audacity wrote:
Certainly inspiring hatred of yourself in others will cause them to treat you badly, thus making you unhappy. In Rand's Egoism, however, there is a sort of calculated kindness that is used to circumvent such a situation. Is there any reason to care about others feelings if I am able to detatch myself of guilt? It is often impossible, depending on the person, to be free from guilt.

audacity wrote:
Is there such thing as unselfishness?

audacity wrote:
Everyone by necessity acts how they themselves want to act. If they are always acting as they want to act, are they always being selfish?

audacity wrote:
Is this selfishness, if it exists, bad, if bad even exists?

audacity wrote:
Dostoyevsky thinks there can't be morality without God

unenlightened wrote:
Self interest is not rational; there is no reason behind it. There is no reason to be interested in oneself and what one wants all the time, it's just an unattractive and addictive habit that people get into, which makes them miserable and unpleasant.

unenlightened wrote:
Why should I feel a need to sustain my life, and how on earth would I go about it? Come on heart, keep beating?

unenlightened wrote:
A fact cannot be irrational because it does not reason. I am alive, and that is a fact. Just because I am not self interested, that does not make me suicidal; on the contrary to be suicidal is to be self-interested, obviously.

unenlightened wrote:
"Man has to be man — by choice" The way the language is used where I come from, if you have to do something, you have no choice, and if you have a choice, you don't have to do it.

audacity wrote:
This is an awfully depressing issue.

The_Rational_Animal wrote:


reason is a characteristic exclusive to man.

He has evolved in such a way that reason has replaced the innate instincts (not a good term, I know, but it will have to do) completely.

Using this intelligence to capture food separates him from other organisms.

Choosing to eat (although rational) is not the only example of using reason to sustain one's life. Knowing not to step out in the middle of a street when a car is approaching is an example of sustaining one's life through reason. It is a decision reached by reason because there are obvious examples of animals stepping out into a street when a car is approaching (and animals do not have reasoning capabilities). To say that the decision to sustain one's life is irrational is to say that one ought to step into the street and be killed. And thus, you would have a reason to die, as you say.

Being 'suicidal' signifies reaching the conclusion that living one's own life is no longer the correct thing to do, and is thus irrational. 'Animal' is used as a means to differentiate a being which resembles a man, from an actual man. Suicide is not rational self-interest, which may be the distinction that we are possibly missing in this discussion. Suicide is the result of being irrational, not seeing things as they are, namely that life is better than non-life. To preserve one's life at all costs is not the kind of self-interest that I advocate either. Once again, that is unethical egoism. I don't push the old lady out of the overloaded lifeboat in the middle of the ocean just as I don't push the old lady in the middle of the street because I just feel like it. These are both irrational and unethical.

Certainly, helping out others is good in times of their crisis when it is not to your detriment because it makes you happy helping them. But it becomes a moral injustice you are committing against yourself when they begin to take advantage of you, your services, and begin treating you as a means to their happiness.

The_Rational_Animal wrote:


A cat or dog will never understand what consequences will occur upon crossing a street, let alone one on which a car is rapidly approaching. Ask a knowledgeable psychologist and she will tell you that animals are unable to establish reasoning beyond one premise (its instinct/impulse) and a conclusion (which is the premise). Crossing a street requires two premises (please don't make me spell them out) which lead to the conclusion that if I do attempt to cross the street, I will be hit.

I mean, what is a judgment exactly? It is either the capacity to assess situations or circumstances and to draw sound conclusions or the cognitive process of reaching a decision or drawing conclusions.

The definition of sound, in logical terms, is that an argument is valid and that each premise is true in reaching that valid conclusion. You reach a sound conclusion, you are necessarily reaching a conclusion by more than one premise. When you reach a "heuristic perceptual judgement", you are, essentially, reasoning. You can teach your pet a behavior; but you can't teach it to reason an internal (albeit extremely short) judgment process.

Suicide is not necessarily the result of self-interest, either. A man could commit suicide upon hearing that he has malignant cancer from purely his wish to spare his family of the medical expenses and grave emotional distress from seeing him die slowly and painfully. There are numerous examples of where people commit suicide because they have no friends or family left to connect with, meaning that they feel that they serve no purpose anymore. If suicide is irrational altogether, cases where it is not required by total self-interest (as you believe suicide is) prove to be counter-examples to your argument as well. You should be able to conclude that suicide can be either selfish or altruistic, it is not entirely a matter of self-interest, even if it is irrational categorically.

This may be the conceptual issue that we are missing. Ethical egoism (remember that ethical is equated with rational, as in my old lady example from my previous post) entails that I secure ethically and rationally my "share of the pie" and that alone. It does not entail that I take your share and everybody else's share because I want to. But ethical egoism argues against my giving up my share to someone else (unless there are reasonable circumstances to do so.) You are right that my need (or want) is no more important than yours; but that is a lazy attitude. It is about dealing with those in this world who have no virtues, and will be willing to steal your share for their own enjoyment. Ethical egoism takes this deprivement out of the picture: the egoist secures his needs religiously and lets no one interfere. His wants, however, are a different story. The difference between an ethical egoist and a peccant criminal is the means of securing wants, which may be the distinction that is so important.

You did not contemplate it because it is a matter of reflex in contemporary society. Altruism is so engrained in the modern man's sense of morality that he doesn't need to think (or reason, as you point out). In a situation like this, I would do the same thing, believe it or not, because I too grew up with a Christian sense of morality. Ethical egoism is not a philosophy which applies to this situation (where there is no conflict of interests), so you cannot argue that I, the ethical egoist, would not do the same.

vlt wrote:


It's seems right. But let's elaborate a little. Your example of returning the hat to a man of wheelchair shows that in situations when little effort or time is needed, helping often is just a reflex, involves no calculation at all. It's intuitive becouse the cost is too low to spend some thinking on it. Still it's some automatized way of avoiding guilty conscience. It may not involve thought, though it has to be somehow developed according to your principals.

Generally altruisitic actions cannot be regarded as something done with no benefit to the performer. Untill only material goods are concerned. That's what I think. Being in good terms with oneself holds great value, yet sometimes we achive it subconsciously. Hope you are able to prove me wrong.

unenlightened wrote:

now you say that my action cannot be regarded as having no benefit to me, and that it is an automated way of feeling good about myself, but I do not see that this is at all inevitable. In evolutionary terms, thought is the latecomer to the party which has been going for a long time without its help, and the reflexive thought of self, imagining outcomes of social behaviour and choosing beneficial ones, consciously or unconsciously is even more recent. It just seems likely that it is still possible for a human to function without necessarily having this kind of thought, although to the self that thinks likethis all the time, it may seem inconceivable, and even frightening, as it implies the non-existence of the self.

I have said a lot, and most of it is contoversial, so I will see what the response is before going into it further.

audacity wrote:
I've been searching looking up posts about Ayn Rand, but haven't been able to find quite what I'm looking for. I want to know what could be wrong (or right) with rational egoism.

Certainly inspiring hatred of yourself in others will cause them to treat you badly, thus making you unhappy. In Rand's Egoism, however, there is a sortof calculated kindness that is used to circumvent such a situation.

Is there any reason to care about others feelings if I am able to detatch myself of guilt? It is often impossible, depending on the person, to be free from guilt.

Is there such thing as unselfishness?

Everyone by necessity acts how they themselves want to act. If they are always acting as they want to act, are they always being selfish (as in the prisoner dilema-are you being selfish no matter what you choose-you will always be acting the way you rational wish to act to make you happy, assuming you have free will)? Is this selfishness, if it exists, bad, if bad even exists?

This is an awfully depressing issue. I talked to my old philosophy professor about it once or twice, he kept weaseling his way out of rational egoism by some shit I didn't understand and thus don't remember.

Is there a way to be safe from this crap? Dostoyevsky thinks there can't be morality without God; I don't really know if that's true or not. Either way God is a load of bull, so that doesn't really matter (there is a warning up top about not posting about religion in here, so you didn't read that last bit).

Ok that's it - rip apart my assumptions and logic now please, dear philosophers.

P.S. If 180 Proof is around - post if you please, yours are some of the more worthwhile words on the forum

Individual wrote:
I don't like the term, "Rational egoism," because it's somewhat of an oxymoron. Egoism is completely irrational. In the extreme, it's narcissism, which is a personality disorder.

The term, "Enlightened self-interest," seems to be better because it establishes how the most rational course of action is in harmony with your surroundings and doesn't try to overcome the interests of others through deception or brute force, treating other people like merely means to an end, like merely objects to be used for personal gain.

Individual wrote:
In the extreme, it's narcissism, which is a personality disorder.

vlt wrote:

My intention was to write "guilty" not just guilty, sorry. Anyway, that's right that neither spieders nor evoution "plans" such selfish actons they just do it. Yet insincts work to provide spider with what his self needs, not to support anyone else.

The_Rational_Animal wrote:
Thus isn't "enlightened self-interest" much more of an oxymoron than "rational" self-interest?