This is some really top-tier advice, thanks for responding! It’s hard to get myself to view self-serving tasks as being altruistic, but they really are, and that’s a personal bias I should work against.
I remain quite curious how you define “altruism”. Oxford offers two options: “the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others”, or zoologically, “behavior of an animal that benefits another at its own expense”.
IMO, both these definitions gesture toward a style of behavior which does not actually optimize well-being in a utilitarian sense. These definitions suggest that when presented a choice between action A which improves the wellbeing of all parties, versus action B which improves the wellbeing of everyone but you, even if both actions create the same total increase in wellbeing as a first-order effect, action B was somehow “more altruistic”. Realistically, in humans, the second-order effects of action A are likely to be pretty much all positive, whereas the second-order effects of action B involve everyone around you being exposed to and affected by your lower wellbeing. Someone who isn’t taking care of themself will tend to treat those close to them less well; those who care about them will see and tend to worry which decreases those loved ones’ wellbeing; those who feel some responsibility for the person or things they share with them will often inconvenience themselves to compensate for the person’s failure to thrive. I’m sure you can think of plenty of examples of times when self-neglect by others near you affected you negatively.
This is not even considering the fact that choosing an action that benefits everyone except the actor is going to tempt the actor’s brain to resent those who benefitted, and then either their behavior will worsen due to that resentment or they’ll experience increased cognitive/emotional load in suppressing the behavior changes, which expends energy that could have been put toward more positive purposes rather than expended on damage control.
I suspect that the bias you mention could also be fed by cultural habits of portraying “women’s work” like household tasks as having lower moral and financial value than “men’s work”, disregarding the synergy whereby, for instance, having someone else doing the housework frees up time for engineers to build technologies, which in part reduce the burden of housework.
100% agree with your take on altruism here. My intuitive definition of the term is something along the lines of “actions taken with the intention of increasing good and/or decreasing bad in the world,” regardless of outcome. For instance, someone who donates to charity, but the charity is secretly killing babies or something, is still doing an altruist action, albeit one with a tragic outcome. In short, what matters is intentionality, imo. If I do something purely good for myself, that is an altruistic act if and only if I am doing it with the intentionality of making the world a better place. Since my subjective happiness is part of the world, one might argue that any act of self-pleasure should be considered altruistic. That doesn’t seem like the typical understanding of altruism, however, as I imagine most would only consider a “selfish” act to be altruistic if done with the intentionality that the benefit I receive will ultimately result in improving the lives of others, external to me. Ultimately the prior view does seem more appealing to me however, since it seems silly to arbitrarily define oneself as not being part of the world.
[EDIT: note that I may have written the above comment after taking sleeping pills, and as such, it may or may not be comprehensible. Sorry about that!]
I think it makes sense! It follows easily from your definition that actions which increase your capacity to do good, without doing harm themselves, align with your value system. To bring it full circle, I’ll bet your high-capacity and low-capacity selves can find all kinds of ways that the latter can make the former even more powerful.
This is some really top-tier advice, thanks for responding! It’s hard to get myself to view self-serving tasks as being altruistic, but they really are, and that’s a personal bias I should work against.
Thanks, I’m glad you found it helpful!
I remain quite curious how you define “altruism”. Oxford offers two options: “the belief in or practice of disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others”, or zoologically, “behavior of an animal that benefits another at its own expense”.
IMO, both these definitions gesture toward a style of behavior which does not actually optimize well-being in a utilitarian sense. These definitions suggest that when presented a choice between action A which improves the wellbeing of all parties, versus action B which improves the wellbeing of everyone but you, even if both actions create the same total increase in wellbeing as a first-order effect, action B was somehow “more altruistic”. Realistically, in humans, the second-order effects of action A are likely to be pretty much all positive, whereas the second-order effects of action B involve everyone around you being exposed to and affected by your lower wellbeing. Someone who isn’t taking care of themself will tend to treat those close to them less well; those who care about them will see and tend to worry which decreases those loved ones’ wellbeing; those who feel some responsibility for the person or things they share with them will often inconvenience themselves to compensate for the person’s failure to thrive. I’m sure you can think of plenty of examples of times when self-neglect by others near you affected you negatively.
This is not even considering the fact that choosing an action that benefits everyone except the actor is going to tempt the actor’s brain to resent those who benefitted, and then either their behavior will worsen due to that resentment or they’ll experience increased cognitive/emotional load in suppressing the behavior changes, which expends energy that could have been put toward more positive purposes rather than expended on damage control.
I suspect that the bias you mention could also be fed by cultural habits of portraying “women’s work” like household tasks as having lower moral and financial value than “men’s work”, disregarding the synergy whereby, for instance, having someone else doing the housework frees up time for engineers to build technologies, which in part reduce the burden of housework.
100% agree with your take on altruism here. My intuitive definition of the term is something along the lines of “actions taken with the intention of increasing good and/or decreasing bad in the world,” regardless of outcome. For instance, someone who donates to charity, but the charity is secretly killing babies or something, is still doing an altruist action, albeit one with a tragic outcome. In short, what matters is intentionality, imo. If I do something purely good for myself, that is an altruistic act if and only if I am doing it with the intentionality of making the world a better place. Since my subjective happiness is part of the world, one might argue that any act of self-pleasure should be considered altruistic. That doesn’t seem like the typical understanding of altruism, however, as I imagine most would only consider a “selfish” act to be altruistic if done with the intentionality that the benefit I receive will ultimately result in improving the lives of others, external to me. Ultimately the prior view does seem more appealing to me however, since it seems silly to arbitrarily define oneself as not being part of the world.
[EDIT: note that I may have written the above comment after taking sleeping pills, and as such, it may or may not be comprehensible. Sorry about that!]
I think it makes sense! It follows easily from your definition that actions which increase your capacity to do good, without doing harm themselves, align with your value system. To bring it full circle, I’ll bet your high-capacity and low-capacity selves can find all kinds of ways that the latter can make the former even more powerful.