I've thought about this too, even love can be selfish. Truly I don't believe there is such thing as a truly selfless act, because there is always a reason you are doing it. But that's just my opinion
I think that maybe motive has something to do with this topic. Often I will want to do something with no thought of how it will effect me, but then I'll think that it still benefits me somehow. Considering though that doing something thought to be nice for someone and thought of as being selfless, may be so engrained that some think to do the deed and think that it is selfless. - Engrained reward(s) though may sometimes be at least partially the motive.
"Selflessness" suggests acts of beneficial kindness,but can also be thought of as simply being actions without sense of "Self".Someone may commit a "bad" selfless action,is possible,for example have no conscientiousness may qualify as having "no self." Maybe some forms of Buddhism promote selfless actions of a kind and beneficial nature.To act with loving kindness free of "ego",perhaps?
Are you asking does altruism truly exist? I believe so, It's perhaps hard to recognize in a culture which tends to be so "me" oriented but I'm fairly certain that many people perform acts of selflessness at some point without the expectations of a reward or to boost self esteem. I think maintaining that is likely more difficult and probably not valued in western culture.
it's ettiquetish to consider it accidental . or , say , jesus made me do it . selflessness is apt to be shy .
I suppose it depends on how you define it. The most common argument against it is that doing something for another, even at your own sacrifice, is selfish because it makes you feel a certain way. And people want to be able to feel selfless sometimes, right? I don't think this feeling counts as a personal reward or motivation to do something selfless, some people do. It might be rare to see people do something for others that doesn't benefit them SOMEHOW, but I do believe that it's possible. I once allowed a friend a need to live with me. It put me out a significant amount of money, time, energy and I knew I wasn't going to get anything in return... Yeah, it might have been my "good deed for the month" or whatever, but it's just part of my personality to care about a friend who needs help. So was I acting selfishly because I was simply fulfilling that need, or was it selfless?
Are the Buddhists selfless though I wonder, or are they doing what they do because it creates good karma and thus speeds them towards nirvana.... Maybe you could only do a selfless action if you had no self, but without a self, how would you be aware of the world. The way I see it the body is a kind of 'self', a multi cellular thing which knows itself existing apart from other similar formations. On the other hand, there's the idea of Stoicism, doing good for it's own sake, not because one seeks a reward. But then again, maybe the reward is to know oneself a good stoic...
Nope, altruism does not exist. Action without hope for gain doesn't exist. Even if we do something with someone else's best interest in mind, we are doing it because it makes us feel good.
reality is truly selfless. it is statistical and diverse. that is its true and only nature. and thus completely selfless. and quite possibly the only thing capable of so being.
It really depends on where you draw the borders delineating one entity from another. That we are reflections of one another is at the heart of "the Golden Rule". So a person can perform a truly selfless and altruistic act, but the impetus to do such is very deeply rooted in our ability to identify ourselves in others and that gives rise to empathy, which is the emotional ability to "put oneself in another persons position". So altruistic acts are selfish if only because we are responding to the familiarity we see in another. Humans with higher brain functions to decipher and direct these emotions take this "mirror identity" to an even higher level by ascribing the same emotional sense of identity with other living creatures. Altruism stems from our ability to recognize ourselves in the other. This is the basis of pretty much most religious/spiritual thought regarding this, we are all essentially one entity temporarily experiencing a period of uniqueness. It is this same phenomena at work whenever attempts are made to demonize a group and set them apart from "us". We see it all the time with arbitrary divisions based on geography, race, ideologies, etc, etc, with each group seeming to want to dehumanize the other group to avoid the sticky problem of empathy. I think that is rather self evident and not in need of further illustration. It's always "Us" vs "Them" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDbeqj-1XOo"]Pink Floyd - Us and Them - YouTube
there is no us that is not them. there is no them that is not us. there is no personal relationship, nor personal wealth, that more affects our experience of living, then the kind of world all of us together create, that each of us alone, must then experience living.
It's possible to take that position, thereby relegating a word to complete uselessness. But then we have the problem of whether or not we want to distinguish between people like Bernie Maddox, who swindle their neighbors out of their life savings, and Mother Theresa, whose "selfish" indulgence came from the satisfaction of serving God and helping others. I think it's useful to distinguish between such people. To do so, we need different labels. And we have them. We call people like Bernie selfish (and worse) and those like Mother Theresa "altruistic", recognizing that differences in degree become differences in kind. The selfish are motivated by self-aggrandizement, usually in terms of wealth, status, power, sensual indulgence, or other material benefits. The altruistic are motivated by empathic benefits--seeing others experience joy, healing, life, etc. The line is not always easy to draw. It's a matter of judgment. But it's not impossible. And it allows us to save a word that would otherwise have to be discarded.
Yes and it originates from when people lived in tribes. The survival of the tribe depended on the survival on the women and children not necessarily the men. Therefore from a survival standpoint the life of the men were worth less.
