Every human behavior has selfishness at its root. It’s the essential thing that keeps us alive.
After all, the act of staying alive, is a selfish act in itself.
But even giving your life for someone else is also a selfish act. Some part of you wants to be seen as the hero. And wants to be remembered as the selfless person who did all.
Even towards babies. And that’s because that behavior is hard-wired in our DNA because of our need to live forever through them.
Every so called altruistic act has to have some kind of benefit in it, even if we don’t gain anything tangible from it. The gain in this case can be moral, satisfaction or some other intangible reward.
This is taken to the extreme with modern “virtue signaling” where you get social points such as likes and comments for signaling how selfless you are.
We should get over ourselves and realize that we are selfish to the core — and in so doing actually do more for the rest of humanity, accepting the gain that we get from it.
Reality is complicated and nuanced and attempts to boil reality down to single concepts or dimensions are always full of ifs and buts and end up not really holding up when you look closer.
Everything is selfishness is an especially lame theory of everything. Start asking who the self is, and what the benefit is and you're going to quickly see that you can't define either without completely washing any value out of your theory of everything. In the end it doesn't serve much purpose beyond justifying selfish behaviour.
Even helping a baby unrelated to you is selfish to some degree, at least in terms of ensuring the propagation of your species.
I think the more useful way to evaluate actions is to try to estimate the net good they do or don’t do. It seems like a much more useful metric than the level of genuineness we attempt to ascribe.
After all, the act of staying alive, is a selfish act in itself.
But even giving your life for someone else is also a selfish act. Some part of you wants to be seen as the hero. And wants to be remembered as the selfless person who did all.
Even towards babies. And that’s because that behavior is hard-wired in our DNA because of our need to live forever through them.
Every so called altruistic act has to have some kind of benefit in it, even if we don’t gain anything tangible from it. The gain in this case can be moral, satisfaction or some other intangible reward.
This is taken to the extreme with modern “virtue signaling” where you get social points such as likes and comments for signaling how selfless you are.
We should get over ourselves and realize that we are selfish to the core — and in so doing actually do more for the rest of humanity, accepting the gain that we get from it.