This is... perhaps a weird thing to be thinking, but it's something that has been bothering me for a while:
What reason is there to be selfish? Why have we accepted the axiom that "I should try to benefit myself"? Why do we somehow believe that there's any reason to do so?
I mean, put it like this: There are maybe 7 billion people on the planet. Why do I care that a particular person out of these 7 billion is better off? What reason do I have for that? Is it just that I'm more acutely aware of that person - that I can hear that person's thoughts, that I can perceive that person's hunger and thirst?
That doesn't really make any sense, does it? That's like saying "There are plenty of paintings in the world, but I can see this one most clearly because it's standing right there, so therefore it must be the most important painting in the world and I should care about it more than I care about any other painting."
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"If I don't take care of this painting, and it is broken, I will never ever be able to see or appreciate another painting in the world."
Well, the other paintings will still be there, won't they? The termination of myself doesn't mean the end of the world - in fact, it wouldn't have much of an impact at all on anything.
If everyone thought so, it actually would mean the end of the world. Or, well, the end of all paintings, anyway.
Practicality is of no concern for the philosopher. Besides, the argument is circular in the first place - "Why should I care about me? Because if I don't care about me, I will die. Why do I not want to die? Because I care about me."
Then don't be selfish. If you die, you can never again have a positive impact on anyone else, and everyone has positive impacts on other people, no matter how small said impact may be.
Well, out of all philosophical things, this is one of those that I don't think I'll ever understand. How do you know the world will continue without you, and why would you care about that? My world ends with me. When I die, it's all over as far as I am concerned. Selfishness is difficult because it's circular; I'm unselfish because I selfishly either want to feel good from being unselfish, or want to reap the benefits of it.
If the termination of yourself don't make much impact on anything, btw, it means the loss of the actions you could have taken have no meaning, meaning your actions have no meaning, meaning you might as well be selfish all of the time and feel good, because the world don't give a shit and will go on without you.
I think I agree with D, as far as I can tell, most everything is selfish.
This is... difficult to discuss, because it requires words that I'm pretty sure haven't been invented.
Basically, though, my problem is founded in what is said above: Everything is selfish, but does it _have_ to be? If you argue that everything is ultimately founded in selfishness - that this is the one principle we are guided by - then you're basically arguing against free will, which is fine: I can accept a world in which we are just causally bound by selfishness. What I can't accept is a world wherein there is a choice, and somehow, one choice (favouring myself) is intrinsically better than another choice (favouring the pope and the Catholic Church, for instance).
When did we decide that selfishness is better? This just started out with you asking why it's there in the first place, no one here said that being selfish is inherently better than not being it.
Also: How do you know there is a catholic church?
Also: Retort to the original idea of why you should take better care of the person whose thoughts you can hear, etc: How do you know that anything you do for anyone else is actually an improvement? The only way to be certain that an action has had a positive effect is that you yourself know "This made me happy". The other person might lie politely, to not hurt you. There is no way for you to know which selfless actions are positive, only the selfish ones. So the selfish ones are quantifiable improvements, whereas the selfless ones are only improvements so far as you think they are.
I have just as much evidence of there being a catholic church as I have evidence of there being a me, or trees, or cheese, or anything else. Each choice is equally arbitrary.
Similarly, I have no real evidence anything I do for myself is "beneficient" either. It might be from one point of view (I am no longer hungry) but it isn't from another point of view (Three Indian children are hungry 'cause I ate their rice).
I'm not arguing that unselfishness is better than selfishness, or the opposite - I'm arguing that they're both equally arbitrary and are just a question of perspective.
Yes, exactly. It's a matter of perspective, and your own is the only one that you know is real in your world.
What? No it isn't. I disagree about that. "Cogito ergo sum" does not cut it for me. I'm not at all certain that I'm real, not anymore than any other person is.
Well, either you are or nothing is. Otherwise there is no way to function.
"I am as real as anyone. I know my own emotion. This emotion is happiness. I did something good".
I disagree. Exactly why would take an extremely long time to explain though, but suffice to say that "I have primacy over everything else" is the very axiom I'm trying to question here. Arguing that "I am important because I am important" is just tautology.
"Either I exists, or nothing exists" is just an assertion of "I am important".
No, that was just an extension of what you said, you are as real, or not real, as anyone.
I wouldn't say it's selfish to eat food when you're hungry. If you "unselfishly" neglect your own needs someone else is very likely to "unselfishly" see to yours, and possibly falling short on seeing to his own needs. Why is this less selfish than eating that rice in the first place?
Also, "I feel good = I did something good" is a terrible argument. I'm pretty sure that some rapists feel good about what they're doing at the time.
Whenever I eat something that I didn't grow in our backyard I might very well be the indirect cause a person is starving somewhere in the world.
If I feel a need to hug someone, and hug another person who felt a similar need, we are both being selfish, because we're wasting time we could have spent helping others. Quite likely there is a person somewhere that "needed" that hug more (as in, it would have made that person feel a lot more happy/comforted than it did for me and the person I hugged.
I love having friends who discuss philosophy and the existence of the self at 5 in the morning ^_^'
I've been thinking. A choice between selfishness and selflessness, assuming those exist, can only be self-perceived. In your mind you might do something selfless, while someone else who knows something you don't might think you're being extremely selfish. So selfishness, like evil, only exists within perspectives and have no truth or value in itself.
I strongly suspect that you consider yourself special to yourself somehow; what I mean is, not on a grand scale perhaps but here in the now you can draw a logical conclusion that you feel your own hunger and not someone else's, you can hear your own thoughts but nobody else can. If you think of a tree, you won't be thinking the same as someone else that thinks of a tree. That means you have a perspective. And that in turn would mean that inside your perspective, selfishness and selflessness have only the values that you assign to them. In my world, we're causally bound by selfishness. In your world, if you want them to be random, then they're random.
Hm, so I guess the question you're asking is "why do you live according to your own perspective and not someone else's"? "Why is your own perspective more important?"
Well... living to someone else's perspective would be like trying to live according to a book you don't have, written in a language you can't read, with ink you can't see. Of course that doesn't mean my perspective is "right". Since we can't read other's books, saying someone else has the right perspective is either flailing guesswork or outright lying. And saying our own is right is jumping to baseless conclusions. But we have to live according to something, and since our own is the only one we know...
Thank you, D.
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