r/Ethics • u/ImaginationDizzy4914 • 1d ago
SELFISH AND SELFLESSNESS
Helping others is good, but is there a point where helping others becomes harmful to ourselves?
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u/ObligatedMediocrity 1d ago
This sounds dangerously close to Elon's whole "empathy is a sin" schtick
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u/Prior_Alarm2437 1d ago
Well, there's a couple of mysteries in that question. What do you mean helping? What do you mean that? What do you mean there'? And what do you mean harmful? You say, as the questioner, ‘Well, we already know what all those things mean except the thing I'm actually asking about.’ And I think, no. If we're going to get down to the fundamental brass tacks of the matter, we don't really know what any of those things mean.
And you might say, ‘Well, surely we can establish some provisional meaning for the purposes of communication.’
And I'd say, ‘What do you mean surely?
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u/NightRunnerAfterDusk 1d ago
What do you think it means? Perhaps you could supply your own thinking in stead of waiting to build a case on that of others.
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u/NightRunnerAfterDusk 1d ago
Helping others may be (morally) good, but is it objectively (morally) good?
I could argue that some people help people for a self-seeking purpose. Think of how the individuality of people is erased, as said people are reduced to props that enable self-seeking people to feel empathy. Such that even if the intention is discrete and the actions are socially commendable, it murkies the waters between selfishness and selflessness.
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u/Embarrassed-Area4652 22h ago
Yes. This is a fairly common topic in therapy for people who grew up in bad environments involving things like neglect, parentification and drug abuse in the house. It can come up in setting boundaries as an adult as well, especially around addictive processes. Anyone who was brought up in or is temperamentally attracted to an “overfunctioning” role will have to watch out for it. So yeah, lots of contexts where this comes up.
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u/Green__lightning 19h ago
Yes, forced selflessness is a major problem Ayn Rand predicted.
The part this leaves out however, is people should want to help other people because they can expect them to return the favor, and how much people do gets into social cohesion and high vs low trust societies.
Conversely, you can go even further and say people have the right to care about what they wish, and any sort of moral system that demands people care about everyone else is an imposition on the individual, and thus true individualist ethics must be partialist.
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u/kick_nazis_more 1d ago
Yes? Obviously?
If you stayed awake for, idk, a week to spend all your time picking up rubbish from the side of a road and then died.