The problem is defining the self of the person in question and how he / she relates to society.
When it becomes a subjective judgment call regarding whether that person feels good / bad, then a “selfless” declaration is going to get fucked up in the hypothetical circumstances. The judgment will keep getting infinitely regressed within the circumstances. What is the judgment even based upon, society or the individual? Go from there. If it’s the individual, then selflessness can’t exist without losing the self, perhaps becoming ignorant / illogical somehow, new qualitative judgments of “self”. If it’s the society, then selflessness is just a vote or popularity contest. “Yeah, that guy’s selfless, because he donates to charity and reads to kids after school.” (It turns out he just wants to impress the girls and get some pussy, in retrospect, or so it may seem to me.)
It can go anyway, so: simplify, simplify, simplify.
Well put. Selflessness is a subjective idea, because we must first have an understanding of “self”. I believe it is based on both the individual and society, depending on whether you are benefiting yourself by physical means or emotional means (which are all based on society.)
Simply put, I know a human would not make a decision to do something if he/she didn’t feel that it benefited them in some way or another, but the true meaning of self is something even we won’t be able to understand. Thanks for the discussion folks.
‘self’ isn’t only a subjective concept (it can be) but it can also just be a term for an iindividual organisma way to talk about its behavior/function. If a prarie dog cries ‘predator’ and exposes itself to warn the pack its engaging in a behavior which hurts itself as an individual at the benefit to others. The prarie dog doesn’t need to have a sense of self to act selflessly. Infact being non self aware could make you act more selflessly, if you didn’t have proper fear for yourself.
either way selflessness can be defined as one organism helping another at cost to themselves and benefit to another, whether it has a sense of self or not
.
This is fucking golden Cyrene! I believe it’s 100% true. The less “self-aware” a person or creature is, the more that subject seemingly acts “selflessly”.
I don’t see how you can get around it though … an entity can’t be “selfless” without a “self”.
because ‘self’ can just mean an individual and its cognition and not just self-awareness or advanced theory of mind. When a cheetah challenges/runs off a lion to protect its cub, it risks its own life for another organism and not personal success. cheetah’s may have no sense of self but they have a sense about the danger of lions, because and a sense of protective care which causes it to risk its life/limb for a defeceless cub. it will get itself killed for a cub that will probably die if she’s hurt.
one organism doing so much to help another cheetah is ‘selfless’ because there is a huge cost to the mother.
like i just mentioned if organisms around you share your genes and if animals can detect that, theres pressure to help spread your genes even if its a cost to you. (because the two bodies share genes)
most humans aren’t fully self aware either, most people don’t realize we love family because of adaptation or all sorts of evolved tendency i’d still say selflessness exists. the cheetah scenerio can lend itself easily to humans as well.
What role does intention/motive play under that definition? I mean, what about the case “realunoriginal” mentioned with the guy doing charity solely because he wanted to improve his chances of getting laid?
First off, I understand I’m being pedantic. So let’s just get to it. Having a self-reflective sense of self is irrelevant here, so long as we’re agreeing that the action comes from a being that has desires, instincts, feelings of pleasure, and feelings of pain.
I think it really goes without saying that any act that any creature does is the act they feel best about. Either because it instantaneously brings pleasure or as sometimes in the case of humans because of a guess that’ the act will bring pleasure at some point in the future. 2. Pretty much every thing that any creature does, is done because they get something out of it. Without some purpose for the act, a creature would not act :. Right off the bat, selflessness is out the window.
But I guess it can still be salvaged if one were to show that an action benefited another more so than the actor. But even this relies on an subject independent system of value for actions. I mean to say that to an observer who witnesses a mother jump in front of a bullet to save her child, the act clearly benefited the child over the mother, but to the mother the act might give her something very valuable that the spectator who declares “Altruism!” just isn’t taking into account.
Like I said. I’m being pedantic here. And don’t get me wrong. I still think that the terms altruism and selflessness are good terms to use in a day to day basis, but when they’re argued for in a philosophical matter, they ought to be argued in lieu of the above mentioned.
Not neccessarily true. humans masturbate, some religious humans think its a huge sin, but are still compelled to do it, brief physical gratification for long-term emotional turmoil. natural selection produces organisms who have urges/desires to reproduce, it doesn’t really care if animals ‘feel’ good about the choices that they make, unless them feeling good has some kind of evolutionary value (which it often times does) but thats not a basis to say all animals ‘feel best’ about X option.
X option might terrify them more than say Z option, but they’re still propelled to act in X way. Some dogs clearly want to run in face-off’s with other dogs, instinct often-times has them holding their ground though. close mental evaluations of each don’t seem to suggest the dog feels best about its choice, its just instinctfully engaging in it.
except that organisms, most organisms go to great lengths/risks to seek out things which have little to do with pleasure, and when they have to do with pleasure, the pleasure is an evolved byproduct to keep these animals engaging in X action.
Plenty of animals may engage in self-deception/depression as a evolutionary tactic to see if say a mate is truly interested in them or X other reason. When couples fight about inane things, its not about pleasure, it might be about the female unconsciously testing how caring a male is though, which might bring pleasure at a future date. (though she is probably unaware of the evolutionary reasons and just feels pissed/ignored)
yes, but the creature might get ‘somthing’ out of it, only because it engaged it more cost to itself, at a benefit to another, because that helps propagate its genes.
This is confusing and kinda absurd. We can talk about this on a biological level, we don’t see animals throwing themselves to their deaths for no reason, when their cubs are threatened they do so or take risks they never would otherwise.
whether an animal or human gets emotional payoff for attacking a bear to protect its young is questionable. Plenty seems to suggest that people act without consciously thinking when their young are in danger.
see, the copout is applying a ‘maybe’ philosophical point that really doesn’t make any sense. A spectator crying ‘altruism’ when a mother jumps infront of a bullet isn’t making a random claim, like a philosophy student or whatever who says 'maybe they got somthing and we didn’t realize it!"
we’re talking about somthing which is 1. cross cultural in humans. (we all have it and engage in it when we have normal biology). 2. Its done throughout the animal kingdom again and again and again. 3. It makes perfect sense in light of modern biology.
yes you could make the arguement that a cheetah or human mother was getting an emotional pay-off, but that assumes that they’re making a choice and not ruthlessly spurned by instincts to ACT to PROTECT another organism. Again, we know that cross culturally mothers protect babies with a high degree of savagery, its dumb to assume that all mothers in the world get emotional or other payoffs for jumping in front of bullets or bears, they don’t engage in these types of *SAME actions, for anyone but close kin, usually children.
so if mothers/animals do get a payoff for saving their children, the emotional payoff is only *after engaging in the risk, they’re not getting emotionally or otherwise satisfaction while fighting a bear or child-killer, they might get it afterwords, but thats after the evolutionary directive of “PROTEcting ANOTHER ORGANISM AT coST TO YOURself”
Say, if humans or cheetahs or whatever are adapted for “PROTECT your babies at cost to yourself, because the babies have 50% of your genes” they may get pleasure from jumping in front of a bullet. but that pleasure is from engaging in the goal of 'COST TO SELF AT BENEFIT TO OTHER BODY WITH MY GENES"
if I see a tiger, and i scream to my wife and kids to run, my emotional pay-off at saving my family might be huge, but more likely its a calculated risk as in “i’m going to die I don’t want everyone to die with me for no reason” the emotional payoff *COMES from engaging in an action that helps propagate genes, not randomly.
you can say that people jump in front of bullets for the emotional rush of saving a child, but thats absurd. the rush is there because they’re engaging in that selfless action, not randomly.
I’m an animal and I may feel best about eating 4/5 hamburgers in a day, but I don’t because I know that the long term consequences would be a very early death.
That doesn’t mean that if i eat the hamburgers i’d be more emotionally upset about the outcome which is maybe heart disease in 30 years, I feel worse about the momentary lack of hamburger, but still, I don’t eat them.
not all animals engage in what ‘makes them feel the best’ somtimes animals, human animals at least, can engage in actions which make them depressed, upset, cranky or otherwise, because they can use clear thinking.
I get no emotional payoff nothing from not eating the hamburgers. I know I won’t die as early, but that doesn’t matter to me right now, I just now it will in say, 40 years.
when you can look into the future like some organisms can, immediate pleasure or pleasure can be overlooked for long-term gain, even if that gain doesn’t make a person happy.
I believe I know now why I disagree with your concept of selflessness; it seems that you are basing it on the sacrifice of self of any particular creature / animal. That’s fine, but then I would go on to say that your version of “selflessness” carries a directly implied “cost” of immediate death. Thus, an action isn’t officially selfless until a person literally gets killed for their “selfless” act. Perhaps that differentiation needs to be said and had. I believe it does.
The problem with calling a person “selfless” while they’re living then implies that the particular person is merely headed toward an end (death) that is based on altruism. In other words, the rich guy donating to charity seems to be headed toward “going to Heaven” for example, losing self in a socially acceptable way. However, from the self-ish standpoint, this guy could be subconsciously trying to get laid. This effect carries over. The prairie dog that “takes one for the team” may also just be “trying to get laid” insofar as the officially “selfless” behavior indicates (to females) that a male is part of their society and playing by their rules. He is selfless, because he seems selfless. But we don’t care about seeming; we want to know what’s actually happening. Apparently, the coin has two-sides.
I am going to stick with your earlier statement: selflessness / selfishness are both based on degrees of self-awareness. If the prairie dogs don’t have “selves” in the first place, then it’s a moot point to make. In fact, we’re judging their actions from a strictly human standpoint anyway. Who has selves, only humans? I will assume “yes” for now and run with it. So, to conclude this thought, from my point-of-view, people generally lack a “keen” degree of self-awareness. That X number of girls don’t recognize or understand that Mr. Banks is donating X millions for a new Women’s Center in order to get laid (in reality), then that doesn’t really change anything. Is Mr. Banks actually trying to get laid or is he just doing his (socially determined) “job”, which is to stick his head out in danger where it is necessitated biologically?
It’s interesting that the one Western thinker who attacked altruism harder than just about anyone else…
Was driven over the brink of madness by a human being’s derisive act of cruelty to an animal.
The problem here isn’t really the paradox of finding the “self” of “selflessness,” or completely eradicating any quid pro quo. To my mind, it’s about danger or risk, and whether we are going to say that ANY personal risk is altruistic, or whether only an EXTREME risk to personal safety qualifies as altruism.
But it simply doesn’t make sense to say that NO action is selfless, or that all actions are selfish – because then we’ve simply DEFINED every action as selfish, we haven’t said anything about what being selfish MEANS.
So instead of asking what a selfless act is, I want to know: what’s a selfish act?
It doesn’t cost ‘immediate death’ though. I am talking about any cost to one organism at the benefit of another. Theres risk of death in plenty of the situations, risk of injury, risk of starvation risk of whatever, but no, i’m not talking about only after a mother or organism has been brutally killed/beaten.
if a cheetah or human mother runs at a wolf to scare it away from their baby (or lion) or whatever, they are acting altruistically whether or not the other predator kills them. theres a risk envolved when a mother runs to shoo away a bear or wolf, the mother doesn’t get ‘anything’ back from running at the animal, we can all safely assume the mother is terrified and almost sick with fear (this isn’t a reward to the self that the mother would engage in. You don’t see females just randomly putting themselves at risk for any baby)
No, the action is selfless because its for the huge benefit of another organism, with no benefit or small benefit to the individual organism engaging in the act, food sharing towards babies for example is another, raising children who never return as much as they’re given and etc.
Thats not what I meant though. If I face down a tiger for my male son whose say, 3, i’m not gaining anything other than protecting another organism (my son) that i’m genetically inclined to protect. I may feel good about it, get an emotional reward, but thats *AFTER the altruistic act has been done, the altruism about protecting children is often spurned by fear and rage and protective instincts, not emotional rewards, the emotional reward comes AFTER the defence.
If I beat a child molester who was looking at my son funny (if i had a son) and ended up with a broken nose, thats altruism, i’m expending calories and huge risk in a physical fight with the person, to protect someone who can’t protect themselves, rage/fear for my child probably drove me to do it. After the act is complete, the the offspring is safe, emotional rewards may come, but no one does that shit *For the emotional rewards, at least not commonly.
Yeah sure, but this line of thought can’t possibly apply to biological aspects of morality/altruism that we see cross culturally and all through the animal kingdom like protecting ones offspring, feeding ones children, favoring kin over nonkin.
and if someone does somthing with an unconscious drive, i’m not sure if that makes it any less ‘selfless’. The guy is trying to get laid, *NOT for selfish reasons if you want to take unconscious urges into it.
guy wants the pleasure of sex he’s doing it *for himself.
but if you want to talk about subconscious and unconscious urges in that light, he’s not being selfish because he’s engaging in huge risk to himself, to create more life, to create more copies of themselves.
The only reason sex is considered ‘selfish’ is because of the conscious goals of males, its not selfish if you take into consideration that its to produce offspring.
So being a big charity giver through being rich maybe the person is looking for a woman unconsciously, thats selfish. But wait, the only reason their even looking for women is an unconscious urge to create more organisms, at huge risk to itself.
but i mean you raise a good point. A lot of nice people are nice to everyone, but unconsciously so they can get more mates, I don’t think that takes away from the person being nice, if they’re unaware thats why they are nice, that might be ignorance of personal motivations but it doesn’t change the selflessness of the acts.
selfless acts can be from inherently selfish desires. just not often.
The prarie dog is engaging in the action because the family shares it genes and thus the prarie dogs who are more likely to engage in that act crush the number of non-altruistic prarie dogs. The idea that its ‘part’ of their culture is absurd, theres also no evidence that they get more chances to mate over ones that don’t have to make the call because the predator wasn’t around them. Their mating ‘choices’ seem to have nothing to do with it.
Now with birds, some of which that specifically forgo eating to be watchout birds for predators, they are engaging in exactly that. “i am so fit i can watch while everyone else eats” thats an issue of sexual display and dominance or whatever, not the prarie dogs though.
I actually never made that claim. My claim was the exact opposite, that selflessness exists whether an animal is self-aware or has advanced theory of mind. Any animal that can act in a controlled way, to benefit another organism at cost to itself can be called ‘selfless’ whether it has a concept of ‘self’ or not.
Why does everyone think I made that point instead of replied to it?
No we’re not actually, a biological viewpoint. Cost to one organism at the benefit to another. Its not hugely hard to understand why it typically happens to only close-kin, people likely to give somthing back, or mates. (humans are more altruistic because of misfirings of adaptations)
Dolphins, Elephants, Chimps, probably orangs and bonobos, magpies. Self would have to be a sense of ‘self-awareness’ and lots of non-human animals have it. Theory of mind is another issue, where animals can think about what other animals are thinking, and some animals have theory of mind too.
but again, you don’t need to be a dolphin, chimp, magpie or etc to be selfless, any organism that gives cost to itself to benefit another organism (where the organism doesn’t expect to be paid back for it) can be called selfless/altruistic.
Humans aren’t fully self-aware and thats a good point to make. We don’t have control over every heart-beat or breath that we take. I don’t agree with you that everyone who works charity is looking to get laid, but its true that people don’t understand the evolutionary logic behind relationships, emotions and etc.
people aren’t aware of a lot of the puppet strings that urge people to act in a lot of ways, but you can become aware of them through education/whatever to limit their pull on you, if you think thats a good choice, I doubt anyone will ever be able to cut the puppet strings, but at least they could go about having a lot more control over their own movements.
I think its simplistic and naive. 1. Intention/motivation for selflessness is whatever the animal *emotionally feels or cognitively feels to spur it into action. The real motivation I guess is genetic propagation. The same which is true to offspring can apply to other kin.
Some people are nice only to engage in sex or whatever, including charity givers. A lot of rich people give to charity, probably to look better than their slimy business dealings would naturally allow, BUT:
When a random person is ncie and engages in charity, yeah they might be this way to look for a mate or to keep social relationships running smoothly but:
Most people are unaware of why they are nice like that, and when they are nice like that its not a veneer of niceness. They are nice because their ancestors who were nice/civil whatever, had a great chance to pickup girls. That doesn’t mean modern man is nice only to get laid, that means some modern men/women are *nice, because theres an evolutionary logic to it, not because their somehow consciously acting that way.
if i give someone a candy because my ancestors did so to get laid, but I did so out of a geniune feeling of kindness that had nothing to do with getting laid, i’m guessing it can still be called selfless. Even if people are that way to attract mates, they don’t purposely act that way to attract mates or anything else.
On another point too. Evolution has given us adaptations that allow mental time travel, all sorts of emotions, and the ability to think things through. Not all scientists are just scientists against disease because they want to get laid or get rich.
They have a hardcore interest in the subject, the molecules, the science. because their ancestors who were intelligent and showed intellectual ability got more females, and because the scientist may unconsciously be driven into those ‘interests’ by genetic urges, what the scientist himself is engaging in, his actions themselves are selfless. Whether or not they have a selfish evolutionary logic or not.
If females are attracted to niceness and if males have different levels of niceness, we can yeah, expect a lot of fake niceness and we should be warry for that. But again, we are warry for that, humans are amazing social animals and we have detection mechanisms for cheators, and like we all know, if someone is artificially nice half the time, and then shows even a hint of their true colors, a lot of people are willing to hate that a lot easier than other equally fraudulent things.
but my main point is females probably put a selection pressure on males, and that doesn’t mean ‘the males best at pretending to be nice’ that means, the males who were nice probably had more babies (nice to their children/woman circumstancially at least) and thus males are born now, somtimes, some of them, inherently nicer than say, another random individual. They aren’t ‘being nice’ to get chicks, they may be born with a nicer disposition right from the start, because it was *selected for.
Ah, well, better there be redundancy than ignorance, I say.
You’re still the spectator here, in that you still claim that option Z is the best option, as if the actor in this scenario knows this as well. Someone who is propelled to act in X way will feel that acting in X way is the best way to act–i.e. that acting in X way will satisfy their need to accomplish something. Think of it like an itch that needs to be scratched. A spectator might say that scratching the itch won’t be beneficial, but to the person who itches, scratching is the best course of action, even when they know it’s a bad idea to scratch. My point is that value is relative, and what a spectator finds very valuable, the actor might find only a slightly valuable.
My itch analogy works here as well. When I meant pleasure, I did not only mean to limit my argument to a pleasant physical sensation.
Yes, but this is, strictly speaking not altruism.
Yes, I agree, but only because the theory (I don’t even know if I’m right in calling it that) of altruism makes the situation absurd. It need not be. An animal that sacrifices itself-- and where this sacrifice we, the spectator, see benefiting the animal’s young --because it gives the animal, loosely speaking here, the most pleasure at that moment. Acting in such a way scratches the itch, in a manner of speaking.
A creature acts because it is driven to act. Were the drive not there, then it would not act. As such, any and all acts are selfish.
I sometimes scratch an itch without even thinking about it.
I’m only decrying that the theory of altruism, as it begs to be understood, is logically inconsistent with a very basic premise in all living things.
"A creature acts because it is driven to act. Were the drive not there, then it would not act. As such, any and all acts are selfish. "
Choice is irrelevant here. All that is relevant is that at one point something drove a creature to act, and that acting in that way satisfied this drive to act. The animal got something out of it. Acting scratched an itch, that you say was put there in an evolutionary purposeful way.
Yes, they get pleasure from acting in such a way, and that pleasure is evolutionarily driven. What’s your point? The actor does whatever it’s doing because by acting it gets something out of it. Were it to not get something out of it, it would not act. I drink when I’m thirsty. I don’t even think about it. My body needs something, and so it acts to get it. When it does not need something, it does not act. Something from inside the self spurs the body to start acting so to satisfy this need.
…and an act is always perpetrated by a self.
I don’t think I’m engaging in deceptive sophistry here, at least not intentionally. I think this is just common sense.
if an animal is driven to act at a cost to itself, at a benefit to another organism, where it doesn’t get anything back then by definition the act can be called selfless.
the creature may be driven to act, but its driven to act SELFLESSLY. by any biological standard.
if i get angry and attack a child molestor, again I may be ‘driven’ to it out of instincts, but its still a COST TO ME, and BENEFIT TO ANOTHER. by definition, selfless.
The idea that evolution can implant urges/desires to get animals to act in a certain way, DOESN’T TAKE AWAY THIS:
THE RISK/REWARD
THE BENEFIT/COST to the organisms envolved
theres biological standards that we *CAN take about when using the word selfless. And whether an animal is driven or gets an emotional payoff, they are doing what they are doing for another *ORGANISM
whether its an urge or desire doesn’t change whether the act COST ONE ORGANISM more than it BENEFITED ANOTHER.
the only way this conversation makes any sense is to ignore all biological criteria entirely the concepts of risk and reward, cost and benefit, and soley make essentially unjustifiable statements about urges/desires in animals somehow negating this “cost”.
can’t just wave a stick and hope run of the mill philosophy will dissapear all the biological concerns at hand. As in animals don’t just randomly have drives/urges to do anything, only things which tend to spread their genes. And one of those things is protecting other organisms at a cost to themselves. (at least some of the time circumstancially)
Yes, there is a drive, but this drive belongs to the creature. The drive itches the creature until the creature goes ahead with the action so that the drive goes away. Through the action the creature gets to satiate some primal instinct that bothers the crap out of it. Basic principle. It’s thirsty, so it drinks.
But it does get something in return. Acting is it’s own reward.
Acting is not its own reward, protecting the cub/baby is. Because it gets pleasure from acting ‘selflessly’ (acting in a way that benefits another more than itself by BIOLOGICAL CRITERIA)
I mean, you’re being philosophical to the point of nonsense and irrationality if people seriously quesiton whether the mother animal is doing its action for the reward, the emotional reward if there is any (plenty of time its just rage/protective instinct with no emotional reward).
just because an animal is driven by its hardwiring to act in X way, doesn’t mean that X doesn’t benefit another creature more, and that X doesn’t cost organism 1 A LOT, regardless of WHAT DROVE IT TO ACTION.
Seriously. We can talk on biological terms ones that are a lot more grounded in reality than philosophical questions about ridiculous shit that makes no sense.
And when the act it engages in mindlessly, benefits one organism more than *itself, on terms of biological criteria (life/death, nutrition, risk, injury etc) we can call it altruistic, whether or not the creature is actually trying to benefit one organism over itself, or whether its mindlessly acting out.
If we know that humans avoid wolves, and mothers attack wolves to protect their babies, we can assume that 1. The mother is acting in interest of her baby because;
they naturally avoid wolves.
Its irrelevant if its a thought out choice or an instinctual reaction. She thirsts and drinks to soothe that thirst, when the thirst is literally protecting another ORGANISM, at risk to itself, then its altruistic.
An urge to protect another organism against a predator that you run away from every-time you’ve seen it before, whether its a mindless desire or not, by definition is altruistic. No matter what the organism is getting, on a biological level it is not getting anything back ANYTHING, but attempting to ensure the life of its offspring.
its pretty simple. Risk to organism A, at benefit to B, the benefit to organism A can’t match up to the benefit of organism b on any LEVEL (considering biological criteria) EXCEPT, the protection of her costly, costly offspring.
