The poverty of 'altruism' and 'selfishness'

In ethics we talk of the difference between 'selfishness' and 'altruism', and although it is frequently acknowledged that these terms are very elusive, we are to a great extent dependent on them for moral discussion.


On the surface of it, a straightforward reading of the dictionary has the case set out plainly.  

self·ish adjective \ˈsel-fish\: having or showing concern only for yourself and not for the needs or feelings of other people  

al·tru·ism  noun \ˈal-trü-ˌi-zəm\ : feelings and behaviour that show a desire to help other people and a lack of selfishness

However, there's a sense in which these definitions can only be read plainly if we were discussing, say, animal subjects--subjects which have a clearly defined 'self' to which they can clearly be concerned with benefiting or not within a given activity. Animals have this as they are strictly programmed by evolution. They have a 'self' (using the term loosely) amounting to a biological entity looking to survive and replicate, as a biological entity. This sets out clear boundaries in which activities such as eating when hungry or finding shelter are self-preserving, while activities such as grooming another or helping another eat when they are hungry are other-orientated.

Humans are a different kind of creature, we are programmed by evolution only in a weak sense, and we are in a much stricter sense programmed by values. We have selves that are mental, which exist in self-selected ideas, and as such are malleable. We can learn, we can develop preferences, and we can change our minds. What is at one point unselfish can become selfish merely by shifts in our ideas. And therefore, there's a sense in which we can never become less selfish in the pursuit of altruism. If a person is motivated by 'wanting to win the football match' this notion may entail 'wanting to motivate the team', 'wanting to play your best', or 'wanting to give the crowd a good time.' Each action can be interpreted fairly as both selfish and altruistic. Although each can be seen in a sense as generous, they are not idly or purposelessly giving, they serve some desire of the self. This veil of selfishness to our actions continues to apply to most human intentions, even charity.

The lines between altruism and selfishness are blurred by our existence through the mental in which 'us' and 'the outside world' can be intimately intertwined by values. In the extreme, selfishness can manifest itself in form of dying for a cause or a loved one.

Under an Objectivist perceptive, this renders talk of altruism redundant, with altruism standing out only in instances in which coercive pressures precede generosity. But it is not evident that, if this be so, by the same token talk of 'selfishness' shouldn't becomes obsolete. If we find ourselves in a situation where one can say 'I changed my mind drastically from being selfish to being selfish', the term is hardly descriptive.  

But of course, all of this misses the point. Practically speaking when people speak of 'selfishness' being good or bad, or 'altruism' being good or bad, they're really being used as umbrella terms for some handy rules of thumb to help guide us in selecting and reviewing our values.

selfishness is good entails ideas like:                   selfishness is bad entails ideas like:

it's al-right to enjoy yourself                                       consider long term consequences
your property is your own                                          the world is better when you don't hinder others
great innovation follows doing you own thing                      

altruism is good entails ideas like:                        altruism is bad entails ideas like:

human life is valuable                                                  your life is as worthy as another's
generosity enriches the soul                                         you needn't become a willing slave to others


But the terms offer nothing more comprehensive, and certainly can't profit us in a one verse the other framework.

To decide between values we require much more sophisticated ideas to guide us.

Why you should make improbable claims.

There is a sense in which the title of this entry may seem misleading. If 'improbable' is read in a certain way, the assumption will be that my intention is to encourage theories that are bizarre relative to what would be a more practical conclusion given our best (by which I mean most successfully tested) theories. A concrete example of a 'bizarre' or improbable theory of this sort would be something like this:

Light speed is relative to human imagination. Much like pixie dust in Neverland, the human subject has to believe and then it will behave how they want it to. 

This theory is clearly 'bizarre' or improbable. It makes claims about light, and the power of the human mind to directly interfere with the laws of nature, which are contrary to our best knowledge in science. More precisely there's an arbitrariness or variability to it. Why does the ritual require 'believing' as a control mechanism and not say a song, or a dance. Or why indeed this theory at all and not another theory of light, say that: human can't control light speed because it's the work of the gods. Not working within the confines of epistemology opens the door for theories as fiction or nonsense.

So I'd clearly have my work cut out for me if this was at all the reading I intended. Which it was, but only so I could turn it all around and show that there is another reading, which makes a lot of sense.

'Probable' has two meanings in ordinary language, at least two proper meanings (it may also be misused in certain ways).

(i) The first is the one we have seen above, a soft meaning. We may find this kind of 'probable' in sentences like 'I'm probably going to the party Saturday' or 'probable she forgot'. What it means in this usage is that we are not sure either way, but theory A (going to the party, or 'she' forgetting) has tested better than theory B (not going to the party, 'she' not forgetting). So going back to the world of science, we might describe Einstein's theory as much more probable than Newton's.

(ii) The second meaning is stricter. Here 'probable' refers to the probability calculus.

A common mistake is when (ii) will be assumed to show (i). That is, if the probability calculus is high, then it's our best/most tested theory, and vice versa.

Consider the prevalence of this view. We see it in our every day lives when we flick (or more accurately scroll) through a popular magazine and read about topics claiming things like 'studies have found blonds really do have more fun', where surveys and statistics are used to establish generalisations.

We also see it in the supposed solution to the problem of induction. Induction attempts to show a proposition true for having a pattern of occurrence. The problem is, the future doesn't always resemble the past. By making the mistake, however, that (ii) implies (i), philosophers have argued that we should believe propositions reached through inductive logic not because they're guaranteed, but because they're probable. So for example, if the proposition P was that the sun will rise tomorrow, and our induction was that it has always risen previously, it is thought that we can accept P because it scores highly with probability calculus.

So what's the problem with equating (i) and (ii)?

The problem is the rule 'obtain high probabilities!' (ii) puts a premium on ad hoc hypotheses. Put simply, (ii) is mostly likely to wield high results the less information it actually has to work with, which far from leading to (i) is actually at odds with it, as (i) has it that our best theory is the one that has been successfully tested the *most*.

You can make 'the sun will rise tomorrow' less and less probable according to (ii), just by adding more information: That the sun will burn out, that weather conditions can hid sun rises, or the plenitude of distastes that can occur such as supernovas and meteoroids. In doing this the (ii) would go down, even though we could speak more expertly on (i).





 

How to live well

While some people just drift through life, others are driven towards certain belief systems and attitudes aimed at taking control of how good or bad their life turns out to be. This is a very good and important thing to do in principle for the obvious reason that it's empowering. The alternative would be to hand over your future happiness to lady luck.

The trap one can fall into, however, is having too rigid an idea of what one must do to live well.

It happens all too often that a person gets so convinced of a particular approach that they actually completely miss that they're miserable and not getting any closer (or as close as they could have gotten) to where they'd like to be. Some people identify the wrong thing they want and live towards that goal. Such people may suffer from the pains of forcing themselves towards a goal, and feelings of disappointment/loss when they get there and realise they're still not happy. Other people try to live the best life by having generally the 'right idea' about things like career, love, friendship and so on. Such people can suffer because their ideas are so set for them that they miss out on good stuff that aren't covered by their philosophies. Or because it can be hard to expose these more detailed philosophies to rigorous criticism, because you have to make time to do so.

The weird thing is, if you look at people who get life right, often they're more like drifters than planners or deciders. It seems to me that the difference between an aimless drifter and a purposeful drifter is exactly the life lesson that these planners and deciders miss out on. And it's a matter of methodology.

Purposeful drifters have error correcting criteria for the things they do in their lives, while aimless drifters tend to be more inductivist. They achieve happiness by repeating the things that have worked for them in the past, but perhaps at the cost of re-living a lot of the same problems again and again.

Some examples of purposeful drifting might be to have a criterion such as 'does doing what I'm doing make me feel happier or not?' This works by having a theory, i.e. happiness, that identifies progress towards good living or not. This works well because it allows for a standard by which to criticise what you're doing, but in fact involves very little in the way of presumptions (the problem had by the 'planners and deciders'). It also focuses narrowly on what information you actually have, i.e. your feelings about a thing right now, and doesn't delve into information you don't have such as what you'll want in the future.

Or, for another example, one can have a rule of thumb of doing something every time their life gets comfortable to shake things up. If one felt like their job wasn't challenging any more, but weren't sure what else to do, quitting forces one to try out new conjectures and gather new information. All of this again is good for error correction. This approach in particular works a lot like natural selection, since you add selection pressures to your current ideas by virtue of making things less comfortable for yourself.

'Planners and deciders' have the right idea in trying to use knowledge creation to make their lives better. That is to say, they identify possible problems and come up with possible solutions. But their problem seems to be that their approach doesn't lead to much new knowledge being created--it is set up to be biased towards their first theory, whether that be their first theory on how to approach career/love-life/whatever or their first idea on what their goals are. Similarly the 'aimless drifter' creates no improved knowledge on how to live because they 'let what is, be'. But between the two appears to be a golden mean of drifting, but with error correcting/knowledge creating mechanisms in place to improve ones situation and engage with better and better thing in life. This seems to be the approach that is needed if one wants to live well.

Selfishness

In a cringy 1959 interview, Mike Wallace asked Ayn Rand this question:

"Should husbands and wives tally up at the end of the day and say, well wait a minuet, I love her if she's done enough for me today, and she loves me if I've properly performed my functions?"

Almost any interview with Rand involves this question in some form. The question concerns a confusion that the only kind of selfishness is a utilitarian kind. That selfish people are only ever trying to maximize their own utility--that nothing is valuable to the selfish person for its own sake. Now, of course it's an ignorant question to ask of Rand. Rand is quite clearly a virtue ethicists, and quick to praise beauty, rationality, love, human life, and so on as having some sort of intrinsic value. But the mistake doesn't happen because people read Rand and get confused, it happens precisely because the people that ask it don't read Rand, hear 'the virtue of selfishness' and jump to conclusions about what selfishness entails.

Selfishness in common-day English has two distinct meanings.

To act with disregard for others

OR

To act with regard for yourself

On the surface of it, it might appear as if these were two sides of the same coin, but in action they lead to two entirely different ways of life. To act with disregard for others is to preclude yourself from any concern for other people, and because acting with concern for other people can be both profitable and rewarding for its own sake, would consequently lead to less value for the self overall. On the other hand, to act with regards for yourself, only entails that your actions are in-line with your intrinsic and extrinsic values, so will include lots of concern for other people where appropriate. Particularly in the example of loving someone.

Practical Love

There is one good reason to assume that there's a mistake made in how we commonly think of romantic love, even before any arguments are discussed: it's not very successful at delivering what it promises. The promises behind romantic love vary--happiness, fulfilment, to 'feel complete', to make the world a brighter place, and so on and so on--and these things are occasionally achieved, but mostly it just seems to frustrate people, make them act rather strange, and lead to a lot of upset and feelings of unworthiness. When there is an in-congruency like this between the intention and the actuality, something has gone wrong somewhere. The question is, what and where?

"It’s doubly unnatural when the system is based not on rational ideas like good character, similar outlooks and whether or not she owns the next door farm, but on a fluttering change in the brain chemistry that some neuroscientists would say is a form of temporary insanity."

-Ed West on romantic love. See more here 

 Mr West thinks the problem is that people base their decision of who to love on chemicals rather than practicals. It's a common criticism of love--that it's just silly chemicals, but unfortunately it doesn't hold. The chemical reaction responds to ideas the person already holds about who to love. It's not just random firing of dopamine and oxytocin triggered by no cognitive process at all, otherwise we'd have less women falling for swarve, charismatic men, and more people in relationships with toasters, or homeless people, or whatever else would have more odds at being present during a random chemical spray. Indeed, ideas also are needed to interpret the chemicals as love and not something else, as we do feel these chemicals in other contexts such as roller-coaster rides and so on.

If people don't do love practically, that isn't the fault of chemicals, then, but the fault of some bad idea people have about who to love, how to love, and why to love.  And... maybe most importantly, when to love.

One such mistake might be elucidated through looking at the meaning of the word 'practical'.

Of, relating to, governed by, or acquired through practice or action, rather than theory, speculation, or ideals

 One thing that seems true of the bad ideas about love is that they're rather presumptuous. Person A meets person B and, based on the idea that they perceive them to have certain lovable (to them) character traits, falls in love, but without actually checking if they *really* have those character traits or if it was just a good first impression. Or person A meets person B and, seeing how well they get along--they have so much chemistry!--decides this means they'd get along with one another really well probably if they spent every other day together for the foreseeable future. Or person A really like person B for a year, probably they'd like them just as much til death do they part.

This problem goes even deeper, however, in that it ignores not just misunderstandings you might have about the external world (them), but also ones about the internal (you).

There's a lot of deciding 'how something should be' before one really has experience of it in romantic love, and by definition, this isn't very 'practical'. People should be more easy-going about it. More open to surprises. More open to turning out to be wrong. And less often love based on guesswork of what sort of person can make you happy over and above the reality of what makes them happy... in practice.

Tony Robbins: The Bad Guy

Season 4 Buffy arch-enemy Adam isn't the only television bad guy I can think of inspired by personal development guru Tony Robbins. Dexter's Jordan Chase also comes to mind. But while in other cases the similarity is quite superficial, in the case of Adam he is, as the character Spike points out, "... exactly like Tony Robbins." (Yoko Factor, s04e20)


If you don't know who Tony Robbins is this means you're probably not a American, or you've probably never looked at the self-help section in a book shop. But in brief summary, Tony Robbins is the highest paid and most successful personal development guru in the world. His whole thing is that he can help you re-engineer yourself for 'ultimate success' by changing how your mind works (by 're-programming your neural pathways'). Particularly, he helps you by teaching you how to do this thing called 'modelling', where you copy the exact heuristics of a 'highly successful' person as they succeed at the thing you want to succeed at. Which is... pretty much what Adam does.

Adam is a frankenstein style big bad on Btvs, who goes around cutting people and demons up to understand how they work, so that he can eventually execute his plan of piecing together people/demons to make super soldiers free of weakness, just like him. Tools of his trade: he has a knack for being able to motivate people (monsters) towards his mission. Like many problems Btvs aims to explore, this is a literal interpretation of the Tony Robbin's mission in life, put in a monster fighting context.

The question is: why does Tony Robbins make such a good villain? On the surface, you might think that a guy who devotes himself to helping others get the 'life they deserve' is no one to associate with evil.

Well, the reason Adam made a good villain for Buffy season 4, was because the season was devoted to the idea of being young and independent for the first time in your life, and having to learn how to deal with the 'greys' and uncertainties in life (pure existentialist-style) and *not* rely on having all the answers. Therefore Buffy fought villains that wanted certainty to fight their weaknesses, so as to contrast with her own journey and that of her friends. She fought soldiers who lived by all the moral certainties that soldiers live by, and she fought a Tony Robbins monster set on removing weakness.

In one form or another the 'Tony Robbins as a bad guy' idea usually comes down to a suspicion of how he's conning people. He promises so much... if you just hand over your money. But the above is an interesting variant, where the con isn't a promise he won't deliver, but a promise he couldn't and shouldn't deliver.

So what's so good about 'the grey'?

It can be tiring to see pain romanised. Pain isn't romantic, it's just painful. But if one can learn to find some peace, maybe even enjoyment, from the complexities and uncertainties they will deal with in their life, they're putting themselves in a much more powerful position to be able to error correct. And error correction of ideas is needed to learn anything about how to live. To seek the perfect cure of weakness, then, might sound pragmatic, but it's really explaining away part of the methodology needed to enjoy life.

The principle is exactly the same in any other area of knowledge creation. If one attempts to create knowledge by avoiding or explaining away problems, one only ends up with dogmas. To actually 'problem solve', one needs to be on friendly terms with the idea that there are problems.

How to deal with loneliness

There's something very odd about loneliness. Firstly, it seems to be a misnomer. Though it manifests as a craving 'for people', specifically usually a craving for love or some other form of intimate connection with another human being such as a strong friendship, the PROBLEM itself doesn't seem to have anything to do with not having this contact.

Why do I say this? Well, people can feel lonely with love/friendship or without it. Similarly, not having enough love/friendship in your life and wanting it needn't lead to lonely feelings. So clearly something else is a foot in a lonely mind, and on consideration it seems to be more of an internal problem than anything to do with the external.

There's a wisdom in NLP to the effect of: Loneliness is not liking who you're alone with.

I'd tentatively accept that there's truth to this wisdom, because it seems the case that if you were a happy fulfilled person it would be hard to then be lonely, even if you did crave greater human contact. It also helps explain the unrealistic way in which people get lonely. They want people to come save them from some unpleasant feeling, that seemingly wouldn't be present if they had an otherwise fulfilling life.

The problem with the wisdom is that it's a little vague, there are lots of ways that you could be in some sense unhappy with yourself but still be... happy. Maybe you're OK with the knowledge that you need to make X, Y or Z improvements to yourself to be happier/better off. 'OK' as in it doesn't interfere with your mood.

I have a conjecture, therefore, that loneliness arises when you're not happy with yourself/your daily life, and there is some coercive force that makes you feel that you couldn't do anything about it, so in an eagerness to ignore this unfortunate situation, you focus outwards in the hope that another person can come along to distract you and make you feel happy despite your miserable situation.

This coercion can come from some authority in your life, say a school. It can come from a lack of knowledge, say you feel trapped in a job and you just don't know what to do to get a better job. Or it could come from a more specific ignorance: you've gotten this incorrect idea about how you should live and you're now forcing yourself to live that ways even though it's unpleasant.

Remove the coercive force, make the problem soluble, solve is, and the loneliness should retire.