After giving a sizable amount of my money to a charity the other day, I walked away grinning from ear to ear. Then it hit me. For the first time in my life, I realized that I only give to reaffirm my usefullness in the world, or to make a deposit into my karma bank, or to improve an already existing friendship. I will give to a homeless man, but will be very angry at him if he doesn’t express a certain level of graititude even though his level of appreciation has no effect on how the money will ultimately be used.
Often, I will help friends with tasks they wuold be unable to perform alone - moving furniture for example. While I do get all warm and fuzzy from helping them, I know deep down that I’m only there because I would hope to expect the same level of helpfulness if I needed it in the future. Basically, I’m building up my karma bank so I can later feel rationalized in expecting others to help me. Either that, or I’m paying off an earlier favor, likely performed by someone totally unrelated to the current situation.
So, are even our greatest actions tainted with the smell of self serving indulgence or am I just a sociopath? Or, does the fact that I’m even concerned with keeping a positive karma balance prove that I am not totally self serving. Does humanity exist relatively peacefully and harmoniously (for the most part) in spite of this flaw or because of this flaw? Or, is it a flaw at all?
I would say that the vast majority of decisions are made on this basis. But not all. I do not believe are sociopath.
Ayn Rand would of argued that all actions are done because of self interest.
I believe some actions are actually done for others but they are rare.
How can any action not be self-serving and biased? Either it is done for your own good, or done for your own ego’s good. Eg, to make you feel better. Even if you were to, say, dive into a vat of acid to save a three year old, insuring your instant death, it could be considred a self-serving and biased action, because if you had not done it, you would have regretted it for the rest of your life.
First, if you define “self serving” broadly enough, naturally all your actions will be self serving. That’s because of the broadness of the definition, not because you are selfish, however.
As for “building up the karma bank” as a reason for your actions being self serving; that and similar arguments are based on the common assumption that being good is stupid, and evil superior; that being good is a sacrifice. In reality, being good more often than not is also in your long term self interest; it benefits you, because being good is a better strategy. And it feels better because we evolved to help each other, because cooperation is generally a better strategy. Working for the general welfare is typically a good idea, because we all live in the same world, and because people who behave that way are generally better neighbors.
If you define altruism as only behavior that is uniformly unpleasant, unsatisfying and benefits you in no way, you won’t see that very often because it’s generally stupid behavior, not because people are selfish.
It’s been years since I studied this, so I’ll probably get it wrong, but I’m reminded of Stanislavski’s “System” for actors.
Stanislavski was an actor, director, and drama theorist who developed a Theory of Acting that is still studied today. One of its major tenets was that every scene can be subdivided into units – called “beats” – each with its own motivation (“action”) and limitation (“obstacle”). If a given beat had more than one action, you hadn’t subdivided it enough. A beat could be half a second long, or it could be ten minutes long: it was all about a character’s motivation and the steps taken toward that goal. Beats could be grouped together into overarching units (I can’t remember the proper term), and those overarching units could themselves be grouped.
Part of an actor’s preparation (if he is following Stanislavski’s System) is to go through his script, divide his part into beats, and ascribe an “action” to each beat, and to each grouping of beats. That is, decide what is motivating him at every given moment.
And here’s the important part: if an action for a beat, or for a grouping of beats, was not self interest, you were doing your analysis wrong. According to the most popular school of acting in history, the motivation for everything a normal, healthy human does can be traced back to self interest, and anything else is unrealistic.
I think to some level it would have to be or we wouldn’t do it.
I volunteer at a home for seniors and frankly I am there because I LOVE to talk to these people. I’m a huge WWII buff and a lot of them are from that era or even before.
And I can talk to them for HOURS and HOURS. They tell me what Chicago was like, and what it was like in WWII and radio and movie stars.
I’m sure I get way more out of it than I’m giving.
I always thought this whole assertion was incredibly strange. I’ve often done things (admittedly they never required a great deal of effort directly) to help other people like giving a few dollars to a charity or holding doors (to a fault) for people without feeling
anything. I just thought “it makes sense, so why shouldn’t I?” When I really think about it I don’t think I really have a justification, but I never felt anything. People always talked about how you should give “to make yourself feel good” but I never understand. Maybe I’m just a weirdo with an abnormal brain, but in my experience, the assertion that every action is self-serving is total nonsense.
Maybe. But the standard response (due to Joseph Butler) is that if doing good stuff makes you feel good (and failing to do it makes you feel bad), then that shows you care about something other than your own well-being. After all, if all you really cared about was your own welfare, then failing to help the child wouldn’t bother you, and helping others wouldn’t make you feel good. Ergo, you are not motivated solely by selfish considerations.
“self satisfaction” is the most common form of shoehorning “self-serving” into most charitable actions usually to most forms of anonymous donations like blood.
The logical fallacy with this position is that it can never be proven. You can adhere to it as a religious position, or deny right and wrong entirely, but you cannot hold it as a logical or observed phenomenon.
It can’t be proven, or disproven, but how can you ever say any arbitrary action is not self-serving? The best you can say is that it’s not directly self-serving, I think.
The OP isn’t the first person to have this theory. I have heard it several times including some from respected academics. I don’t think it matters much in the real world but there are degrees of selfishness associated with supposedly unselfish acts. A car dealer that presents a billboard sized check to the local Childrens Hospital probably has multiple motives, some of which are self-serving. OTOH, a person that donates a kidney to a person that they have never met and never will meet is coming close to pure altruism.
I have to disagree with this. Their friends, family, and acquaintances will all know what the person did. There will probably be some amount of media coverage as well. Whether they any status boost from the actual recipient is largely irrelevant.
I do think every intention is ultimately self-serving, but this is not the same as being selfish. Helping yourself by helping others is just participating in the web of society. What we call “selfishness” is calculating the interaction in a way where the outcome is always obviously in one’s own favor. When people observe that you never help someone else unless the odds are very strong that you’ll directly benefit, it degrades your social stock and you’re deemed as “selfish”. It indicates that your own immediate gain is more important than what others think about you, which can result in ostracism.
That’s a long-winded way of saying that it’s okay to be selfish, but it’s wise to carefully manage the appearance of your intentions.
You could block all of that stuff if you wanted to especially if you are single and live away from your family. The media can’t have access to your medical records although the one person that I have heard of that did this did get media exposure by consent.
This is just just an extreme version of any type of anonymous donor and there are many out there who don’t tell anyone at all or expect anything in return. I am sure they feel good about doing it but that pushes the definition of selfishness over the edge IMHO.
I would disagree with Shagnasty’s hypo as well, but for a different reason.
If you anonymously donate your kidney to a stranger, and insulate the act from any extrinsic reciprocal benefit*, it is still self-serving. You’re doing it because you get a warm fuzzy feeling from the knowledge that you’re Helping Someone, or that you’re Doing the Right Thing. Any action taken in pursuit of that warm fuzzy feeling is self-serving. There is, as several have noted, nothing wrong with this.
Yes, this gets into the overbroad definition that Der Trihs warns about, but it’s still, IMHO, a completely valid take on individual motivation.
*Extrinsic reciprocal benefits: attention from the community, gratitude from the recipient, spiritual/religious returns, increased social status, probably others.