All human actions are inherintly motivated by self interest

Post Reply New Topic

There is no selfless act committed by human beings. All actions we commit we do so at some level to advance our personal self interest.

By evaluating examples of selfless actions, it is easy to illustrate this human action pattern.
Supposedly selfless individuals like mother Teresa, do good onto others for the personal self reward of good feeling by helping others.
Supposedly selfless acts such as saving a comrades life in a suicidal act - appear to be selfless until the immortality of heroism is considered. You take a bullet for an army bullet to die a hero, not to save a life.

By examining the impact of human selfishness you can determine if a persons actions are motivated by long term or short term gain. An overtly selfish act is generally shortterm benificial but long term detrimental to interpersonal human relations, but a "selfless" act is short term selfless only, the rewards pay off in the long term and the selfish motivation becomes apparent.

Does this theory hold true with you?

Yes. This has to be true; selfless actions just don't make sense in the context of evolution. Slight exception though: animals can behave completely selflessly as long as they are helping a close relative, who of course is likely to carry a lot of their genes so this action is not weeded out by natural selection. Still, that only applies to close relatives, and our fundamental units, our genes, remain completely selfish.

It is only because we can only percieve what we are in this world. Your soldier is more likely to want to be a hero the day he signs up for the army, no?

Everything we can relate to, is in this world. So of course through ego, people are going to want to leave their mark. Whether you hide behind a church, camera, charity every act in some way is selfish. If we were to release ourselves from our ego and realize our soul is energy that can NEVER be destroyed, maybe then you would start to see a change, but because most people do not want to expand their minds, we are left selfish barbarians, who only see the finish line and not the after-party.

I'd like to preface what I write here by saying I am soon to bed and so these are the musings of a tired man. I'll probably see them in the morning and be embarrassed by them.

Whilst this seems superficially plausible, I don't think I need accept this argument, for I can recall some times when I personally decided to do what I thought to be a good deed despite knowing straight away that I would feel no pleasant glow from it. One instance of this happened about seven years ago (although it is an example of a terribly minor and petty action that does not rank with your more grand examples of supposed good deeds):

I really do not like talking to strangers, because it causes me to feel bad. I also hate being touched by strangers. Now, I passed a person in the street who was collecting money for a charity in a tin. I saw him, and I wondered whether I should give him money. On one hand, I knew I would have to talk to this man, and also that (since I was around twelve at the time) he would try to put a sticker on my chest. On the other, my mind was telling me that I should give money because that would be a good thing to do (and by this I do not mean good in the sense of causing me pleasure).

Now at this point, you might say that if I decided to give him money it would be in order to remove a guilt I was feeling because of my lack of charity. This is not the case: I am the sort of person who will always find a way to make himself feel guilty no matter what, and I knew this well even at that age. I knew, even as I decided to give money to this man, that I would put in perhaps twenty-pence and the "voice" inside my head would say "Why wasn't it fifty-pence? It could have been fifty-pence."

So, I went up to the man, feeling a knot of dread in my stomach, knowing he would make conversation and that I would feel that familiar powerlessness that comes over me as I stand there unable to think of a reply. I knew, too, that I would be torturing myself all the way home about how I failed to make competent conversation and about how he would probably think me a rude person. I worried too that he would put a sticker on me, and I was afraid I might recoil from him as I did so.

I gave him fifty-pence (and my "conscience" said "You had a pound in your pocket, you could have given him more than you did.") and he put a sticker in my hand (so he didn't put it to my chest thankfully) and said some things to which I mumbled some inept reply. As I walked home I tortured myself by replaying this event in my head and pointing out all of my mistakes.

An obvious response now would be to say that I only gave the money because I would feel even worse if I didn't. However, I can't see why I should accept this claim: I walk past beggars and charity-collectors in the street all the time and feel no more than a minor pang of guilt. Certainly, I cannot recall any times I bypassed a charity-collector with such a horrible vividness as I can this time I actually gave some money.



I don't know much about what a soldier is thinking when they are in a battlefield and I suspect, forgive me, that neither do you, so I think we are heading way into the realm of "armchair" psychology here. But I will tell you about a soldier I once read of, who survived throwing himself upon a grenade in order to muffle its explosion and protect his comrades.

I would suspect that, had he wanted immortality at the expense of his own life, he would be disappointed to have survived. He did not seem to be, instead he expressed in an interview his jubilant disbelief at his luck, which is quite incompatible with someone who has been robbed of a chance for a hero's immortality which was so urgently desired that the person was willing to sacrifice their life.

Sane human actions are motivated or could be justified by rational self interest.

ruveyn

The premise is not meaningful.

If we assume everything is done in self interest we can argue any form of altruism that appears contrary to self interest is not contrary to self interest but merely more subtle (such as serving the self interest of feeling good by contributing to others). People sometimes willingly risk death in their altruistic conduct, and if “self interest” can be construed to be consistent with such behavior (particularly when there is not genetic interest in the person’s being risked for), then the premise “all human action is self interested” is rather meaningless.

Hence the purpose of religion, ethics and morality. With religious indoctrination the self is replaced by the congregation so that the democratic whole is preserved. The most selfless being the most easily indoctrinated.

I believe this to be true but I don't believe that that self interest is always inherently vein.

You could, lets say, die for a cause or sacrifice your life for one because you know that a) someone has to do it and b) you'd believe that life in the loss of that battle would lose so much value, to you personally or perhaps the whole of your society, that its worth dying for or dying in the process of defending/even losing. That very sense of duty guiding you can be far more rewarding and drive your life into a far crisper focus than one could ever have naval gazing on the sidelines fearing oblivion.

Also, very generous (yes, non-sacrificing in the physical sense but sacrificing in time and dedication) people who do great things to help the poor, to help younger generations come up with clearer senses of themselves, who try to help a sagging area of society where the structure or system is failing the greater good - yes, they may feel better about themselves but, also, there is something else at play, similar to the architect who wants to build the most perfect building they can or the artist who wants to make the most perfect representation of their thoughts or feelings through either clay, glass, steel, canvas, or even kicks, snares, and hi-hats. The person who is taking these actions can in fact have great joy out of seeing the world in a better place, especially since whatever good will they had inside them or whatever desire they had to see the world around them do better - they were able to not only take a stand on what they felt but they were able to score a major victory for other people. People can also....we're wired to do this...gain great joy out of seeing other people do better and especially if it was by something they were able to offer. Its sincere and its self-interested all at the same time.

Because of this I have do disagree with the OP - I believe that all the great and noble concepts such as altruism, self-sacrifice, and generosity above and beyond the call, are all derivative of self-interest but they aren't elaborate or masked games played by egotism or basal selfishness, they're merely extended components of our capacities and if anything shows that we need more to be happy than to step on as many heads as we need to in order to get ours. As for the idea that its all about salvation - if that were true you wouldn't see atheists displaying most of the same confounding behaviors such as charity, generosity, self-sacrifice, altruism, etc. as you would theists as they by definition don't have that conflict. I'd also have to suggest that many if not a fair majority of theists do 'good' things for similar reasons, I do sometimes think that many atheists overrate how much clarity or certainty theists have on salvation/damnation and underrate how much self-reliance and worldliness theists ultimately pick up to cope with the difference or at least to square away with their own conscience no matter what the result (if theists really were so limbic as to live purely to save their own arses this would be a much different kind of world).

Perfect - you said the same thing in far fewer words than I did .

Sure, everything is done in self-interest. Sometimes the interest of the self varies and on occasion, one may act contrary as he/she would normally act on a typical day. How can we act outside of our own interest if we come from the self? Only someone with a split personality would act on behalf of another person's self interest. When we perform altruistic acts, it always boils down to the fact that it feels good.

Altruistic acts are not rational acts, they are emotionally based forms of behavior. Still, altruistic acts are performed from the roots of self-interest because it stems from the perception of empathy.

And?

Yes. But. How many people identify what is truly in their interest correctly?

ruveyn

This is pretty much what I've been saying for years, except I don't make the assumption about long and short term benefit. That can vary.

Personally I like to take it down to its core essentials the stimulus->response relationship in the brain. To an extent you can have mutual self interest such as partnership. What would be interesting to see what causes a stimulus to no longer produce a response, why people have very specific stimuli like fetishes and the influence of strong biological motors such as hormones.

The important thing to note with mother Teresa, ignoring the controversy surrounding her and assuming she was a toughly nice person; the reason why she did what she did was because she got something out of it personally. Functional brain scans show that people who like gambling and those who like to give money to charity, doing their respective activity produces a similar response in the pleasure canters of the brain. But if you were to swap the groups around it won't produce that response (unless they were in both categories).

I agree with what you are saying. However it is not all individualism. We are driven by self interest but that in itself is a motor for what happens to human being as a group over generations.

There isn't really a "justification" or morality of self interest. This is purely a societal construct.

This topic also relates to another point, which is the power of delusions. Humans, at least some of the time, need to believe they are not acting in self interest. Even if they acknowledge that it can be the case a cloak of self deception, and ambiguity can be a useful device so you don't end up totally neurotic.

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 13 Nov 2009, 9:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

I can't even think of a possible action that doesn't appeal to self-interest in some way.

I think in our world it is impossible to, because it is seen as a good thing to act selflessly which makes acting selflessly a self-interested act.

I think maybe random murder that traumatises you when you do it would be a selfless act. Because it would get you shunned from society and you would have personally been negatively effected mentally.