*Originally posted by Achernar *
I think, it’s the opposite. Generally, people are taught that while there are “impure” motivations and a modicum of selfishness, most individuals and society on the whole are good. It’s generally life experience that concretizes the feeling of cynicism.
But, you couldn’t know that, could you?
A truly selfless act, IMHO, doesn’t exist unless you are apathetic about its execution, result and feedback. In other words, random or “robotic” acts.
The problem rests on how you define “selfish” and “altruistic”. I agree with the view that anything we do intentionally, even jumping on a grenade, is done because we want to do it, so it could be defined as selfish. This is an extreme definition of selfish that effectively makes the word “selfish” useless for describing anybody’s behavior. On the other hand, we can define it in the way it has traditionally been used for centuries. That is that a person’s acts disregard the benefit of others.
A person who takes all the meat left on the platter even though others at the table haven’t had any would be called selfish. A person who is concerned that everyone gets their share is NOT selfish, even though they may have taken pleasure in the act because they liked the other people, or wanted to do the right thing, or even because they didn’t want to be accused of being selfish.
We can either define the term in an extreme way that is utterly pointless, or we define it in a useful way. I prefer the latter.
A corresponding argument can be made for “altruistic”.
I agree with what you’re saying, bullfighter, but I think in this case, the more precise definitions (“true” altruism) is what we’re going after. There’d be no point debating whether altruism exists in its more “useful” definition… we all know that it does.
As for the more narrow definition being useless, well, I don’t think it is. Maybe it’ll give us some insight (or at least some wild guesses) about who we are. Of course, on a day-to-day basis, I still use the practical definition and have no problem considering people altruistic in that sense.
It’s my sense that the extreme definition of “selfish” is in effect a tautology - everybody is selfish effectively by definition. I don’t think I can learn anything more by going down that road. If you can find some useful insights based on that definition, good. I’ll watch to see what develops.
I respect people who are unselfish by the “easy” definition and that’s what I would encourage as moral behavior. I find no problem with people who are selfish by the “hard” definition, since as far as I can tell, it’s impossible to avoid and there is no reason to try.
Exactly! Saying that everyone is selfish is equivalent to saying “Selfishness is a useless concept” - if everything can be interpreted as selfish, then what’s the point of calling anything selfish. It’s a form of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Sure, there’s a way that you can interpret the behavior of the guy who gives his life to save a stranger as “selfish”, but you’re using the word ‘selfish’ because of the unpleasant connotations of the normal use of the word, not to communicate anything useful.
Ditto.
If someone is 1% selfish, then they’re a “selfish person?” If they’re 0.00001% selfish, then they’re “selfish?”
Describing someone as “selfish” usually implies a huge amount of selfishness. I think the OP was really about a dishonest debating ploy: if someone is the tiniest bit XX, then we can declare that person to be “XX” (said while hoping that you miss the glaring logical fallacy they’re trying to slip by you.)
If someone is selfless, yet they also feel just slightly good when doing good deeds, then that person is… um… “selfless.” Trying to redefine that person as “selfish” is illogical. Or more likely, it’s just simply dishonest.
I wonder if there’s something to this. It’s been my impression that after people hear how much the world sucks from songs and nostalgic old people, they begin to parrot these same sentiments. But maybe it’s just human nature, and so many people come to this same conclusion on their own; it strikes me as odd. People with several dozen good friends can see a news report about a murder and use it as evidence that people are generally bad. They ignore their good friends that they know personally and focus only on people they’ve never met.
First of all, IMHO, good and bad are labels with respect to some human-imposed and hence artificial code of morality. But, humans aren’t like that. Self-interest and reconciliation of that self-interest with one’s conscience (value-assigned and accepted rules of morality) is what drives people and not just some straightforward principle of adherence to that conscience.
People with several dozen good friends won’t meet “bad” people. Simply, if they meet a bad person, that person isn’t likely to be retained as a friend. Hence, such encounters generally occur as limited-duration events (pickpocket on subway, alley mugging) You’re more likely to encounter these “bad” people if you deal with clients in some kind of business. where there’s no self-screening of clients. I’ve firsthand experience of this.
Another thing that might drive the notion that people are generally bad (if such a notion does exist) is that life is tough and it’s not “fair”. So, most people (unlike the self) conduct their life with actions outside the bounds of “good morals”. It would be very easy to percieve oneself as the “good” one with the “good circle of friends” (since having known one’s own background and constraints, it is easy to rationalise self and its actions as good) whereas categorizing strangers as ‘bad’ on the basis of a limited observation or encounter where one doesn’t know the context of that action in order to rationalise the stranger as ‘good’.