Everything we do or don’t do seems to come back to how it makes us feel, not really for the other person. The root of it always seems to be the effect it has on us. If emotions were removed from the situation maybe it wouldn’t be for self serving reasons anymore but would anything even be done if it didn’t make us feel something?
What I’m saying is that actions are tied to emotions and those emotions belong to us. So even if we help someone else, the reason still links back to how it makes us feel. Does that mean the world runs on emotionally driven self serving acts? Does true selflessness even exist when emotions are involved?
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I think you’re making an argument called “no true altruism” which posits that no human can ever truly do something truly for someone else because, to at least some extent, every choice we make is for us. That may be in a very small way, such as we’re doing something for someone because it fits the type of person that we want to be.
I think that’s true, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. We need more good in the world, so I’m not going to quibble too much about the person’s motivation.
I consider being selfish as benefiting at the expense of others.
So when I do something good for someone else, what I benefit is not at their expense.
Would that not be selflessness?
I don’t think that’s true. Things are about me I put my emotions and perspective first. Things that are not about me, I don’t emphasize my feelings or perspective or even express them if not warranted. Also we can sit with uncomfortable emotions without acting on them. And we can release them through movement, art, crying etc without making any decisions involving other people.
When we use words like “selfless,” we tend to use them within to context of “as selfless as possible.”
This idea of pursuing “pure selflessness,” is kind of futile and unnecessary. There’s nothing “impure,” about selflessness where someone gains a feeling by of satisfaction. We can always choose to define words in such a way as to functionally make them useless but I don’t see the value in that.
For example we could define “valuable,” as being something vital for the existence of the universe, which would immediately make it so that nothing is truly valuable and we could then spend the rest of eternity asking ourselves whether anything is valuable because nothing is “truly valuable,” but like… why? What have we gained by changing the definition of this thing to be unattainable? Maybe a sense of philosophical satisfaction.