Topics Ethics

Question Is there such a thing as a selfless action? Given there's always a self doing the action, surely it's not possible? Even if you appear to the outside world to be acting against your interests, it's always for YOUR reasons and therefore selfish? For example someone gives up all their money and time to a charity, they would do it because they think it's right to do that, therefore they feel better about themselves...OR a mother gives up her kidneys for her child condemning herself to death, it would be because it would hurt HER more to have the child die and not help, than to die herself.

Accepted:
September 15, 2009

Comments

Let me recycle the answer I gave to an earlier question.

It is indeed a truism that, when I act, it is as a result of my desires, my intentions, my goals. After all, if my arm moves independently of my desires, e.g. because you want it to move and push it, then we'd hardly say that the movement was my action (it was something that happened to my body despite my desires).

But even if everything I genuinely do (as opposed to undergo) is as a result of my desires etc., it doesn't follow that everything I do has a selfish or egoistic motive. For to say that I do something for a selfish reason is to say something about the content of my desires (it is to say something about what it is I desire). In other words, to say that I act on a selfish desire it is to say not just that the desire is mine but that the desire is about me or directed towards me or something like that. And it is just false that all my desires are like that. I can want to bring about states of affairs in which I just don't feature at all.

For example: I can want my grandchildren and their contemporaries to have a tolerable world, and do what I can for global warming for their sakes. That is, of course, a desire of mine: but it isn't a desire for something for me (I'm not going to be around long enough for things to get bad). It is a desire for something for them. It isn't an egoistical, self-directed, desire for something for me, for it doesn't have the right sort of content.

"Ah hah," says the cynic, "you don't get it, do you? When people think they are doing something for their grandchildren, that isn't really why they are doing it. They are actually doing it for some selfish reason -- they are doing it in order to feel good, or to avoid upset for themselves (or for some similar pay off for themselves)."

But there isn't the foggiest reason to suppose that that is true (and it certainly isn't implied by the truism that my desires are my desires). Of course, since I want something badly for my grandchildren, I will be pleased with any tiny successes which projects I might be involved have in doing something towards the fulfillment of my desires. And the occasional pleasurable feedback will no doubt help sustain my desire to fight the good fight. But what I want is the better world for future people, not pleasurable feedback for me. And a thought-experiment should make this clear. Suppose an angel were to offer me the choice, (a) modest real successes in my efforts that I never know about [so no pleasurable feedback] vs. (b) no real successes but occasional pleasurable mere illusions of success -- with my choice to be followed by instantly forgetting the angel's bargain. Of course I'd still choose the first. For it is the successes that I actually want, not any incidental pleasure.