Leaving a hundred dollar bill under a rock on the sidewalk, maybe? You'll never gain any benefit from it. Who knows, it might go to some drug addict. Or, someone really down on their luck who needed just that amount to make rent or cover this month's bills might pick it up instead. You'll never know. — Outlander

No. You served your agency or desire to act.

That would, technically be selfless, no? — Outlander

No. They may had gains or motives other than altruism.

No. You served your agency or desire to act. — Copernicus

What if I was drunk/high/on drugs/delirious from lack of sleep/in an emotional frenzy and had no such agency? At least, not my own as one is generally only considered to have otherwise.

They may had gains or motives other than altruism. — Copernicus

Here we go with more presumptions. That overused word "may" that means nothing in absolute discussion.

What if I was drunk/high/on drugs/delirious from lack of sleep/in an emotional frenzy and had no such agency? — Outlander

You are not of sound mind. Everything you do that is not done voluntarily (under influence or coercion) doesn't count as [voluntary] action.

If you have the liberty to choose, then it's voluntary. But if, let's say, I hypnotize or control you with magic, then not.

I've already discussed something similar here.

Here we go with more presumptions. That overused word "may" that means nothing in absolute discussion. — Outlander

Okay. They MUST have had other gains or motives.

You are not of sound mind. Everything you do that is not a voluntary act (under influence or coercion) doesn't count as [voluntary] action. — Copernicus

Is a person not of sound mind no longer a person? Who decides whose mind is sound and whose isn't? You? Society? Was such a formation of such standards a selfish act? How do you know? If it was a selfish act, perhaps their motives are less than representative of reality and conform to personal biases. Who are you to judge? Is this not selfish and so to be avoided, but most importantly invalidated?

Careful now. Lest one paint oneself into a corner one cannot so easily talk their way out of.

Who decides whose mind is sound and whose isn't? — Outlander

This is a chokepoint I've been stuck for a long while in multiple cases. I guess if I can crack this formula, I can solve multiple paradoxes at once.

Check out the hyperlink to see how this is something I have yet to solve.

Is a person not of sound mind no longer a person? — Outlander

If you have the liberty to choose, then it's voluntary. But if, let's say, I hypnotize or control you with magic, then not. — Copernicus

According to who? And certainly, it can at least be imagined as such. One can say many things about the Neoplatonists, or say the Sufi poets, but that they lacked imagination is not one of them.

According to me. My apologies, but when I was referring to the “communitarian” I was referring to an advocate of the modern philosophical movement. I was assuming you were one of them given your writing as of late.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/communitarianism/

In general, when there is an appeal to ancient framings or norms, the idea is that they are better, not that they are merely old (although to be sure, some folks do tend towards tradition for tradition sake, just as some see innovation as an end in itself).

I couldn’t see how such a framing could be better. There doesn’t appear to be much of a good life for the individual wherever Aristotelian traditions were particularly popular. In any case, communitarians often commit the fallacy of selecting a philosopher and assigning his opinions as the spirit of the age, as if everyone today has read Rawls and were all good liberals now. I’ll try not to make the same mistake.

If every action originates from the actor’s internal state, then no act can be wholly “selfless.” Even apparent self-sacrifice — the soldier dying for his country, the mother starving for her child, the philanthropist donating wealth — finds its roots in personal satisfaction, emotional fulfillment, or existential meaning — Copernicus

I don’t deny that we are motivated to achieve k personal satisfaction, emotional fulfillment and meaning. The question is , what is the connection between such reinforcers and our attempts to make sense of our world?


The psychological model you’re deriving both your concept of desire and self from is a bit moldy, dating back to Hobbes and updated by folks like Dawkins. More recent approaches within the cognitive neurosciences argue that there there is no ‘self’ to be found within mental processes as a little controlling homunculus, except as an abstraction. What we call the self is continually transforming its nature, meaning and purposes from day to day. It is more accurate to say that metal processes consist of self-organizing schematic patterns which ‘strive’ to maintain their dynamic consistency in the face of constantly changing conditions. Mental processes are designed to make sense of their world, and the best way to do this is to be able to anticipate events as effectively as possible, as far out into the future as possible.

The aim of this process of self-consistency is to assimilate as much of the world as possible into itself. This means that the ‘self’ doesn’t differentiate itself from others on the basis of a boundary defined by its skin, but by the limits of its ability to assimilatively make sense of others. It is possible for me to relate more intimately to a loved one than to myself when I am confused with regard to my own motives and thoughts. When I perform an active of ‘selfless’ altruism or generosity, it is made possible by my ability to expand the boundaries of my self, thereby achieving a more powerful self-integration by figuring out how to incorporate what I may have previously experienced as alien, threatening and unassimilable in the other. In other words, my most far reaching goals of ‘selfish’ desire are directly aligned with , and can only be achieved by, understanding others in ways that allow me to optimally anticipate their behavior.

I am not thereby using them as means for my own ends. Rather, their ends and mine are the same. My self-expansion is not fundamentally designed to come at their expense. This only happens when such attempts break down, and I cannot find a way to incorporate their strange way of being within my familiar schemes of understanding. The classical notion of selfishness as a competition among egos, whereby what fulfills my desires has no direct bearing on what fulfills yours, does not contradict what I’ve said here. Rather, the concept of the fortress self reflects the limits most people encounter in their ability to make sense of other’s thinking in ways that allow us to see ourselves in them. In sum self and other is not defined by spatially separated bodies. The non-self only appears when and where an aspect our our world presents a challenge to our ability to assimilate it , and we are not equipped to rethink our interpretation of it.

I don't see where I got it wrong.