I agree with you. And I didn’t call charity selfish. What I did say was that every action stems from self interest, and in doing so disagreeing with Blaster Master, who claimed that there were “good” and “bad” reasons to do things and the “warm fuzzies” were a “wrong reason”. He seems to think that the “right thing” shouldn’t be done for pleasure, or it would be the for the wrong reasons–I still maintain that any reason anyone does anything, good or bad, is for pleasure.
Not true. I make some decisions based on pure random chance - the flip of a coin.
Maybe it’s a difference of perception. As far as I’m concerned, nothing in nature is truly random (not even random number generators!) except humankind. Humans do things for plenty of reasons or even no relevant reason at all. They might hand out fluffy cuddly bunnies to strangers because they think Red Skelton is perfectly cromulent. They mig kill themselves because the pizza delivery sent it earlier. People do things for all reasons and no reason.
However, getting beyond that, I think you are making a mistake of confusing raw self-interest with moral training. Yes, I think giving and charity are a good things. Which I why I give and do charitable acts. But it isn’t direct self-interest as such, but rather an appreciation of what really is good. And I certainly believe that self-interest isn’t neccesary to make such a choice.
I, of course, deny moral relativity entirely.
In this world we are primarily responsible for ourselves so in a real sense taking good care of ourselves, educating ourselves, pursuing goals, is making a contribution to society as a whole. It may be self serving but not in an entirely negative sense. If you are self serving with principles such as don’t lie, cheat, steal, don’t achieve your goals by deliberately harming others, then you may be self serving in the non negative sense. Healthy honest competition can help us strive to do better.
There’s a great book on the subject of helping called How Can I Help? It explores the nature of helping. One point it makes is that sometimes we need the label of helper so we step in and do what we think is helpful without really being sensitive and attentive to the individual. In order to maintain our label of helper we need someone to be needy or helpless. So, sometimes being a helpful person is a form of selfishness.
If you believe in Karma I suppose any act where you are trying to unselfishly build up good Karma might be seen as selfish.
I tend to break it down into positive and negative with actions containing some elements of both but striving to be more positive. Feeding the hungry is positive. So is starting a business and giving people jobs. Helping someone through a crisis with emotional or financial support can be positive but enabling someone to continue very bad habits may not be. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart.
I think there are some acts that are very {not totally} selfless in that people are putting others welfare above their own but that doesn’t mean being self serving is always a negative. Being self serving with principles makes a real contribution to society as a whole.
Well, it’s true you get pleasure from doing stuff (although surely you don’t get pleasure from everything you do; that flies in the face of human psychology. Surely you can think of plenty of stuff you do that doesn’t give you pleasure.) But I don’t think that settles the issue of self-interest. The question is this: from what do you derive pleasure? If you only derive pleasure from actions that advance your personal welfare, then you are purely self-interested. If you also derive pleasure from actions that advance the welfare of others, then you are not entirely self-interested.
Slee
Let me be clear by saying that the I don’t necessarily dislike everything Ayn Rand and objectivists say, but I do dislike the fact that they promote selfishness (or greed) as a virtue and altruism as a vice. Correct me if I’m mistaken about this being their position. I’m not claiming that objectivists think cheating and so on are good things. What I am saying is that when most people talk about selfishness, the great majority of the time they are talking about people doing questionable things to benefit themselves at the expense of others. So when an objectivist comes along and praises selfishness, the average listener sees this as an endorsement of some very questionable tactics.
Some socialist types will complain about greed even when it does involve making money by producing better products at better prices or making profits from risky investments. I disagree with them and, I assume, agree with you that this sort of “selfishness” is fine.
It may be that technically objectivists disapprove of non-productive ways of amassing wealth but when I hear them this message gets lost in the fine print. What I see instead is more like simplistic praise of business and wealth and dogmatic loathing of government. John Stossel, who I generally like, had a special called “Greed” in 1998. He’s a fan of Rand, but he didn’t make any distinction between good and bad greed. He opened the show in front of the Biltmore Mansion and, IIRC, essentially praised George Vanderbilt for building it. At the end of the show he trashed Ted Turner for donating money to the United Nations. George Vanderbilt inherited his wealth and squandered it on self-aggrandizement. He contributed very little. Turner basically earned his money (tho I imagine he played some games in the process) and donated a bunch to help desperately needy people. Favoring Vanderbilt over Turner may not reflect “real” objectivism, but in practice the message being sent is morally objectionable.
Objectivists/libertarians usually make the assumption you do that wealthy people earn their money by doing valuable things. Sometimes this is true, but I made my list of objectionable tactics exactly because there are so many other ways big money is made. Bill Gates is a fairly talented guy, but the reason his fortune is so large is monopoly. Operating system software is a natural monopoly. People don’t buy it because it is the best but because they want to be compatible with everybody else. Investment bank CEO’s certainly didn’t make their fortunes by contributing to the public good. By and large they made them by suckering people into buying bad securities, a form of deception. I suspect many wealthy people got that way by kissing the right asses (cronyism) and cleverly manipulating people (deception). We should also remember businessmen are not lovers of healthy market competition. They’ll happily use government influence (Halliburton?) or any other trick they can to avoid competition. They’re selfish - they’re not idealists.
If objectivists made it clear they only support selfishness in a very limited sense, I wouldn’t be objecting, but from what I’ve seen, they don’t make that clear.
Yes, you are partially mistaken. Ot at least overly simplifying Rand’s philosophy. Yes, she advocates a similar “greed is good” philosophy to Gordon Gekko in the sense that greed for personal wealth, life, happiness, etc is the fundamental driver that motivates people to action.
Altruism is a “vice” when it is used to force people to act against their interests out of a misplaced sense of guilt or obligation.
IOW, just because I have and you need is not justification enough for me to give it to you.
Altrusim and greed are not mutually exclusive. For example, in Rand’s world, I may choose to open a private hospital out of a sense of altruism. However I will still run it as a profitable business. That may mean I can’t serve all the patients I would like because of budget and supply constraits. Now some people may come in and cry “that’s not fair! His hospital isn’t helping EVERYONE!” Out of some misplaced sense of altruism maybe they enact a law forcing me to care for everyone. The ultimate result will be that the level of care will decrease as supplies and services are strained. Soon I will be out of business and then no one will get help.
That’s the problem. The average listener feels that those who are better off than they are must have done something underhanded to achieve that wealth. Their attitude is never “what can I do to increase my own value”. It’s usually “it’s not fair that he has more than me. He should share.”
Rand advocates free market competition. Even ruthless competition. What she did not advocate was dirty politics, subsidies, favoritism, dishonestly, fraud and other traits the average jerk associates with “greed” and “business”.
Vanderbuilt used his wealth to build a mansion creating jobs for architects, carpenters and construction workers. Turner basically just shit money away on people who are probable still just as poor today.
Either way, the theory is that you lift people out of poverty by creating jobs and jobs are created by turning ideas into reality. But the “altruistic” belief is that those with wealth should just give it to the poor because they are poor.
I would recommend reading Atlas Shrugged (if you have several months). Rand’s whole point is that the same things you complain about - cronyism, influence peddling, predatory business tactics - are the very things that are destroying society for everyone.
msmith537
I generally agree with your comments except for one point about Turner vs. Vanderbilt. It sounds like you saw the “Greed” show. Stossel did praise Vanderbilt because his money hired workers. But I ask myself, what did the UN do with Turner’s money? I doubt they put it under a mattress. I’m quite sure they pay people to do things like provide education, medicine and food. Either way, money gets circulated through the system, so employment stimulus is going to be a wash. The direct effects are very different though. In one case we have a huge status symbol where a few idle rich can enjoy themselves a little more effectively and in the other case a large number (perhaps hundreds of thousands) can get food, medicine, shelter, clothing, and education they desperately need. I have little doubt the UN squandered a fair share of the money, but they could hardly do worse than Vanderbilt.
I read “The Fountainhead” more than 40 years ago and “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” maybe 15 years ago, so my somewhat flawed recollection is that I was neither particularly impressed nor did I strongly disagree. My impressions of Rand are probably more from her followers than from Rand herself. I have a great respect for free market economics, but I’m sure that stems more from Adam Smith (who I didn’t read, but who greatly influenced my college microeconomics course) than from Rand. I’m not sure what of importance Rand had to say that goes beyond Adam Smith.
My altruistic belief is that we should encourage each other to work for the common good. That good includes our own. If we can make some money without hurting others, good. If giving money to a poor person means they spend it to get drunk, don’t “help” them. But if a small sacrifice on one person’s part can do a lot to help someone else, that should be encouraged. If a poor person sacrifices a few moments of his time helping a rich person escape from his burning Ferrari, he should. And if a rich person can prevent a hundred third-world children from dying of parasitic diseases by having one less Picasso in his collection, I think that should be encouraged as well.
And I don’t believe that my (or anyone’s) actions should be dictated, encouraged or discouraged by other people’s sense of “altruism”, “common good”, “sacrifice” or anything else. So many idiotic decisions are made because someone feels “it’s the right thing to do”.
I could prevent a third world kid from starving if I wanted to instead of buying a flat screen TV. I choose not to. I work hard and sacrifice my time so I don’t have to live like a poor person. I expect to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I’m not working to support a couple of mooches no matter how pitiable their plight may be.
Is it better for me to give money away to some poor starving family than say, hire a housekeeper? There is less hypocracy in hiring the housekeeper. If you are going to be dependent on me for your livlihood, we might as well establish a formal arangement where you provide me with a legal and ethical service in exchange for money. With the poor starving family, it’s simply based on my whim.
By some people’s reckoning Mother Teresa was one of the most selfish people in the last 100 years.
I think actions are either moral or they aren’t.
When a banker makes a million dollars at the cost of a billion dollars to society, that is both selfish and immoral.
When a banker makes a million dollars and in the process provides capital liquidity to an industry that is going to be a net positive to humanity, then that is both selfish and moral.
Too many bankers don’t give a shit about the difference between the two.
Those of us who argue that all actions are at their base driven by self-interest do this by not drawing an arbitrary distinction between the final motivation and the prior motivations. If you only take actions that have immidiate and obvious self-benefit, then you’re a jerk. If you do actions that help others at your own expense, then you’re not a jerk…but the question then becomes, why did you carry out the altruistic action?
If the answer is “because doing good makes me happy,” then you have a ‘selfish’ reason to do altruistic things. This is not bad - far from it! If everybody derived joy from altruism the world would be a better place.
If the answer is “because it’s better for the social order if people are altruistic”, then the question becomes…why do you want to do things that are better for the social order? If it’s because of the secondary benefits to onesself of living in a society of nice people, then that’s a ‘selfish’ motivation.
If the answer to was “because God likes seeing people be nice”, then the question becomes “why do you care what God likes?” If the answer to that is “because he’ll reward niceness,”, then that’s ‘selfish’. But if it’s “I just like doing things that make God happy”, then that’s also ‘selfish’ - it makes you happy.
The thing to note here is that not only is there always a ‘selfish’ motivation, it’s also the case that the base motivation is always ‘selfish’. This is because human beings aren’t irrational. Decisions are, fundamentally, cost-benefit analyses: people do things that seem like a good idea at the time. This is simply the way people work. And fundamentally speaking, this means that all actions that are taken are the result them seeming like a good idea to the person making the decision - good enough to trump other options. And these decisions are, at their core, made from the perspective of the person making them.
Thanks for articulating what I couldn’t.
Maybe, maybe not. There is a problem with a reasonable amount of charitable giving in that they just give shit to people and don’t actually do anything to *change *the situation. Turner gave a bunch of money to the U.N. The U.N. probably bought some food (good) but for it to be really effective they would need to do something that allows the people to get their own food (way better). Effective charity is not just spreading money around. It seems to me, though I haven’t actually researched it, that the U.N. is kind of effective at getting food to people but not very effective at getting people to the point where they don’t need the U.N. any more.
I think it depends on how you look at it. Giving charity to someone to help them learn to take care of themselves is great. I don’t think the U.N. is very good at that (based solely upon what I have read in the news). On the other hand, giving someone a job so that they can take care of themselves is better. The best solution to poverty isn’t giving away food, it is getting people employed* so they can take care of themselves.
Um, since you benefit from your ‘altruistic’ deeds (working for the common good) then it ain’t altruistic.
Slee
*Either for themselves or for a business.
@Begbert, why did you keep putting “selfish” in scare quotes?
Well, people are mostly rational–but egoism is a substantive and contestable theory of rationality. It assumes that when asking questions about final motivation, the answer will always be “Because it benefits me,” or some version of that (e.g., “It makes me happy.”) But that is just assuming that, “Because it benefits her” cannot be a rational final answer to the question, “Why did you do X?” And why should we immediate rule such final motivations out as de jure irrational, unless you are just going to define ‘rational’ as synonymous with self-interested?
Actually, this conversation is starting to run together separate questions: (1) What are people motivated by? (2) What is it rational for people to be motivated by? You seem to be arguing that since people are mostly rational, and it is only rational to act in your self-interest, then people act only act self-interestedly. But again, I think your middle premise is suspect: if I desire the well-being of others, why is it irrational to occasionally act on this desire (even if acting in this way doesn’t advance my purely self-interested desires)?
Because the word “selfish”, and virtually all its synonyms (or all of them that I can think of) tend to have a pejorative connotation. That is, when you say that a person’s altruism is motivated by an underlying selfish motivation, hackles start rising and people stop listening. The scare quotes are to hilight the fact that “selfish” and its insulting baggage probably isn’t the greatest term to describe the state of taking actions which are percieved as being the best alternative in some way from the analytical perspective of the person themself.
You misunderstand me - My position is that “Because it benefits her” cannot be a rational final answer to the question, “Why did you do X?” because it immidiately raises the question, “And why to you care if it benefits her?” Presumably a rational person has some reason for seeking to benefit others, and when you finish digging through the motivational strata, eventually you will find that the core of the matter is “I would like the results if I do not help her less than the results if I do”, which is a thin veneer over the base reason “I’m happier when things that I like happen, than when they don’t.”
Stating this is not an insult or an attempt to trivialize the inner desire to carry out altruistic acts. It is simply a recognition that the desire to carry out altruistic acts is a desire. People, by nature, seek to act on their own desires, for their own happiness - because that’s the criteria, the only criteria, a human has with which to assess and compare the merit of various actions on. You say you prefer the outcome of helping others than the outcome of something overtly selfish? Great! More power to you. But it remains the fact that by assisting others, you are satisfying your own preferences too - and that’s the reason you chose to do it rather than something else.
As a final note, I should add that I think that irrational actions are necessarily based in a ‘selfish’ cause as well (that is, that deep in the wrinkles of the brain, the brain had a reason for deciding the action was a good thing to do). The main difference with irrational actions is that it gets difficult to figure out what their reasons for doing things are, because the connections because their motivations and their actions may get pretty unintuitive to the average observer.
I was thinkig about this the other day. Came to another conclusion
Most actions which appear publicly selfless are grossly selfish. Most actions which are publicly selfish are at worst, honest and even rather humble self-interest.
A key observation was the self-interst cannot be defined solely as emotional or financial resources. Rather, people most desire power and fame than any other thing they can have, and would throw away fortunes in roder to have it.
Wait, you are putting in your own assumption here. You are assuming frm the start that people are selfish, and then finding a reasoning which supports that. Your conclusions, therefore, may not be correct and cannot be “valid” unless this assumption is correct. You cannot assume what you are arguing over. 
Likewise, when you say that the “desire” to carry out altrusitic acts is a desire, this would be correct… if you can show that such a desire exists. I would agree it does some of the time, but not all of the time. But I cannot prove it except from my own self, that I have done things I emphastically did not want to do and have not done things I emphastically wanted to do. And I am more than capable, if I wished, opr ignoring or rationalizing any guilt I might possibly have felt, which I probably wouldn’t.
This probably only holds for certain values of “publicly” - probably starting with “really, really public”, on up. Clearly, there are “publicly selfless” actions, like handing a ten dollar bill out your car window to a dude with a cardboard sign, which are clearly not done with the intention of gaining fame or acclaim. They’re certainly still motivated by some internal desire (most likely the desire to percieve onesself as generous or kind or unselfish), but the idea that all public acts of generosity are calculated machiavellian efforts to grab power and fame seems a bit extreme.
Nope - I acheved my belief about human motivation by observing peoples actions and speculating about their reasoning. Inevitably I found that without fail a person never takes an action which will not satisfy some overriding desire in themselves, be it to gain money, power, influence, happiness, self-image, excitement, whichever - at least to the degree that it can be satisfies these desires better than the alternative actions would be perceived to. I have never seen or observed an action that cannot be plausibly attributed to an inner need to pursue outcomes the individuals percieves as important to themself.
Everyone does things they don’t want to do, and fails to do things they do want to do - but never without a reason. Seriously - even you. Think about it. You didn’t say “Oh, look. A hundred dollar bill on the street. I really really want to take that, and can’t think of a reason not to, so I think I’ll just - ooh, a shiny car just drove by! I’ll just stare at that for a while…hmm, what was I thinking about?”
Nonsense. in such a situation you had “second thoughts”. A “mental conflict”. “Priorities”. Surely you’ve heard of these things. They’re conflicting mental desires duking it out in the storied halls of your cranium, each presenting an argument for and against specific actions. In this hypothetical your desire not to feel like a thief won, and the fact that it stood over your fallen greed with its gloves raised in triumph was why you left the money there, not because…well, whatever you think would be compelling you not to do the things you really want, besides having reasons not to.
Seriously, what cognitive mechanism do you suppose would enable you to choose between acts without a basis for comparison? The mechanism I propose is simple - all acts are assessed based on how much the person in question likes an outcome, scaled using bad mental math by the estimated probability of a given action achieving the outcome. You are claiming that the person does not base their comparisons based on how much they like the outcomes - which seems to me robs you of any way of choosing between actions at all.
Post snipped :
The question becomes this: If you did things you did not want to do, why did you do them? If you passed up things you wanted to do, why did you pass them up? Surely you did/did not do those things for some reason, correct?
Slee