What Is The Purpose Of Helping Others?

If you're going to frame it in a religious context and question why atheists and agnostics help others when there is no real authority advising them to do so, then I definitely stand byy earlier statement tht empathy is a natural reaction.

If you take it a step further and look at it from an evolutionary standpoint, one could argue that humans developed empathy because the human race has to work within a social group more so than
most other animals. We have few other natural defenses - we know how to problem solve with our brains and we know how to enlist the help of others in accomplishing a task too great for one person to do.

I don't really believe we help others for selfish reasons, although the fact that helping others does make us feel good could also be an evolutionary response which serves to keep humans more bonded to each other in order to increase our chances of survival.

 

Ah, karma.
Do unto others as they do to you. Or, do unto others the way you want them to do unto you when you need it.

 

I don't get it. What is the purpose of helping others even if there is a God? There is no one way to function that everything will dissolve completely if we fail to obey. If everything revolves around God, God is all that matters, and God can't die no matter what we do, what purpose is there in anything we do for God, really? Why is it any more purposeful to make God happy than to make ourselves happy? Our morality isn't codified anywhere actually. You can write down a bunch of rules if you want, but there is no absolute authority.

To me religion, the 10 Commandments, are just a post-it note. People are going to be good to each other anyway. Some people need to tie religion around their fingers to remember, but that's really all it is.

 

Not all people are going to be good to each other. There are plenty of sociopaths and psychopaths in this world, some of them running for political office. Humans may be hard wired for some degree of empathy and reciprocal altruism--instincts that are found even in lower animals. But those originally didn't extend farther than the kinship group. Norms of universal kindness are a product of millenia of cultural evolution, in which religion and philosophy played key roles. Significantly, altruism figures prominently in the ethical traditions of the major human civilizations, although in our own time people like Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Brandon and other "Objectivists" have spoken against it as a duty.

Why be good to others? In my case, because it's a fundamental part of my idea of meaning and happiness. Viktor Frankl, Viennese psychologist and concentration camp survivor, considers the quest for meanings to be the most basic human psychological need. From an evolutionary standpoint, it helps in overcoming apathy and providing a foundation for positive action. Frankl found that is concentration camps, the ones who made it were those who were able to find meaning even there. The meaning was personal and subjective, ranging from treasured memories of loved ones to a ray of sunlight shining through a crack in the barracks wall. But Frankl thinks many of us look for meaning in all the wrong places: wealth, status, power and/or sensual indulgence. I tend to express these things in Christian metaphors. God is, among other things, a synonym for ultimate meaning: the summation of human idealism, as John Dewey put it. The pursuit of wealth, status, power, etc, is worship of "false gods" that bring no lasting satisfaction. The expression "God is Love" conveys finding satisfaction in being good to others. As Tillich said: let your ultimates be ultimate!"

 

Because God said so? I've wondered that too. There is no general philosophy section here so I put it here. I wasn't really interested in "Psalms 2:34 says..." (not saying they would necessarily just say that..).

That second question is very intriguing. Please clarify if you want. It sounds like you're saying that God doesn't need anything, so what's the purpose of doing anything for him...and that if it makes him happy, why make that leap when we could just make ourselves and each other happy...

 

That's pretty much what I'm saying. I don't see why morality automatically has a purpose if there's a God. God's always perfect anyway. It seems like morality would have more purpose within ourselves, where there is progress to be made.

 

I think it's the feeling that if it's "only" human, it's not good enough. If it's "nothing but" empathy and reciprocal altruism, amplified by biological and cultural evolution, why should I care about it? Existentialist writings, particularly Sartre, emphasize the personal, subjective and "arbitrary" nature of meaning and moral choices. So thinking people understandably ask "what's in it for me?" I think Frankl does a reasonable job of offering an alternative. Tragedies like Paris and Mali could have been so much worse if brave people hadn't risked their lives to help others. I think it's possible that a stronger, more assertive humanism could offer a viable alternative to ethical relativism in taking moral values seriously.

 

Like I said, it depends on whos helping whom. And "Its about you?" If thats what you took from my reply then let me broaden your narrow mind. I help ppl because I want to, and when I do it, it makes me happy. Sorry if this offends you. But im allowed to feel satisfaction from the good things I do that help others. Hey look a win, win.

 

lol I was just asking. I wasn't offended and I didn't mean to come across as rude....

 

i don't believe in karma.

99% is to get laid. the 1% is when you're really in deep shit and actually do need help. percentages are more or less on mark.

 

This is it essentially.

 

Why would anyone think it's not good enough or not care to maximize and realize their humanness?

It seems to me this mentality of deeming it not good enough would only be an issue for the power hungry and those who want to control and/or subvert others.

 

Yeah it seems to me that we take ourselves for granted. Would it be good enough if we had some spectacular shining gem, which thrived on morality, and if we were all immoral the stone would be destroyed and we'd all drop dead? Then we could point to it clearly and say, "This is why we should be moral." But it's the same difference anyway. If we don't help each other and cooperate, it's as likely as not that we'll end up dead. Selfish people don't make me question that. I just think they're idiots who don't realize all they've been given in life due to the empathy and cooperation of others.

To me being good to others is like eating food. If I don't do it, I might as well be dead. Like I say, it's so easy to take ourselves for granted. We want something else to point to, like the shining jem. I don't think it qualifies as selfishness to want to simply live. Odds are as good as not that I would be dead if I lived in a sociopathic society where nobody felt any empathy for each other. So I don't think empathy for others comes from a place of "What's in it for me?" really. I eat when I'm feeling hungry and I help when I'm feeling empathetic, and they both stem from the same fundamental, biological need. It's not a matter of getting something "extra".

I guess your "life" is more than your beating heart. In a sense nobody really risked their lives. It would be riskier if nobody helped.

 

This question has different answers at different levels.

At the grandest level I believe that helping others has no purpose, but only in the same sense that I believe all things including the universe itself have no grand purpose.

At the social level there is clearly a number of purposes for helping others. I am referring here to the following types of situations: An organization with paid employees that does charitable work. A Government that looks after the welfare of its citizens to maintain order. Etc.

I believe in the computational theory of mind and the standard theory of evolution so ultimately I believe that I help others because I possess a brain that is made up of highly evolved curcuits, and that "helping others" behavior is one of the things that a human brain drives its upright ape body to do.

For me personally helping others serves a number of purposes. Some of them obviousy selfish, some of them possibly not. But really the reason that anyone helps anyone is that human behavior is driven not just by emotion but by reason. Anyone who does anything through conscious effort does so for a reason. One of my reasons for helping others is that it is consistent with my beliefs about life.

To sum it up: No purpose in helping others. I do it because I feel like doing it. Not because it feels good necessarily, but because I am compelled to do so by my state of mind, by my thoughts, beliefs and emotions.

But I want to stress that although I think it has no ultimate purpose I have many reasons for doing it. Helping others is about the best experience one can engage in. Not just the sense of relief felt when seeing the relief of the person being helped, but also the philosophical aspect of believing in the act of doing good for others, for its own sake.

 

In regards to the Computational Theory, do you think hurting others, say from the instances we can think of ranging on a spectrum of (non) verbal disrespect to violence is a "bug" of the human mind or is it a different 'program' that also helps the human mind?

 

It is a different program. Or rather a different set of programs. Spreading a rumor about someone to tarnish their reputation clearly differs quite a bit from assassinating a rival. But even within one larger class of "hurting behaviors" such as physical violence the forms it comes in are diverse enough, and the reasons for violence differ enough that it is not likely that all violent behaviors arise from the same modules.

Of course I take "help" to mean in the sense of reproductive fitness. Unfortunately the decisions that improve reproductive fitness are often at odds with the decisions that improve hapiness. Still I take many anti-social behaviors to be a sign of a perfectly functioning gene machine, rather than a malfunction.

 

Because our culture conditions people to think that way. Realizing one's humanness is pretty much absent from the values displayed on TV, which tends to emphasize getting stuff.

 

really? consider this - free hospitals, and illegal aliens - should they get free medical care at your tax dollars?
how about this scenario - there's an outbreak of ebola among the poor and alien and they have no recourse to medicine
guess what's gonna happen?

when you help others you create a healthy world
regardless of who you help or what creature or lifeform

 

ultimately to create a world and a culture, in which you can have reasonable confidence in a reasonable likelihood, of your own survival.

 

I totally agree with chopda… for sure, when you help others, maybe you feel better and you think, that you are giving something back… but in the long term, you will also help yourself and your loved ones, to live in a “better” and healthier world furthermore, maybe people, who already got help, will give something back too (like one hand washes the other and so on)