Question If you are someone who likes to help others, is helping them actually a selfish act that is only done to avoid feelings of guilt that would otherwise occur? Is it really any less selfish than a sadist who hurts others for personal enjoyment, despite the happiness that may be felt in those who are helped?

Accepted:
June 18, 2007

Comments

Maybe yes, if you unreflectively act to promote your own enjoyment and to avoid unpleasantness for yourself. But this condition may not be fulfilled.

One example is that of a person who has worked hard to become someone who takes deep pleasure in the (morally appropriate) happiness of others. Philosophers as different as Aristotle and Kant agree that we can and ought to promote such a disposition in ourselves -- Aristotle because he believed this to be a necessary element of true virtue, Kant because he believed this would avoid temptations that could lead the agent to fail in her duties.

Another example is that of a person who finds that helping others is what she most enjoys doing, but who also reflects on this enjoyment and conscientiously approves of it in moral terms. Had she found that sadistic conduct is what she most enjoys, she would have restrained herself and tried to change her own desires insofar as possible.

In both these case, the enjoyment conferred by the helping act is only a superficial part of a more complex motivation that, more fundamentally, is moral. Here it is because the agent understands that helping others is morally good that she tries to be someone who enjoys helping others. Neither the agent who has this motivation, nor this complex motivation itself, nor the particular act it motivates deserve the predicate selfish.

(It may also be helpful, perhaps, to have a quick look at my earlier answer to Question 1190: www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/question/1190.)

In the general muddle of psychological impulses that might come under the category of motivations for a given action, we can distinguish between our principle aim(a) in doing the action, and enabling conditions such as its being broadly in their interests to do such actions. The mere existence of such enabling conditions does not mean that they figure in one's principle aims; the mere fact that it is in my interests to look after my child does not mean that that is my principle aim when I treat her kindly - in particular, it does not mean that my interests are what I have in mind when I treat her kindly. So one might have a situation in which someone - a nice person who enjoys helping others - has nothing more than 'helping my friend' as her principle aim, even while something like 'I'll feel better for doing it' might figure as an enabling condition (it might make it easier to put in the necessary time and effort that the friend needs).

We judge people in important part by reference to their principle aims, and if someone's principle aims are sadistic then they are morally speaking entirely different from someone whose principle aims are to help others. Kant thought the mark of morally good action is doing it from duty, doing it just because it's the right thing to do. He thereby sets (I would say) a very strange standard of moral worth; one which has no place for altruistic feelings as moral motivations. By contrast, Hume before him was more Aristotelian and conceived most good moral actions to be, simply, those that we naturally admire. Here, in this (I would say) more natural philosophical conception of the moral, we find a proper home for the idea that if a person's principle aim is to help someone, then they and their action are to that extent morally good. The sadist's acts of sadism have no such admirable motivations.