Ok, I’ll grant that I am being a little hard on philosophers and intellectuals (who of course aren’t actually interchangeable) - but I do completely agree with your characterisation of ‘good’ philosophy as being aligned with the search for the good life - and I share what appears to be your sincere respect and appreciation for philosophers and philosophy in general. I guess my concern is that the coat of philosophy is often worn by individuals with less virtuous motives, and to return to my original point, that’s why I think the abstraction ‘humanity’ is often used as a punching bag, rather than as it should be used - namely, as a guide for actual individuals to get a balanced understanding of themselves and other people, so they can act in the world.

Also, you seem to have switched beliefs between the first and the second posts you made - first you were complaining about humanity and then you changed your tune. — TheMadFool

That's interesting - I clearly need to work on expressing myself, as it was certainly not my intention to complain about 'humanity' in the first post, (assuming you're referring to actual humans). The point I was ham-fistedly trying to make is essentially a very pro-human one, namely that actual extant human beings get an unfairly hard time of it from philosophers and intellectuals, who use the abstraction 'humanity' as a kind of straw man repository for negative emotional reactions. I guess I should probably point out here that I have a slightly nihilistic tendency when it comes to abstractions - generally speaking my sense is that one of the 'flaws' of human nature is that we invest our abstractions with more ontological weight, and more meaning/value than they necessarily deserve. As a lifelong 'overthinker' it's definitely something I'm aware of in myself - and always seeking to correct where I can.

As for question of humanity being an abstraction, I think it's irrelevant at this point because love of humanity doesn't commit the fallacy of composition and the word "humanity" doesn't dilute or ignore the fact that individuals who constitute it are our main concern. — TheMadFool

Thanks for the interesting and detailed reply, but at risk of being overly pedantic (which I guess is probably not such a problem on a philosophy forum !) I'd like to take issue with your assertion that the fact that humanity is an abstraction is irrelevant.

I do take your point that 'love of humanity' doesn't necessarily commit the fallacy of composition, but I think there is a deeper and more intractable problem with the abstract nature of the word 'humanity' - which is that I don't think it's a term that actually points to anything concrete or meaningful in the world, and instead serves as a kind of placeholder concept for people to displace emotions that would be socially unacceptable if acted out on real, existing human beings (emotions such as disgust, hatred, envy, despair, contempt etc). Hence the general tendency for people to talk about the state of humanity in such tragic terms as in your response above. My assertion is that while there are self-evidently negative aspects to real human nature, in reality the picture is nothing like as grim as it appears once we drop the philosopher's temptation to sit in judgement of real human beings, on the basis of an abstraction we've created ourselves, informed by the most lurid extremes of human behaviour.

With all due respect to Piaget, who is obviously right about lots of things, I've always had trouble with the idea that doing good 'for humanity' is somehow a 'higher' good. To my mind, 'humanity' is an abstraction - and it's been noticeable in my experience how often people who talk about doing good for humanity in the abstract, are not actually that pleasant to the actual flesh and blood humans they encounter. There also seems to be a slightly simplistic inflationary principle here - loving one human is good, therefore loving 9 billion humans is 9 billion times better. Is it not possible that 'the love of humanity' is actually just a self-aggrandizing delusion ?