Great post, just that one line sticks out to me as something that others might gloss over thus prematurely proving the OP's premise as valid.
By excluding all senses of "self-less" or not-for-yourself as a motive for action, there is no way to model particular behavior as relative to others. It makes La Rochefoucauld's observations useless because he was mainly interested in the differences of motivations behind similar appearances, not turning them into one goo.
The claim that all moral claims in the past were based upon this proposal of the single motivation of selflessness is taking a presumption for a fact. That kicks a lot of moral philosophy of the past to the curb.
If one grants your solipsistic bubble, how do we get to the model you present here:
Quoting Copernicus
Solipsists don't usually let themselves out for weekends on the town.
Thanks for that.
Quoting Outlander
There's a case for considering generosity to one's children is a kind of selfishness. But that just reveals that what counts as selfishness is not necessarily obvious. What do we make of the virtue of looking after one's family? In the context of wider society, it can look like selfishness. In the context of traditional individualism, it is altruism.
Think of benefactors of your town or city or of art rather than homelessness.
I could spend my money and time on my personal pleasures and leave the kids without. Would that not be selfish? Is helping out my friends and neighbours not generous, because they are my friends and neighbours? Yet, I agree that exclusive attention to my kids, neglecting my partner, would be wrong.
Quoting Outlander
Yes, but the point is that I consider those happy children to be a benefit and not a drag. The rest of it is far from guaranteed. However, if my generosity to them was predicated on those happy outcomes. that would undermine my claim to generosity.
You serve your vision of a better world.
No.
Quoting Ludwig V
Exactly. Everything is about that one way or another.
Quoting Ludwig V
The self.
Quoting Ludwig V
Not.
Quoting Ludwig V
No one escapes it.
I fail to see where that's my problem.
Quoting Paine
I do.
You miss the point where the distinction arises. If your vision is of peace and justice for everyone, it is altruistic. If your vision is of your own well-being and prosperity alone, it is selfish.
Quoting Copernicus
Thanks. Very helpful.
Quoting Copernicus
You only read part of what I said. You will surely not see what you choose not to look for.
Quoting Copernicus
How would you know?
@Outlander was right. You seem to fail to grasp it.
No, and no.
Quoting Ludwig V
I'm selfish. (P.S. I did read)
Quoting Ludwig V
As a solipsist, that's the core of my worldview.
You're a bit of a dill, arn't you.
Depends on perspective.
Well, I'll just leave you to it. There's not much fun to be had here.
Reality is subjective, dependent upon stimulus reception and intellectual perception.
Quoting Ludwig V
For him, we don't exist, so you already have left him to it.
I guess I'm just Copernicus laughing at himself.
That makes selflessness theoretically (of course, practically) unattainable.
That's just one aspect of solipsism. I take it as an initial chamber. Which leads to the understanding that no matter what the truth is, you would never know it because it's outside your head and you're stuck inside your head.
You are a solipsist. There isn't any one here for you to talk to. You are on your own. There is no one here to care about your opinion, or even to read your posts.
Oh - you are one of the solipsists who think other people exits? They are surprisingly common. But not that coherent.
It is a problem with your dichotomy. You enlist La Rochefoucauld for your purposes but are unable to replace his model with equal perspicuity.
Quoting Copernicus
"Stimulus reception" is the language of behaviorism. Reductions to a pure set of external inputs is not the foundation for solipsism.
Okay, see now this is a good post. That much makes sense.
However, does it not defeat the premise (or at least title) of your OP?
Out of the billions (perhaps more) persons who have lived, there is absolutely no way to know at least one person never lived a life doing exactly that. Sure, it's likely said life ended prematurely, perhaps violently, and the person died an unknown and was never heard of or spoken of. But that shouldn't matter as far as the premise of your OP is concerned.
I see solipsism as the idea that we know nothing outside our heads, which creates the outside experience for us.
Whether my yellow is your yellow, or whether you're real or an imagination or an NPC is unknowable; that's all. Not that we know the objective truth about your existence.
As a reference or background intro music.
Quoting Paine
This argument isn't based on solipsism. Don't get distracted.
I answered it here: Quoting Copernicus
See that "we"? There is no "we" in solipsism.
There is just you. I'm not here.
Isn't it odd, that even now, as you read this, you seem to be responding to something new - something from "outside your head"? Something unexpected, novel, hopefully even quite annoying. What Banno does out here is changing what goes on "inside".
Or am I just you, doubting your sanity?
So, your OP, if simplified in one sentence would be: "Most people are selfish."
It's very well-written, I'll admit. With the right fine-tuning and your own personal chaperoning and stewardship can turn into something readable and thought-provoking. I feel you've yet to take that step, however. Pardon me for saying.
That's the general way of arguing. (Like, "you can't see a young lady and lose your composure."..."you" doesn't mean you in specific.)
Quoting Banno
Nope. I'm intaking these letters coming through a screen and interpreting it according to my subjective perception and giving it back, creating a communication. What someone from other universe or dimension sees me taking and giving is unknowable to me.
I'd like to know where it went wrong.
From my argumentative conclusion, all people are, and it's impossible not to be.
Sure is. But you have no one to argue with. It's all in your head. So why use the "general form?"
If you are taking letters coming through a screen, then there exist letters and a screen. But no, you are a solipsist. There is only your mind, so the stuff I write here is somehow just part of that.
Quoting Copernicus
There isn't any one from some other universe or dimension - there is only you, trapped in your head, making me up.
I never know FOR SURE. That's the idea. No accepting, no denying.
Yeah, it is. All those threads about not caring for anyone else - that's all part of your realisation that you are alone.
Or that you are mistaken.
Quoting Copernicus
You seem very certain 'bout that.
Your version of solipsism is not the one I follow. Something like anarchism vs libertarianism vs liberalism. Close, but different.
Don't remember when I ever was.
Quoting Banno
No. What I argued was that you can't betray your self. Nothing more. Solipsism isn't even involved in this.
It's not my version - I don't exist. It's the reality of your realisation that you are the only mind, closing in on you.
So you are certain that you are never certain about anything. Cool. I'd say that problem was with coherence rather than certainty.
Quoting Copernicus
You are betraying yourself, by writing as if we were here. We don't exist. There is only what you have in your head.
No accepting, no denying. Just skeptical.
The argument is based upon being able to completely separate the self from what is not self. You defend the thesis by an appeal to solipsism as a given condition. But you give the world back to yourself when proposing a different one.
It is not a matter of challenging your thesis but from where the new models will come in the conditions you have set for yourself that make me think that you have had your cake and have eaten it too.
You're now swimming in solipsism. I don't see any point in arguing if you'd deviate from the OP.
Well, this is one person's opinion. Your assurance, your worldview, the way you were raised and so live your life. Surely you don't think out of the billions people alive and who were once alive, it's impossible not one person could have thought differently than how you do in a way that laughs in the face of the way you perceive life must be lived?
To put it bluntly, your views, your limitations perhaps, weakness even, are yours and yours alone. Even if in principle they are shared by every person you've ever met or ever will meet, there's more than enough people (7 billion+) to warrant the belief that perhaps your way of looking at life, or rather, how your mind is forced to process life, isn't the only way to do so.
Does that make sense?
That's not the point. We're not separating anyone. I just said humans are programmed to be selfish. If some physical properties manage to be selfless, it's not humans.
This is the very same problem you aimed at yourself in the The Libertarian Dilemma
thread - the failure to acknowledge the other.
Your own acceptance of solipsism in a post to other people brings out clearly why you are a bit of a dill.
(a+b)^2 might have been a2+2.0045ab+b2 in some corner of the universe, but from our observation (practicality) or mathematical equations (theory), we derive that it's impossible to happen.
ISN'T THAT WHAT PHILOSOPHY IS? Unless we're talking math (or science), my arguments don't have to be universally accepted. Philosophy is a higher form of art, which is a subjective expression of oneself.
Quoting Banno
Worse for solipsists.
Quoting Copernicus
But for you, that's all there is...
Quoting Copernicus
You seem quite adept at it, even when not in the mood.
I'm quite serious. Your ideas are a nonsense, the result of a failure to realise that you are, like it or not, a part of a community, a member of a group - the very fact that you are writing in English belies your excessive faith in individualism.
Your need to post your ideas on this forum probably indicates that you know this, and are looking for a way out.
The fly and the bottle. But you probably will not get that reference.
No, I don't.
Quoting Banno
Where was my question wrong?
Quoting Banno
Yes, to myself. I wrote and sang a song for you by myself. You're free to give feedback.
Quoting Banno
Yes, I'm forced to accept the social contract involuntarily, and I don't live in a utopian individualistic planet, so yes, I happen to live in a community.
But still we could arrange a separate bedroom for each member despite sharing the same house, instead of putting everyone in the common room floor (which communitarians do).
Just because we eat, play, and dance in the same house doesn't mean we'd have to sleep together.
Just because we coexist and transact monetary and other values in a society doesn't mean we'd have to be socially bonded (to a point where the collective interest supercedes the individual's).
I wouldn't say anything "went wrong", per se, just, as it stands, this isn't anything substantial that hasn't been discussed (and dismissed, if not by widely-held view, which sure, might not invalidate anything in an absolute sense). It simply didn't "transcend" what others have suggested and discussed before, in my opinion. So, nothing went wrong, it's just, it didn't seem to "catch" or what have you, in the sense of throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks.
It's still early on, who knows, perhaps you're simply ahead of your time, not unlike the many great artists and authors whose work was discounted, even ridiculed while alive, only to become a staple in every library after their death. Vincent van Gogh only sold but one painting while his breath was still in his body. So. Who could say, yes? :smile:
Quoting Copernicus
See this is where things get a bit confusing. You say just a few moments ago, here:
Quoting Copernicus
Impossible = not possible.
Theoretically (practically unattainable) = possible. (albeit unlikely)
These are two starkly different worlds of possibility you seem to waver back and forth between. So, I'll ask the obvious question. Which is it?
I think you meant to write "the flea in the bottle"?
No, since I don't exist.
Quoting Copernicus
You love it. You keep coming back for more. You don't have to be here, after all - go play Counterstrike or something - oh, wait, those are team games... Patience, maybe?
I'm sorry your living arrangements do not meet your needs. Perhaps if you asked nicely...
Oh, that'd require taking others into account...
Looks like papers won't cut it. Need a book to cover everything.
Quoting Outlander
I don't think I quite caught what you meant.
I go to the grocery store to get fruits. Do I need to marry the cashier for that?
What's wrong with self-serving social interactions?
define it
You tell us. You want to be here. But you tell us that we don't count for anything. You shit were you eat.
Quoting Copernicus
Supposing that all you need is a definition.
That sounds like a charge without evidence.
Quoting Banno
To see what you mean. Perhaps you meant your way of thinking?
Now who's getting distracted. :smile:
You say, the only way a truly non-selfish act can occur is if one denies basically all positive and generally-appreciated aspects of life. You also say, if one does this, it is because they seek a "challenge" and some sort of fulfillment from said challenge.
I then state, it's possible that out of the billions and billions of minds that exist and have existed, one may have embraced the first part of your premise (self-denial) without doing so for the challenge or sense of fulfillment in any form.
You find this impossible. You are one person. There are billions of people. Therefore, the odds of your sentiment being correct, without substantial proof are 1 in 8 billion, and that's a high estimate in your favor.
Do you understand that?
Well, no. It's the consequence of your approach.
Your every act is selfish - so you claim. So what we want doesn't count, unless it matches what you want. We don't count.
So why should we do anything for you?
At the very least, you need to learn to play the iterative prisoner's dilemma.
Yes. Newton believed light wasn't a wave. He was proven wrong. I can be proven wrong. But from my equations, I'm pretty solid on my conclusion.
Might get a Nobel in math and then 200 years later someone proves me wrong and the Nobel committee is left feeling like a twat.
It happens.
Proven? Are you certain?
But you said...
In the realm of science. Or at least the books we read.
Don't tell me you're planning to bring solipsism (a philosophy) into science or court ("your honor, reality is subjective and deceitful, hence the crime didn't happen").
You offer only two possible motivations. I have been arguing the limits of such a division, not whether it is the case.
It's your epistemology. So you say that we can be certain that Newton was proven wrong... but that
Quoting Copernicus
I'm just trying to work out how you keep both those ideas in the same head.
According to who? And certainly, it can at least be [I]imagined[/I] as such. One can say many things about the Neoplatonists, or say the Sufi poets, but that they lacked imagination is not one of them.
Quoting NOS4A2
Odd, I seem to recall the biggest communitarian movement of the past century or so doing things like dynamiting cathedrals to turn them into the world's largest swimming pool, massacring priests and monks, re-educating minorities out of Buddhism and Islam, etc., and trying to rebuild man in a radically new image.
In general, when there is an appeal to ancient framings or norms, the idea is that they are better, not that they are merely old (although to be sure, some folks do tend towards tradition for tradition sake, just as some see innovation as an end in itself).
Quoting Harry Hindu
Bingo. But then it also seems to commit a fallacy of equivocation on this usage later on.
My previous efforts were not deemed worthy of consideration,
But surely the intent matters here? If I help an old man cross the street, and he turns out to be a billionaire who buys me a car, that doesn't make it selfish, because that wasn't my reason for helping.
I know that's a silly example, but I just want to establish the distinction, because now we can take a look at an example from the OP:
The OP mentions a parent caring for their child and mentions things like self satisfaction. And sure, being a good parent feels good. Was that the reason for doing it though?
I would say: no. I wouldn't necessarily say it's "love" either.
I think there is a responsibility hat that we sometimes wear, instinctively. It's only occasionally that we get to stop and think about consequences of *not* looking after a child, or how much we love them or whatever. The rest of the time we're operating out of a sense of duty; someone is depending on us.
Of course, we can take this a step back and say that that instinct of duty exists for selfish (gene) reasons. But to me it's absurd if we're requiring selfless acts to go back beyond this level. We'd be implicitly defining "selfless" as "reasonless, and yet non random". Yes of course a nonsensical thing doesn't exist.
Yep. If we said instead that any action can be described in selfish terms, few would protest; it's be a rare action that had no benefit to the actor. The fallacy is framing this as an account of the intent of the actor, or worse, as the only intent.
Pardon?
This is hopeless.
Conscious intent isnt the whole story. Most of what drives us operates beneath awareness. Neuroscience has shown that our emotional and instinctive systems start the process of action before we even realize it. When someone helps an elderly person cross the street, for instance, the brains empathy circuits light up before the person consciously decides to help. The decision is almost a justification after the fact. And those empathy circuits didnt evolve for pure altruism they evolved because helping others in the right context promoted survival and social stability, which ultimately benefit the individual and the group. Even when we feel selfless, were running on emotional patterns shaped by self-preserving systems.
The idea of duty or responsibility doesnt escape this logic either. Duty isnt the absence of desire; its a refined form of it. Acting out of duty satisfies psychological needs for belonging, coherence, and moral stability. A parent feeding a child might not think, Im doing this for myself, but the brain still rewards the act with emotional satisfaction while punishing neglect with guilt or anxiety. These emotional mechanisms evolved to reinforce behaviors that protect both the individuals identity and their lineage. In that sense, duty is not opposed to ego its egos most organized expression.
The objection also touches on the paradox of reasonless selflessness. If a truly selfless act must have no internal motive at all, then it wouldnt really be an act of will it would just be something mechanical, like a leaf falling from a tree. All voluntary human actions require motivation. So, rather than being the absence of self, altruism is better seen as the transformation of basic self-interest into a more complex form of fulfillment one that connects personal meaning with the good of others.
Even when we trace these instincts back to biology, the same logic holds. Behaviors like care, empathy, and moral obligation evolved because they improved survival and reproductive success. The very capacity for compassion is an evolutionary tool that served self-preserving systems in the long run. In other words, what we call duty is simply the most refined form of self-interest that evolution has produced.
So yes, intent gives moral texture to our actions but intent itself arises from internal drives shaped by feedback loops of pleasure, coherence, and survival. To call an act selfless just because the person wasnt aware of its benefit is to confuse consciousness with motivation. Every voluntary act comes from within: from emotion, instinct, or belief all of which exist because they help the self endure.
Yep.
What is your proof for objective reality, @Banno?
I've shown the problem with solipsism, over the last few pages. Your asking me a question shows that you are not a solipsist. You want my answer. Therefore I exist... :wink:
So, assuming I'm believing in objective reality, what is your problem with the OP proposition?
You exist at least in my head. Therefore I want to debate.
Just because I might be the only real thing in the universe doesn't mean I'll have to die in mental solitary.
I daydream all day or imagine fictional stories (either to write books or movie scripts, or just to entertain myself while living in my basement as a societal hermit). Just because I'm societally reclusive doesn't mean I'll have to be a lifeless monolith in flesh.
Yes. But received and processed by my head. I can't bypass that.
Then there is error. If everything is in your mind, how can you make sense of being mistaken? You are mistaken when what you take to be the case is not actually the case; if solipsism is true then what you take to be the case just is the case.
It is. I can't function without my brain. So my brain gives me the reality. And since the brain is an element of the universe, it's the universe blurring my vision from itself.
Quoting Banno
I never sense true or false. I'm only skeptical.
So you have a brain. The mess gets bigger. Then, a universe, to blur your vision. So are we happy now that there is more than is "inside your head"? Can you begin to see that your doubt is unjustified? Quoting Copernicus
Never? Is that true?
A performative contradiction occurs when the act of making a statement contradicts that statement. Like "I am dead" - the saying of it renders it false.
Or "I never sense true or false".
Now I see the problem. You had an idea of a solipsistic school of thought, which says your mind is a divine entity, if you will, that created the whole universe, your body, your thoughts, and everything, and you're a formless abstract entity in no-one-knows-where land. That's not what I follow. What I advocate for is that there is no way to know anything outside what our brains construct for us. And even if there was an objective reality (not necessarily the universe itself, but the "truths" in it) out there, it's impossible to know outside our subjective experiences.
Quoting Banno
That's the idea. I'm skeptical.
There are sounds outside our hearing range, or lights outside our visual capacity. If we hadn't advanced in science, we would never know they existed.
Right now, there could be elements billion times faster than light, but even our scientific observations are too rudimentary to detect them.
The same thing applies to the mind. Not everything is received or detected. So the whole picture is never captured. That's the bottom line.
So you constructed me? You poor thing.
In the same way I constructed the image of the screen in my head after receiving the lights through my vision.
Your true version is unknowable to me. I only know what my brain allows me to.
Oh well.
Philosophy didn't create the distinction you're referencing. . You're attempting to use philosophy to eliminate a distinction.
If all acts are selfish in all possible worlds, you've created a definitional truth, which means you needn't go through an empirical analysis of various acts to determine which are selfish and which aren't. You've just created a tautology.
The point here is that we call acts from empathy selfless and those that result in gain but injure others selfish. The terms mean very different things. If you have arrived at a definition that collapses the distinction, you've not arrived at a new profound truth (i.e. that there is personal benefit in kindness to others so such kindness is selfush), but instead you've just mis-defined a term.
Everyone knows there can be personal benefit when you benefit others. That doesn't make it selfish.
I think it's more complex than that; it depends upon what action we're talking about.
And I think you'd likely agree that the subsconscious mind is also part of the person, so I think you're agreeing with me, but coming at it from a slightly different angle.
My position was that our "wiring" is such that we can go into a state where we appreciate that we are responsible for this important, fragile thing, and moment to moment we are not doing a cost/benefit analysis; there's no time for that.
You're suggesting we are internally motivated by our mind seeking particular activation for certain actions: yeah, I'd say those things are alternative descriptions of the same set of phenomena.
Quoting Copernicus
Agreed. It's also interesting that you throw in the concept of will here, because my main objection to the OP is the same as for the free will debate. But I'll avoid the temptation to tangent into it completely.
Quoting Copernicus
I was agreeing with you right to the end :)
Firstly, I don't think we should take the structure of the word that literally; I don't think it's understood as meaning literally absent the self. If a kind person does a kind action, and someone calls it "selfless", we're not saying it appeared from nowhere (which would make it as worthy of praise as being struck by lightning).
And secondly, no, I don't think all voluntary acts necessarily exist for helping the self endure.
Social species have group selection pressures, so there will be some behaviours that are not optimal or even to the detriment of the self. Plus just genetic drift will mean humans are likely saddled with some arbitrary proclivities.
And heck, a mother caring for her child is to the detriment of the self. Hear me out.
I know that parental love is such a strong thing, and a familiar thing to us all. And that all organisms prioritize reproducing above all else. So we casually consider reproducing and caring for the next generation to be aiding the self. And that we "live on".
But the next generation isn't the self.
Those behaviours evolved for the genes' benefit, not mine.
Again, we might not mind at all, because we get the benefit of feeling good about ourselves later. That doesn't make it the reason we behaved that way though.
But it is, nevertheless, self-serving. Specifically when you do such with said knowledge (or intent) beforehand. His point is, we're somewhat "trapped" in the dynamic that everything we do is expected to have positive benefit, even things we must do or otherwise have no choice but to do.
He does have a point when he suggests "every action is out of desire", even a mental invalid who chooses to harm himself or paint his driveway a certain color and then attempt to vacuum it. Sure, in that case, while such actions have no utility or tangible benefit, they do "benefit" the person by expressing or fulfilling such a desire, misguided and whatnot as it is.
Though, some people choose self-denial or "avoidance of desire" or pleasure or what have you. He says people who do this are still doing it for a sort of tangible benefit even if that benefit is to "challenge" one's self or live a better, purer, or otherwise specific sort of life.
I responded saying, sure, most people do that, even 99%, but that doesn't mean every single person who ever existed, including people not alive or who OP would otherwise never meet necessarily fell under that wide assessment of mindset he assumes every person must subscribe or live under.
In a way, you could frame the OP as a simple critique of the modern mammalian brain. We don't do anything unless it (seems) to offer benefit, and even when it doesn't, the act of trying and failing versus not trying at all, seems to self-validate, at least in the context or argument the OP is suggesting.
Perhaps we'd need to redefine the word.
No, that would still suggest the OP said something about the world, which it doesn't. It just asserts an incorrect definition.
Give me a hypothetical example of a selfless act. That you can't clarifies you're saying nothing about the world. If nothing qualifies due to logical impossibility, you're saying nothing about the world.
The best example might be that I trip over a carpet and accidentally fall on a guy and stop him from shooting an innocent guy I didn't care about. That is, unintentional accidents might qualify under this strained definition, but no one uses the term selfless to describe unintentional accidents.
We have a perfectly useful word. Acts from kindness are referred to as "selfless," and it is not a prerequisite that an act to be moral that it not offer any benefit to the one who does it.
If you need a word to describe an act that offers no benefit to an actor, maybe "unintentional", "accident", or "mistake" will work.
Selfishness=Self-Interest=Self-Serving
My definition.
Other parties (their gain or loss or neutral outcome) are never my driving force for action.
I mean, the first sentence in the OP references "human", which, to my knowledge is a direct reference to a physical being that exists in, you guessed it, the world. But hey, you're the professional, I'll take your word for it. Just seems you've left ample room to argue is all.
Quoting Hanover
Leaving a hundred dollar bill under a rock on the sidewalk, maybe? You'll never gain any benefit from it. Who knows, it might go to some drug addict. Or, someone really down on their luck who needed just that amount to make rent or cover this month's bills might pick it up instead. You'll never know. But fancy this. Imagine the person is a psychopath or sociopath, whichever one doesn't feel empathy or "happiness" like a normal person feels when helping someone in need. That would, technically be selfless, no? Random, if nothing else seeing as it would be unlikely in that prescribed scenario such an act would occur.
I get your point and like your rug example. Very poignant and succinct.
No. You served your agency or desire to act.
Quoting Outlander
No. They may had gains or motives other than altruism.
What if I was drunk/high/on drugs/delirious from lack of sleep/in an emotional frenzy and had no such agency? At least, not my own as one is generally only considered to have otherwise.
Quoting Copernicus
Here we go with more presumptions. That overused word "may" that means nothing in absolute discussion.
You are not of sound mind. Everything you do that is not done voluntarily (under influence or coercion) doesn't count as [voluntary] action.
If you have the liberty to choose, then it's voluntary. But if, let's say, I hypnotize or control you with magic, then not.
I've already discussed something similar here.
Quoting Outlander
Okay. They MUST have had other gains or motives.
Is a person not of sound mind no longer a person? Who decides whose mind is sound and whose isn't? You? Society? Was such a formation of such standards a selfish act? How do you know? If it was a selfish act, perhaps their motives are less than representative of reality and conform to personal biases. Who are you to judge? Is this not selfish and so to be avoided, but most importantly invalidated?
Careful now. Lest one paint oneself into a corner one cannot so easily talk their way out of.
This is a chokepoint I've been stuck for a long while in multiple cases. I guess if I can crack this formula, I can solve multiple paradoxes at once.
Check out the hyperlink to see how this is something I have yet to solve.
Quoting Copernicus
According to me. My apologies, but when I was referring to the communitarian I was referring to an advocate of the modern philosophical movement. I was assuming you were one of them given your writing as of late.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/communitarianism/
I couldnt see how such a framing could be better. There doesnt appear to be much of a good life for the individual wherever Aristotelian traditions were particularly popular. In any case, communitarians often commit the fallacy of selecting a philosopher and assigning his opinions as the spirit of the age, as if everyone today has read Rawls and were all good liberals now. Ill try not to make the same mistake.
I dont deny that we are motivated to achieve k personal satisfaction, emotional fulfillment and meaning. The question is , what is the connection between such reinforcers and our attempts to make sense of our world?
The psychological model youre deriving both your concept of desire and self from is a bit moldy, dating back to Hobbes and updated by folks like Dawkins. More recent approaches within the cognitive neurosciences argue that there there is no self to be found within mental processes as a little controlling homunculus, except as an abstraction. What we call the self is continually transforming its nature, meaning and purposes from day to day. It is more accurate to say that metal processes consist of self-organizing schematic patterns which strive to maintain their dynamic consistency in the face of constantly changing conditions. Mental processes are designed to make sense of their world, and the best way to do this is to be able to anticipate events as effectively as possible, as far out into the future as possible.
The aim of this process of self-consistency is to assimilate as much of the world as possible into itself. This means that the self doesnt differentiate itself from others on the basis of a boundary defined by its skin, but by the limits of its ability to assimilatively make sense of others. It is possible for me to relate more intimately to a loved one than to myself when I am confused with regard to my own motives and thoughts. When I perform an active of selfless altruism or generosity, it is made possible by my ability to expand the boundaries of my self, thereby achieving a more powerful self-integration by figuring out how to incorporate what I may have previously experienced as alien, threatening and unassimilable in the other. In other words, my most far reaching goals of selfish desire are directly aligned with , and can only be achieved by, understanding others in ways that allow me to optimally anticipate their behavior.
I am not thereby using them as means for my own ends. Rather, their ends and mine are the same. My self-expansion is not fundamentally designed to come at their expense. This only happens when such attempts break down, and I cannot find a way to incorporate their strange way of being within my familiar schemes of understanding. The classical notion of selfishness as a competition among egos, whereby what fulfills my desires has no direct bearing on what fulfills yours, does not contradict what Ive said here. Rather, the concept of the fortress self reflects the limits most people encounter in their ability to make sense of others thinking in ways that allow us to see ourselves in them. In sum self and other is not defined by spatially separated bodies. The non-self only appears when and where an aspect our our world presents a challenge to our ability to assimilate it , and we are not equipped to rethink our interpretation of it.
That collapse is what I tried to illustrate earlier in the discussion.
It is not as if the collapse gives us a better way to understand narcissism, lack of self-awareness, or solipsism, as a form of isolation.
And Copernicus by chance could be cast as an Ahab, if psychopathic traits prevail.
Ahab was no more or less selfish than anyone else on that fictional ship according to the OP's generalization. Though he was ignoring economic/moral duty to pursue a personal desire/vendetta.
To be less selfish is to extend yourself into having someone else's perspective, so as to make a decision that benefits the greater self (the group) sometimes at the cost of the little self (you). The greater self may be selfish too but it's coordinated actions override and guide the little selves for mutual benefit.
The self can imagine itself to be like another, to have its point of view. If it shares a body with other selves, many may breath from the same lungs and coordinate to use the same appendages for the sake of living a good life. So together they are all selfish, insofar as they must use up and destroy or exploit other selves, for the sake of living.
Refinement of selfishness.
For my purposes you don't need to read Moby Dick but just contemplate when a crew shares a body (function/vessel) and coordinates action for mutual survival. You could just as well think of astronauts on a space station, who have to maintain a breathable atmosphere.
[quote= Corpernicus]Refinement of selfishness.[/quote]
I think an issue is the connotative baggage of the word "selfish". It's doing a kind of associative/propagandist work we can't properly articulate. Like the generalization we've all a propensity for violence. It doesn't say much.
Rather we want to know, relatively, who is problematically violent and who is problematically selfish with regard to whatever the mutual goal is.
Sounds more like statecraft than philosophy to me.
The definition excludes a difference that does not replace why the difference has been used up to now. General terms lose their value when they apply equally to all particulars without a way to make distinctions amongst those particulars. "All men have flesh" is not to say, "Flesh is all that men are." As a matter of contrast, the use of the terms self/selfless is similar to other contraries which provide a way to distinguish what is experienced through a range of differences. That was my first point:
Quoting Paine
The reference to La Rochefoucauld is to point out that none of his Maxims do anything without the distinction. Your definition erases his observations. Thus, my second point:
Quoting Paine
Hanover underlined the paucity of this generality as a way of describing our world. I jumped on the wagon by noting your definition does not give us any leverage understanding actual experiences:
Quoting Paine
When Copernicus changed his standpoint from that of Ptolemy, he was looking at the same heavenly bodies. Your definition says they are the same but there is no corresponding discovery proffered.
"Jack turned on the light" is neither selfish nor unselfish.
What makes it selfish or unselfish is the intent with which Jack turned the light on. And that is a description of the act, not the act. Jack turned on the light to see what was going on - done for himself. Jack turned on the light so that Jill could see what was going on - done for Jill..
Point being, you seem to be in need of a broader theory of action in order to understand what is going on here.
Your use of "my" in that sentence makes your statement irrelevant. If you change it to "the," you'd be wrong. If you argue that an act is selfish if it is performed out of a desire to be a good person, you would also be wrong. "Selfless" does not mean the person receives no benefit from the act. Words are defined by usage, not by literally putting the words "self" and "less" together and then claiming it must mean an act where the person performing it receives no benefit whatsover.
Self-interest.
Quoting Banno
Intent to assist others agency serving his own will and limbs to turn on the switch. He did it to both save himself from subconsciously feeling bad for not assisting, and serve himself his agency to act.
Perhaps because there's in none.
Not necessarily. It could just be an unconscious habit at this point, not unlike putting the toilet seat down after use or putting the cap back on a bottle after a sip.
What defies explanation is how you assume every person on Earth both alive and who ever did live once, and who ever will live just automatically has to have a mind that works the way yours does, exactly as it does. This is just not realistic, at all.
Your brain adapting to a pattern for your future convenience self-interest.
Quoting Outlander
Just like I don't measure everything in the universe but know that (a+b)²=a²+2ab+b².
But how can that be agency, if unconscious or otherwise a non-consciously formed arrangement the human mind forms automatically with no say or input from the "self" or conscious mind?
Is that not an example of a truly "intent-less" act? Like nail-biting or some other nervous habit? Sure, you can realize "whoa, wait a minute I'm biting my nails" and stop at your leisure, but it was still initiated without a conscious agent behind it.
Agency requires awareness and intent, whereas the prevailing understanding of the human mind is that the unconscious can never be made conscious. So riddle me that.
Quoting Copernicus
That still doesn't comport or explain an intrinsic, large part of your theory, which seems to suggest every other person's brain on Earth who lives, ever lived, or ever will live, somehow must respond and behave the exact way yours does.
You are pressing the switch in your sound, awaken mind.
Quoting Outlander
Reflexive actions are done biologically for your own good. They're self-serving.
Quoting Outlander
Your entirety is your self. Whether mind (agency) or body (reaction).
Quoting Outlander
Natural law, not personal experience.
Hm. I'm sure the person is aware of it, but the arising tendency or intent to, in some cases, might be reflex of habit, thus never once being a thought that enters the "thoughtsphere" or "conscious mind." That's what an unconscious reflex or habit means.
Quoting Copernicus
I'm sure many if not most have benefit, but now the person is completely removed from the equation thus eliminating all possibility of such sort of acts being either "selfish" or "selfless" since their is no agency. It never once crossed or entered the persons mind until said action long already occurred.
Anxiety or nervousness that makes one stand out and otherwise miss out of social opportunities doesn't seem "for [one's] own good." To name one example. Same with stuttering. And a few other non-willed actions that are generally lumped under "nervous tendencies."
Quoting Copernicus
Again, selfishness requires intent, which requires agency. Otherwise we're just talking about cellular responses, not unlike photosynthesis. Was that your intent?
Quoting Copernicus
So, what is your point then? What is the point of the OP? That organisms, no matter how simple (one-celled amoeba) or complex (human beings) perform actions that generally offer benefit to said organism in just about any and all scenarios? That's common knowledge; a solution in search of a problem.
I mean, what's next. An OP about how fire is bad if touched by most organisms?
Mind isn't the whole of the person. Body can't be sidelined. Agency requires both (not necessarily in synergy; can be done independently).
Quoting Outlander
It is. It reduces the stress and helps you relax.
Quoting Outlander
Your bodily functions (whatever causes stutter) execute full agency (even if against your mind, i.e., your willingness to talk smoothly).
Quoting Outlander
Why? Intent is mental. Function is physical. Both constitute the self.
Quoting Outlander
That's a fact supported by everyone, unlike my OP, which is still being debated.
Selfish people no doubt experience the same reward when they perform acts of greed and meanness and bullying. The difference is not in the hormonal reward, but in what acts stimulate the hormonal release. By focusing on the same reward that follows altruistic and selfish acts, you eliminate the distinction. Clearly, to you, the distinction is not important. Fair enough. But you can't prevent other people finding the distinction important.
No doubt people who harm themselves (cutting themselves, starving themselves) experience some sort of hormonal reward. You would no doubt call those acts of self-interest in the same way and ignore all the reasons why such actions are problematic and fail to understand why other people want to help, not merely observe. Addicts perform actions that are similarly harmful to themselves, and experience a certain reward. For the rest of us, it is not about the reward, but what stimulates the reward.
Your way of looking at these actions does not enable you to see such actions as problematic. That's your prerogative. Other people see things differently, and they are entitled to their view even if you cannot understand it.
Quoting Joshs
Yes, but I think it is important to add that the differences at stake here are not about those rewards as such. They are about what gives us personal satisfaction, emotional fulfilment and meaning. People find those things in different ways, and that is where the moral questions arise.
Quoting Joshs
In a sense you are right, of course. But that way of putting it doesn't distinguish what's going on from individualistic self-interest. It's more complicated than that. When I empathize or sympathize with someone else's predicament, I do not lose sight of the fact that it is not me that is sleeping in the streets.
Yes.
That's on top of the fact, as already pointed out, that the conception of "selfless" as literally meaning having no concern for the self whatsoever, is nowhere related to what the word actually means.
(NB: I would guess some dictionaries might give a very terse definition, that implies no concern for the self, but they would also probably define words like "monopoly" or "democracy" in similar simple terms that would imply they don't exist either, if taken literally)
So if you want to create a term that means a willful action that's not willed, and not even originating in biology, possibly even causality...then sure, that doesn't seem to exist (or even make coherent sense). I'm with you on that.
Meanwhile back in the real world, people can be motivated by a desire to help others, putting their own needs second (within reason), and that's what people actually mean by the term selfless.
...people call mass "weight".
That mistake is probably due to the opinion that they're acting in their self interest, whether they know it or not.
And I believe you grasped what I meant here.
Every thread now is just pithy responses. Why are you on a discussion forum, if you're unwilling to discuss the points being put to you?
Anyway, I'll give your response the courtesy you didn't give mine.
The difference with "weight" is that both the technical and colloquial meanings of weight are useful self-consistent terms, used by people speaking English to refer to actual phenomena.
Whereas the idea of "selfless" meaning very literally having no concern for the self, and not even having any biological basis for the behaviour, isn't a term anyone actually uses. Outside of threads like this, that is.
Threads claiming that there is no such thing as a selfless act is the only time we seem to encounter this extreme meaning of the term.
Say we take the example of a man spending all his money on a flash car and fine clothes while his children go hungry...we'd call that selfish, right? Because that person was satisfying his want of nice things and putting that ahead of others that depend on him.
However, if we flip it, and talk about a father that sacrifices because he wants the best for his children, suddenly we can't talk about his wants and motivation in this simple way.
No, we instead now need to go super reductionist, and try to find neurochemical underpinnings, or even the whole evolutionary history of the species, to find an agency-free description.
IMO you can't have it both ways: if you want to take the agency out of selfless acts, you need to do the same for selfish acts and claim there's no such thing as a selfish act either.
A man is working a hand pump. A simple physical description. What is his intent?
Is it to replenish the water supply? Is he exercising? Is it to mix the poison so as to kill the town's population? Or is he just amusing the kids by making funny shadows on the wall behind him?
Notice well that the intent is at a very different level to the action. The very same act can have different intentions under different descriptions.
All you have done is to notice that any given action might be described in selfish terms. It simple does not follow, as you seem to suppose, that therefore all actions are selfish.
Yes.
Yes. My point was that words can have dumb meaning.
Serving his desire and agency to protect his children.
All serving the self. I can't see where not.
Quoting Banno
Your OP is a signal to nefarious actors to institute their plans. We know this, despite your denials and protests. We can see the reality behind your post, and there is nothing that you might do to convince us that you are not part of the conspiracy.
Just to update you, the OP, or father of the discussion as to where the rest of us have reached or what the metaphorical child has grown into:
Most actions are self-serving either by intent or biological inclination that offers benefit or potential of benefit.
However not all actions, including misspeaking, unconscious reflexes or habits, have intent, which is required to constitute "selfishness."
The title of the OP is false. You have admitted multiple times that not all actions are selfish or self-serving (Which you did change from selfish to self-serving after being given comeuppance, mind you).
Quoting Banno
This is a good example because, he might not care about the kids, personally, or kids in general, and just does it because it's "what society would want." Perhaps he couldn't care less about whether that society lives or dies or otherwise ceases to exist. You might argue, okay, sure, then he just did so to pass the time and make that moment a bit more interesting for his enjoyment. But you don't know that. You're one man with one brain, and you still fail to realize there's 8.2 billion people with 8.2 billion brains whose might work just a tad differently than yours. How is this so hard to understand?
Straight out of Anscombe.
But yes, the common problem in @Copernicus's threads is the failure to acknowledge the other.
Quoting Outlander
Look.
Quoting Outlander
Quoting Banno
Quoting Copernicus
More secret messages.
I can judge the nature of a nitrogen electron from Andromeda from the nature of an electron of oxygen here on Earth. The foundational nature is universally uniform.
Same with human selfishness.
But you don't know that. You don't know any of that. Sure, it's a reasonable guess. You might even base a theory on that and it be proven correct. But you haven't done any of that, nor do you have the capability to. It might even be considered JTB (justified true belief), though I'm not sure as I don't read or rather immerse my virgin mind in established philosophy. But that's still just a guess. A reasonable one. A rational one, sure. But a guess all the same.
Everything is a leap of faith. True reality is forever unknown. But detected patterns often show uniformity.
I can judge that the chooks have laid an egg by their chortles. Therefor the villainous deed in which you are complicit starts next Tuesday.
Fried eggs, therefore, are a leap of faith. Cool.
Quoting Copernicus
So the true reality is that true reality is unknown...
Quoting Copernicus
No. I'm pointing out your part in the conspiracy. The more you deny it, the more certain we are of your complicity.
Just as you can point out the selfish reality behind any deed.
I hope you remember the spoon scene in The Matrix.
Quoting Banno
Exactly. It doesn't deny, only skepticizes.
Quoting Banno
How am I related to the chicken?
A crap film.
Quoting Copernicus
It's a performative contradiction.
Quoting Copernicus
Ah! There's the proof! He denies it again!
Even if - and I want to make this perfectly clear - even if there is no obvious relation between you and the chook, that does not say that there is no relation.
Just as you say all our deeds are selfish.
If you meant from the aspect of causality (butterfly effect), then sure, we're related. But if you meant uniformity like electrons, then you're missing the point.
It's not.
"I'm sure everything is unsure" = Everything is unsure.
"I'm unsure if everything is unsure" = Everything is unsure.
Does the relationship between whatever a "self" ought to reference and the "body" (of that self) have any relevance to the opinion that "all acts are selfish acts"?
There is sometimes the anomaly of conjoined twins who share a composite body, like Abby and Brittany Hensel. Maybe we would say two selves (individuals with distinct personalities, minds) share one body, while one controls left side and the right side.
In accordance with your OP, they both are always acting in their individual self interest all the time. Mutual coordination/agreements, trade-offs for the shared self (as shared body), is just a "refinement of selfishness". In one sense they share a self and another they don't.
This same kind of relationship extends to people who do not share a body in the conventional sense, but are embedded in ecological environs/processes (dependent functional relationships between each other that comprise "organizations").
How do we assign what belongs to self (as body, or otherwise) and what doesn't in terms what goes into instantiating whatever the "self" is?
Someone could do an act and not really know what caused them to act. They may form a rationalization/narrative that explains their action, but the motivation could actually be caused by something completely unknown to them. Suppose a benign brain tumor enhances the reward for gambling in a person towards self-destruction. For the person the desire/reward of gambling might align with their desire/will at one point in time and be against their desire/will at another. They know with respect to a future condition they'd be better off if they could inhibit their impulse yet they always succumb to the act.
What goes into instantiating the self goes beyond the limited awareness of any self.
Well-structured post. Still, I agree with several critiques made by @Count Timothy von Icarus, @Mijin and @Banno. The argument equivocates between different senses of "selfish" for its plausibility, and it does not take into account the intent or aboutness that I believe is highly relevant for determining if an act is selfish or not.
Quoting Copernicus
This is questionable. It seems trivially true that our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and impulses are dependent on our minds, but that does not mean that our thoughts, feelings, perceptions and impulses are about our minds. One could argue that a person can be motivated to relieve another person's pain by perceiving a person in pain and then having certain emotions and beliefs in response that makes them act without this making their act selfish. Those defending altruism typically don't reject that a mental cause plays a role in a person making an intentional action. So I don't see how our ultimate motive being selfish follows.
Something can be caused without that cause being what that something is about. To take a photo, light that bounces off objects must be filtered by the internal mechanism of the camera, but that does not mean that the photo is about the camera's internal mechanism.
The "causal view" of aims has strange implications about ultimate motivation. Why stop at internal states if motivation is merely based on causal connection? My parents having sex plays a causal role in my current act of writing these sentences, but I don't think that means that my ultimate motivation in writing these sentences is about my parents having sex.
Quoting Copernicus
Such acts may be correlated with activation in the brain's reward centers, but that does not show that having a pleasurable experience is the agent's aim. Sweating is correlated with me jogging, but that does not mean that my aim with jogging is to sweat. "Pleasure" may be a side-effect (even a necessary one) of other-regarding actions without collapsing into being self-regarding.
Yes, we'd need a standard definition for "self".
Two straight lines can't intersect at more than one point. No act can be selfless.
There's no way around them. Some things are just like that (at least to our comprehension), like causality.
I see. Are you saying that your claim is true by the definition of the concept you're using? And you call this concept "selfishness" or do I misunderstand you?
You can use any symbols and sounds you want for the concept you're talking about, of course. However, why should others use "selfishness" for that concept? The term typically carries a cynical meaning. It is often used to critique individuals for failing to properly account for the interests of others because they focus on their own interests too much. For instance, when a person is told "you're being selfish!" it usually implies that the person is acting with insufficient regard for others. So the term your concept uses is normatively loaded due to this association.
When you write that selfishness is the foundation of all motivation, it sounds like you're making the cynical and controversial claim that human actions are always self-regarding, often at the expense of the interests of others. If you're merely stipulating the term "selfish" to cover all intentional action, you are free to do so, but I'm not sure what the utility of it is.