Although it isn’t my debate, this is an interesting back-and-forth!
I agree with almost everything Tristan said - after all, it’s hard to be named “Tristan” and to be wrong - but there are some things I think I can add to his points.
First of all, there’s the question of what Love is. Most think of this as either a very spiritual or a very philosophical question. It - very clearly, I think - is neither. Introspection and logical analysis don’t tell us very much about love at all. In fact, those techniques tell us so little about love that we have to invent fluffy crap along the lines of “love is the transcendence of the self”, “love is giving”, etc. Comments like that have almost zero content, and even if they are correct to any degree, they certainly do not suffice for a basic notion of love and how love works. Love is in the domain of the evolutionary psychologist, and the neurobiologist. Love isn’t transcendental, and love isn’t all you need - love is a human emotion, like any other, and so those who actively study the science of human perception are the best equipped - and often the only ones equipped - to tell us any more about it than what it feels like.
More specifically, we can draw basic scientific conclusions about love.
- Love, as an emotion, evolved. Thus, the emotion of love is beneficial either to the individual organism, the collective species, or, more likely, both.
So there’s an immediate question - HOW is love beneficial? Anyone who has ever experienced pure sexual attraction AND love knows that they are two different things (sorry, Tristan, but at least for me and all those I know, that’s true. The assertion that love and sex are the same is more often made by those who have never really been in love.). Sex is the drive that helps us procreate - so what purpose does love serve? Well, that’s pretty obvious, too - love encourages us to pair off, and stay together even after the children are born. And this is advantageous because two parents are more likely to raise a child to adulthood than is a single parent, especially back in the “cave man days”.
So is love selfish? Most people here will say “no”, quickly and emphatically, without actually thinking about the issue. Still a large number of people will say “yes” very quickly, because they like the notion that every human emotion is innately selfish. But let’s examine the concept a bit more closely.
First, what does “selfish” mean? An act performed exclusively because of the expectation of personal gain? That certainly seems like a reasonable definition. Well, in this sense, many things are selfish. In fact, under this definition, almost every single act of charity or kindness ever perpetrated would be “selfish”, because of the fact that most of us FEEL GOOD ABOUT OURSELVES when we do something kind. I can say with absolute confidence that very few (if any) people would help an old woman across the street, help a stranger change a tire, etc., if doing so made you feel ashamed and guilty and gave you a headache. But instead it makes you feel good about yourself, which is really why you do it. There’s nothing wrong with this - it’s a good trait to feel good about good things you’ve done - but it does qualify your generous actions as selfish, technically.
However, even under this definition, I don’t think love is selfish. After all, love is not consciously motivated - it’s an emotion. It’s generated by a nonconscious part of your brain, and your consciousness only EXPERIENCES the already-generated love, and does not choose to generate it in the first place. It seems to me that love cannot be labeled either as selfish or selfless.
So it seems that the EMOTION of love isn’t selfish, and isn’t selfless. How about the FUNCTION of love? Is love only around because of its benefit to the lovers? I think that in general the answer is no. Love is often less beneficial to the man, especially in the sort of family structure where the man will provide a proportionately larger amount of food / income / whatever than the woman. Love can be more beneficial to the woman in the sense that she can care for her child more easily with the man to help than by herself, but still, the only person who objectively benefits from the pairing due to love is the child. I think, even functionally, love is not selfish.
How about friendship? Is friendship really just buying alliance?
Well, again, it depends on motivation vs. function. Very few people approach a possible friendship thinking to themselves, “ah, this will be better for me in the long run.” Rather, most people approach friendship thinking about whether or not they enjoy the other person’s company, share similiar interests, and so on. In a motivational sense, I don’t think friendship can be called just buying alliance - although even in this sense, it seems pretty clear that friendship IS selfish. After all, you make friends with someone because YOU want to. People rarely make friends when they would rather not, and even in those circumstances, it is usually still selfish - befriending the boss’s son in the hopes that you’ll get a raise, etc.
But functionally, is friendship just buying alliance? Did the human desire for friendship, and human social behavior, evolve as a mutual-assistance strategy? Yes, without doubt this is the case. The function of friendship in a real scientific perspective is mutually-beneficial cooperation. Some assert that we make friends to fulfill a social need - this is true, but it isn’t delving deep enough. The evolutionary reason why we even HAVE that social need is because mutually-beneficial cooperation kicks ass. Both people win, neither lose. And as Tristan has correctly pointed out, this is exactly why friendships are terminated when one “renigs on his contract” - that is, when one doesn’t assist the other in the expected way, especially repeatedly, or betrays the friendship trust. We ditch friends if they treat us badly (implying that we can’t count on them in the future), if they hit on our loved one or steal our resources, or even let us pay for dinner repeatedly without ever paying their share.
The misunderstanding between Tristan and KingDaddy is really due to this difference between motivation and function. KingDaddy asserts (correctly) that the motivation to establish a friendship is usually not the desire to mutually benefit (except in an emotional sense). Tristan asserts (correctly) that the function of friendship is mutually beneficial cooperation. Both are correct, and only need be a little more careful in specifying context.
Lastly, I’ll say that, while the Golden Rule is a very good simple catch-all for saying “behave well”, it is by no means always correct. First, it fails in many obvious ways just because different people desire different things. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” implies that I should approach people talking about philosophy, because I would love it if others did that to me. But most people don’t like philosophy, so that wouldn’t really be a good strategy. But there are more complicated moral matters that are better examples. You really can’t have a human society where no one is discouraged from committing crimes - human nature really is pretty self-serving in most cases, and if you didn’t have punishments for crime, there would certainly be much more of it. But the very nature of punishment is to violate the Golden Rule. After all, I never want to be punished - therefore, if I followed the Golden Rule, I would never punish anyone. But clearly that isn’t a good idea. Even if you have problems with the prison system or the idea of punishment to deter crime, we can still agree that there are times when it is necessary to be harsh - to correct the behavior of a very bad child will require behavior that is unpleasant to the child.
These topics are interesting, but they are also more complex than they appear. Because of this, beware of overly simple answers! Saying “the Golden Rule” is more a way of getting out of a real discussion than it is a solution to the discussion. Additionally, beware of emotional attachment to certain issues. Certainly we all want to believe that humans - especially ourselves - are selfless, good, and kind - but just because we WANT to believe that doesn’t make it true. The ability to believe something undesirable is absolutely essential to anyone who wants to call themselves a philosopher - or even a perceptive person.