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by jdimov10 3604 days ago
Yea, it says that I'm awesome :)

Come on, how can you possibly call this "self-less"?? If you're doing something for someone you love, it's because you love them. That's the ultimate good-feeling. You're doing it to feel good, period. I hate people who do things like this and then say "I acted selflessly for you". No, you didn't, you moron. You acted as selfish as can be. Now, thank you very much for doing what you did for me, but don't EVER expect me to pay you back in any form, or to thank you, or to even acknowledge what you did, because then there wasn't anything selfless about it, was there?

If you love someone and you've done something for them, good for you. Yay. Move on.

2 comments

I think a big problem with your concepts about altruism and selflessness is assuming the actor had the choice to act or not act, so by definition if they acted it must be because they wanted to; therefore, its not selfless.

However, life is not usually a choice of act or don't act (help a love one or not). Moreover, when people make selfless decisions, we usually define them as such because the choice is action A or action B (buy a loved one a gift instead of yourself) and action A is objectively more beneficial to the actor (buy oneself a gift) but they still choose action B because the benefits it brings to others and the decision was based on putting others before oneself. In other words by sacrificing act A to do act B, you are right the actor will usually receive some subjective inherent benefit of doing B (it feels good to buy loved ones a gift), but the decision is not made on that basis because A would have made the actor feel even better than B, but the actor made the decision on the basis of putting others needs before their own.

Have you never done something you don't want to do to help someone else?

Well - of course there has to be some charge somewhere in your brain build up before you do anything. But your reasoning is essentially just playing with words - b/c of course if you do something for somebody b/c you love them, then you do what you do B/C you love them ... well.