Tuesday, April 28, 2009
To Help Others.
In class today we talked about how it is often times better to help others with their goals rather than go after our own. I feel this has both negative and positive consequences. The negative being that humans would not have evolved as rapidly as we have or exceeded such limits if there was not some sort of self motivated goal. The positive aspect being that in a perfect world we will all help one another and never experience such selfish emotions. There has to be some general happy medium between these two ideas. Humans need to find away where we all help each other achieve goals but we also take some of our selfishness into it too. If anyone has noticed, it always seems to be the motivated and ambitious people are the ones that score the best colleges, best jobs, and are the most successful. Now, I know that isn’t the case every time, but in my experiences I feel that it happens a lot. I’m just trying to figure out how we can create a world where we can have both. Where humans can be a little bit ambitious and a little bit mindful of other’s goals as well. What does everyone else say? Which world is better and how can we merge the two together to get something in the middle?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
There are both positive and negative effects of people going forth to help one another rather then themselves, but I also feel that it is possible for people to help one another while helping themselves progress as well. Since there are so many "niches" in society, if one to be living in one "niche", it could be beneficial to himself to better others throughout his "niche" because it will come around in benefiting the "niche" as well as himself. But there are drawbacks if everyone was to help everyone else at once, which I really don't see that happen, I am positive but realistic.
ReplyDeleteOh My. There is no perfect world because, quite frankly, there are no perfect beings that live in it. Just a "heads up" on life, borrowed from somebody else's philosophy, "The present many-colored and ever changing world that crowds in upon us in all our experiences,and the conditions which alone make any experience of this world possible (time and space),are perceived intuitively without definite content, independent of all experience, purely in themselves."
ReplyDeletePaula, you can't go quoting something without citing it. You're just being selfish! Just kidding. That quote sounds vaguely Kantian, but also profoundly un-Kantian as well, but that might just be an issue of terminological discrepancy.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, responding to Meagan's query, Naess's point seems to be that the distinction between egoistic and non-egoistic (i.e. altruistic) actions is a false one. In fact, ecological awareness and other supposedly altruistic activities are essential to self-realization, i.e. they are REALLY selfish, and egoistic actions are only apparently selfish.
Consider the case of coal power: We invested heavily in coal because it was cheap and efficient, hence it served our narrow self-interest in getting a lot for a little. Unfortunately, we now realize the environmental impact of that technology and want to move away from it. At the same time, developing countries like China and India want to expand investment in coal because of its cheapness and efficiency. We'd like to urge them to take a broader view, but we're still hampered by the specter that economic self interest is real self-interest and ecological self-interest amounts to a form of self-sacrifice.
In this case, our commitment to an interpretation of the self as narrowly egoistic has undermined our ability to act at home and abroad. In other words, our (egoistic) self-interest has turned against the rest of our (ecological) interests.
For more on this, see Hilary's post "Stopping the Loop."