In an absolute sense, probably very rare. To be altruistic I think by definition, to be regardless of personal interest or satisfaction to commit an act of overall good. So a person who donates to the Red Cross out of emotional gratification may just as well be a bit of self-indulgence to boost their esteem as society would put them if they do/or not observe them, but if a person sees it as a problem waiting to be solved, attributes it like a math problem, no personal gain in any form, some kind of loss on their part, then I think so.
I think Kant addressed this, a man who acts because it is moral thing to do and finds no gratification, may even hate doing the action, is still morally superior to one who does the same out of kindness or emotional reasons.
But I think we would be all be more altruistic, if we had brain nerves interwoven between each other and we could see the world from each others shoes, memory, personality, and emotional states at any given time. Actions would be purely empathetic, selfish motives would become easier to distinct.
To include such phenomena as "emotional gratification" within the sphere of self-interest, is to be too clever by half. It suggests an intellectual sterility which would subordinate all phenomena to a rational-mechanistic framework within which virtue by definition cannot be the prime mover.
In other words, instead of viewing human behaviour as such, we are reducing it to formulae and cliches.
I've suggested once and again, that self-interest is not an explanation for human behaviour, it rather raises the questions for it.
The question is not whether our actions are bound by self-interest, but what we believe our self-interest to be.
This is a very difficult question because of the indeterminancy of the conscious mind. So perceived, nothing is fixed and sacred to self-interest. Not self-preservation. Not preservation of race and kin. Certainly not sexual reproduction. Self-interest seeps through all categorical explanations of biological or social science. It would be more appropriate to say that the very term "self-interest" means little or nothing.
Awww come on we all know you switched the Halloween work date because a. UR A LOSER AND HAVE NO PARTIES TO GO TO!! and b. u wanna bang the girl...but what you don't realize is c. u just hurt ur chances by showing weakness u should have d. lol'd at her for having to work on halloween
donating money to charity anonymously and telling no one about it but obviously feeling good about yourself= altruistic behavior?
if you think the answer is yes then it exists, if the answer is no then it doesn't exist...its all about the semantics and implications of the word altruism, in my mind there is a good reason or good effect(upon the person doing the behavior_ for every single kind act people do, whether it is intended or not. so no, altruism doesn't exist and i don't think you can say mothers doing anything for their kin is altruistic because blah blah passing on genes blah blah for the greater good of the species.
i mean a mother sacrificing her life in a battle to the death with an enemy species trying to eat her kid. sure its altruistic to the kid but on the flip side it's selfish to the enemy species cuz that enemy species is just hungry trying to feed it's kids too!
See all this awesome stuff other animals do for each other, like meerkat's watching out for hyenas for each other we don't know if the guy who alerts everyone on the hyenas gets a bonus later. All we know is that they're cooperating to survive, without understanding how the 'other half lives' we can't really compare our decision making to theirs, and if it even exists.
I think there is a huge difference between not being able to say "no" and being altruistic. I just cant refuse if someone asks me for help.
Its hard to really define whats altruism, but if you see it purely as behavior having as goal to improve the welfare of some guy that you are completely emotionally neutral to (or you dont even know in personal), then yes, altruism truly exists.
And btw I see the altruism entirely as a subject of the economy
If you want to talk about evolution, at least in many species of animals there's a balance between group selection and individual selection. Take a pride of lions: The more they share and help each other, the more likely that entire pride is going to survive and pass their genes on. However a specific lion in that pride can "cheat," taking advantage of the selflessness of others to enhance its own fitness. But if too many lions become cheaters, then the fitness of the pride breaks down and they are all in danger of dying.
In humans today we aren't closely genetically related to most people an altruist would help, but we aren't exactly obeying the same forces of natural selection that put those genes there in the first place (when groups of people were much smaller and genes would be much more intermingled).
On October 23 2009 21:19 MoltkeWarding wrote: To include such phenomena as "emotional gratification" within the sphere of self-interest, is to be too clever by half. It suggests an intellectual sterility which would subordinate all phenomena to a rational-mechanistic framework within which virtue by definition cannot be the prime mover.
In other words, instead of viewing human behaviour as such, we are reducing it to formulae and cliches.
I've suggested once and again, that self-interest is not an explanation for human behaviour, it rather raises the questions for it.
The question is not whether our actions are bound by self-interest, but what we believe our self-interest to be.
This is a very difficult question because of the indeterminancy of the conscious mind. So perceived, nothing is fixed and sacred to self-interest. Not self-preservation. Not preservation of race and kin. Certainly not sexual reproduction. Self-interest seeps through all categorical explanations of biological or social science. It would be more appropriate to say that the very term "self-interest" means little or nothing.
I don't know man your trying to demolish Hobbes, Miller, Marx, Nietzsche, the very core of universal egoism, evolutionary biology, an aspect of psychology and sociology in one fell swoop. (not saying my argument is a certain thing, I know its flawed, but reducing it down to indeterminable properties in a short paragraph, and concluding an argument that has been going on for centuries is..too clever.)
I'm very tempted to think your a dualist, not that there is anything wrong with it intellectually, but I don't want to go down that road as I don't have a sufficient and formal knowledge of it, if you would be so kind to entail proofs to your claim, its interesting to me.
On October 23 2009 18:31 zeppelin wrote: There are many people who make their charitable donations anonymous. You could argue that they're doing it for the "reward" of a good afterlife, but I'm sure there is at least one nonreligious person who has given to charity anonymously.
altruism definitely exists among family members (and from an evolutionary standpoint it makes sense that it does)
reciprocal altruism (I act altruistically in the hopes that I later benefit from the altrustic actions of another person) is something I also think exists to a limited extent.
On October 23 2009 18:26 Sadistx wrote: Of course it exists. Mother's instinct towards her child for the first couple of years is probably the most common example. .
Acutally, that's learned through society more than anything. Go look at how rich families took care of their loved children in the early 18th and 19th centuries. They'd send them off to surrogate mothers who'd care for them, breast feed them, etc until they didn't require as much care every waking second of the day
altruism certainly exists though. the people who deny it always cite shit like bill gates donating money because of the pr gain and tax credits. let's fucking see anyone clunk down 3$ mill for a bunch of greedy assholes you dont know.
how about people volunteering at animal shelters? helping coach kids sports? there's a ton of things that are purely altruistic
On October 23 2009 21:19 MoltkeWarding wrote: To include such phenomena as "emotional gratification" within the sphere of self-interest, is to be too clever by half. It suggests an intellectual sterility which would subordinate all phenomena to a rational-mechanistic framework within which virtue by definition cannot be the prime mover.
In other words, instead of viewing human behaviour as such, we are reducing it to formulae and cliches.
I've suggested once and again, that self-interest is not an explanation for human behaviour, it rather raises the questions for it.
The question is not whether our actions are bound by self-interest, but what we believe our self-interest to be.
This is a very difficult question because of the indeterminancy of the conscious mind. So perceived, nothing is fixed and sacred to self-interest. Not self-preservation. Not preservation of race and kin. Certainly not sexual reproduction. Self-interest seeps through all categorical explanations of biological or social science. It would be more appropriate to say that the very term "self-interest" means little or nothing.
I don't know man your trying to demolish Hobbes, Miller, Marx, Nietzsche, the very core of universal egoism, evolutionary biology, an aspect of psychology and sociology in one fell swoop. (not saying my argument is a certain thing, I know its flawed, but reducing it down to indeterminable properties in a short paragraph, and concluding an argument that has been going on for centuries is..too clever.)
I'm very tempted to think your a dualist, not that there is anything wrong with it intellectually, but I don't want to go down that road as I don't have a sufficient and formal knowledge of it, if you would be so kind to entail proofs to your claim, its interesting to me.
My main point was that the kind of reductionalism which a topic like this will inevitably excite tells us nothing new or interesting about human behaviour, and more often prevent intelligent questions from being asked than giving satisfactory answers.
The statement that all actions encompass self-interest is of course a truism, too obvious to argue for. Marx and Nietzsche, Mills and Bentham, Tocqueville and La Rouchefoucauld, Spencer and Freud, Goethe and Stendhal, Metternich and Machiavelli, Milton's Moloch, Belial, Mammon, Beezlebub and Satan all said so.
But did not Marx and Nietzsche have contrary, and even incompatible views as to what true and primary "self-interest" was? Did not Milton's devils, all in full possession of their wits, advocate very different avenues of revenge against God? The apocalyptic visions of early Christianity, the self-destructive impulses of German romanticism, the patriotism of English industrialists during the World Wars, the autoparalysis of Hamlet can all be rationalized down to self-interest, yet does it really aid our understanding of these phenomena?
Are not homo economicus, egoisme sacree, sexual and utilitarian theory not merely moral partialities for a particular sin? Centuries prior, Christian philosophy had already identified not the one, but seven such primary objects lurking within the human heart, and still insisted that they could be overcome by human altruism. A more sophisticated moral philosophy, in my judgement.
I am inclined to think that how we identify our self-interests is not separable from what we identify as virtues. Saying that our actions are self-interested cannot really remove the moral dimension behind all self-interest. Self-interest after all, isn't really the antithesis of morality. Only materialism is.
Now I have a few questions to ask about that, and I apologize if there are contradictions, I am tired from a test earlier today and I will revise some of these later: *And I have never taken a philosophy course, I only know from random readings, I am aware, and I'm trying to re-direct, condense it, but any answer is appreciated.
1.) Do you believe sin is an innate property of this moral proposition, a universal claim?
b.) What are these 7? Why are you so certain that Christian philosophy has enveloped these, questions these malignant capacity in humans? Why not the Avestan texts of Zoroaster on his conceptual belief of mainyu, Hume's claim that there are no substances, or even a Spinozean claim that deterministic naturalism is every fabric of existence, shared by one God, evil, merely incomplete ideas?
The very notion of an Abrahamic God feels restrictive, and I think epistemological religious experience basks on such invested ambiguity, that since we may never know the bottom of the well of all material things, there must be some kind of immaterial substance that substantiates it. An irreducible causality between mind, separate between substances, physical/mental, which may or may not even be there in the first place.
c.) Are you claiming that such "self-interest" is a necessary characteristic of subjective virtue on ontological grounds or sensory claims?
2.) Let's take the example of Libertarian freedom, psychological determinism, and psychological egoism. You always do as you desire, it reflects means, not ends, psychological determinism entails you always do what you want to do most, and psychological empiricism in our best interests, never act "altruistically" even if they all these co-exists on their own. Now this has empirical support, but not easily disregarded, we accept it at face value. True by definition, but we cannot see how people can have libertarian freedom on that account; so there, a basic attempt at compatibilism. And my regard is, how do you define this "human" altruism, what is its intrinsic sophistication, that is absent from all definitions of self-interest, conventional isms, and the cliche that religion is often a moral arbiter? Is it syncretistic? Can secular ethics, re-worded, persist in its place?
Altruism is a flawed concept. It's easy to explain why anyone would help their kids/family, and even someone sacrificing themselves for someone. ( if they value that persons life more than their own, thus even though they die they are still pursuing their own goals).
altruism is an arbitrary standard, anything you do for yourself is bad, but doing something for a random distant strangers is good? Do you really need to feel guilty for a hard days work? for trying to get by, for taking care of your own needs and aspirations? As long as you're not lying cheating stealing and threatening people with a gun, then you're probably doing something good. Altruism is bullshit for popes, kings, and queens to justify otherwise unjustifiable sacrifices from the people under them.
On October 23 2009 18:31 zeppelin wrote: There are many people who make their charitable donations anonymous. You could argue that they're doing it for the "reward" of a good afterlife, but I'm sure there is at least one nonreligious person who has given to charity anonymously.
EPT
