Is everyone naturally selfish?

A Person

A Person

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I was talking with a friend of mine a while back. We were having a discussion about selfishness. His viewpoint was that it is impossible to make a conscious selfless act and therefore everyone is selfish. I thought otherwise. I said, "Suppose I give you a gift, would that be a selfish act?"
"Yes it would"
"How so?"
"You feel good after giving the gift right?"
"Yes"
"Then you are getting something out of it and therefore it is not selfless"​

I am unsure what to think of this. ​

Is it impossible to be selfless?​

What do you think?​
 
The real question is why you gave the gift. Did you do it for him or for the elation you get from doing it? One could say that you will always be acting on the latter, regardless of your conscious motivation, but I disagree.

There are also times when selflessness can make you feel bad. I remember being a child and finding a lost cat that we took care of for a little while (until death, actually). While in class one day, I heard a girl who lived near me talking about how she lost one of her cat's kittens and the description matched up. Although I'd grown attached to the cat, I made the right call and the family came to pick it up when my mother was home. It turned out it wasn't their cat (just very similar), though, so we got to keep it. Regardless, I didn't feel a deep sense of satisfaction from that, and in fact wanted very much to keep the cat myself. Even after seeing her excited, holding the cat and all, I was still feeling pretty bad about it.

To me, that's selflessness -- the willingness to do something for someone else not because you'll feel better (and may even feel much worse), but because you know it's the right thing to do. So yes, selflessness is very possible. Are all "selfless" acts selfless? No, they're not.
 
If you consider selfish as being of benefit to the self, then yes, everything we do is selfish.
 
Very good point, Prometheus, I never thought of it that way.
 
Prometheus said:
To me, that's selflessness -- the willingness to do something for someone else not because you'll feel better (and may even feel much worse), but because you know it's the right thing to do.
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But you'd feel much worse knowing you did the wrong thing, right? Maybe not immediately, but in the long term.
 
April said:
But you'd feel much worse knowing you did the wrong thing, right? Maybe not immediately, but in the long term.
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What are you getting at?
 
naturally and by definition, i say yes. of course we can overcome that.
 
April said:
The action is still selfish. You're gaining satisfaction by adhering to your ideals.
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I see.
Would you concider selfishness to always be a bad thing?
 
April said:
But you'd feel much worse knowing you did the wrong thing, right? Maybe not immediately, but in the long term.
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As a kid, I was used to feeling guilty for things that I didn't even have to feel guilty for. I once told my friend that I'd been talking to a Russian kid online and that he told me they were piling up nuclear weapons. I then became crazy afraid that I might have triggered WW3. I'm not kidding, I even went to my mother about this concern. I was possibly even in tears. But I also did things that I should have felt VERY guilty for, but didn't.

I remember the event very clearly, actually. It was almost mechanical. I overheard it in class and, while passing on the playground, explained the situation. It wasn't a "this is the right thing," but a "this is the thing." It didn't occur to me until afterwards that I'd miss the cat and I personally didn't really like the girl. I even remember my older brother consoling my regret by telling me "Hey, you made some girl happy. You should be proud of yourself." This is probably the one memory I have of my brother in childhood that didn't involve someone's blood staining the carpet. I remember feeling absolutely confounded, not really sure of what I'd done to do that.

I think the event that made it more of a "making myself feel good" thing and forever damned me to selfless hedonism occured four or five years later. I was at a 7-11 and the Sheriff was in line behind me. I bought my items and dropped the change into the little charity cube they keep at registers. I remember walking out of the store and hearing the Sheriff say to the clerk "Now there goes a good boy." That felt awesome. I probably smiled for days.
 
A Person said:
I see.
Would you concider selfishness to always be a bad thing?
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Not at all, I'd say many selfish acts are at least equally mutually beneficial, if not greatly tipped in favor of the other party. But to say you can be completely selfless is untrue, in my opinion.
 
I don't think it's possible to live a completely selfless life, mainly because life wouldn't be worth living for ourselves if we weren't all a little selfish. It's important to think of yourself some of the time and to attend to your needs and desires, it's healthy. However it's just a mattter of making sure your needs and desires aren't harming other people or causing problems. and I think the example your friend used was pretty poor. If you're the sort of person who gives someone something to someone just to feel good about it, then you have problems.

I do love the feeling of making someone else happy, but I also just like giving my friends presents because they are good people and because I appreciate them.
 
April said:
Not at all, I'd say many selfish acts are at least equally mutually beneficial, if not greatly tipped in favor of the other party. But to say you can be completely selfless is untrue, in my opinion.
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I agree.
 
Griffschen said:
I don't think it's possible to live a completely selfless life, mainly because life wouldn't be worth living for ourselves if we weren't all a little selfish. It's important to think of yourself some of the time and to attend to your needs and desires, it's healthy. However it's just a mattter of making sure your needs and desires aren't harming other people or causing problems.
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I think this as well. I've known people who actually are miserable because they think of others too much and it gets in the way of caring for themselves.
 
People are inherently not live for their own since everyone could be die at last.
People are live for their beloved, their chirldren, their family, their friends or/and their beliefs, their aspirations, their dreams and etc.... Once a person is severe rejected by his/her surrounding crowd could possibly lead mental and/or physical disorder/disease.
Why people could suicide if their ultimate goal is solely to keep their own life existence rather than make his/her life luxuriant to himself/herself ? (Surely,oneself's existence is a prerequisite)
 
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I think as young children we may tend to lean toward being selfish. We do, for the most part, have to ask and such for most everything we receive beyond our basic needs someone may be providing.

One of the first acts of giving I can remember was to help make a friend feel better. He had hit me across the forehead with a baseball bat by accident and put the lights out with stars and all. I remember screamimg and my visit to the hospital. Eyes were closed for the most part of two weeks and I remember going back to school afterwards with sunglasses of some type on....people calling me a moviestar.

The boy's parents brought him by for a visit and he felt so bad I gave him one of my four model Blue Angels planes I had glued together and painted with decals. He didn't want to take it but I insisted. Now that I think about it, it may have possibly been to make me feel better, too.

Giving and sharing has a way of treating both the giver and the receiver like that. I would rather think giving to be selfless, especially when compared to so many people that do not give and thus are selfish. Feeling good or feeling blessed after giving is the result of acts of compassion and kindness to others. Should we give in order to
feel better ourselves only, that may be a different scenario.

If we do good for conscious' sake, we are learning to live our life without questioning our every act. If we know it is not going to treat us well, we learn to pass. That in itself is not selfish; it is a stage of learning we go through to better equip us to live our life more abundantly without worry of doing wrong. If our body/ life were a temple and we tried to present it in the best possible manner we could to God, it is no longer selfish; we are then trying to live our life for another. That, to me, could possibly be a way of living a selfless life.
 
No, I don't believe every action is selfish, that would suggest we are all sociopaths and that we don't have empathy strong enough to guide our actions.

For something to be selfish in the way I define it, you have to consciously acknowledge you want something for yourself.

I believe people can expand to a familial, community, or sometimes a world view in a way that symbolically links that notion to that person/group to themselves. That link means they make conscious decisions that truly take others into consideration because they see part of themselves in that person. This means that one may give up short term pleasant feelings because they empathize that their reward comes at too great a cost to someone else.

A lot of times it is the executive functions guiding the limbic system. Our limbic system seems pretty straight forward in a lot of ways and has some basic processes in which it works. To say we are 100% driven by a limbic system, and hence selfish, seems nuts to me. Basic Freudian Id/Ego. But to say we have a limbic system, and it does its job, well that makes sense.
 
Yes.


Anyone who says no is in denial.
 
I don't think every action is a selfish one. In my definition, to be selfish it must be a conscious thought. Just the other day I saw a homeless man jump in front of my bus to help a lady who had driven her automated wheelchair off the curb in front of us. It happened in a split second, and I highly highly doubt he had time to think about himself. You'd be hard-pressed to make me believe it was a selfish action.

Are a lot of things we do "selfish" in nature? Perhaps, but it also means we need to redefine selfish, or at the very least redefine its negative connotations. I think split second decisions like above, which put the individual in danger, are instinct rather than conscious choices. Sure, you can say he thought about how badly he would have felt for not helping her, or that he knew it was the right thing to do, but if you've ever been in one of those situations it's pure adrenaline and instinct. It's my belief that we do it because we are wired to help one another survive. Maybe it's a primal thing that by keeping each other alive, we improve the community, and thus help ourselves, but how does that change in a modern society that is so vast that deaths outside our social circle generally do not effect us? Not to mention, instinct is not a conscious action. Are 'animals' (as if we aren't animals) being selfish when they help each other out of dangerous situations?
 
Yes, we are selfish. Always.

We can only perceive the world through ourselves, in relation to ourselves. That relation is all we know, all we can know. Self is, thereby, a motivator in everything we do.
 
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