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Comment by curiousllama | Hacker News Reader

Only if you define resource so broadly as to constitute anything, at which point the statement becomes “all relationships are based on things” ... which, like, yes of course

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You’re right, and I think this is a good point against the root comment. Nobody can argue against the claim that we are all just resources to politicians, corporations, and law enforcement because it is vacuously true. It’s like saying we are all just atoms. It doesn’t tell us whether many or most in those industries are good people who are in it for the right reasons. And of course, this story about a particular repugnant act can’t prove such a blanket statement.

Whether resources are material or not isn’t relevant. The attention, care, kindness, compassion that a person has to offer others is a resource (and a finite one at that). The basis of the claim is that these entities are viewing other people as nothing more than what those people have to offer them. If you prescribe to the doctrine of psychological egoism, then that is how every single person views every single relationship they have (intentionally or otherwise).

I would say that’s a rather cynical way to view the world (others would say it’s just a factual perspective). But if you view this scenario from that perspective, there’s no logical reason that you shouldn’t also view the relationships you have with your own spouse/parents/children/friends... the same way.

Sure there is; even with so reductionist a view, those relationships can be healthy because they are between equals, and can be done with reciprocity.

With a corporation or politician? Not so much.

The views in my comments are no more reductionist than the parent comment I was replying to. I would also suggest that rejecting psychological egoism as reductionist is a rather blatant anti-science point of view.

However whether reciprocity was involved doesn’t at all change the existence of a self-interested motive. It’s simply irrelevant.

Furthermore, in this case there was reciprocity. In this instance the big corporate interests were selling a product for which doctors had a demand to treat their patients. You’re welcome to have an opinion about the integrity and value of that reciprocity, but that goes for anybody in regards to any relationship. A cynical person could come to that conclusion about any relationship, and offer you a justification for it supported entirely by a leading thesis from the field of ethics.

>But if you view this scenario from that perspective, there’s no logical reason that you shouldn’t also view the relationships you have with your own spouse/parents/children/friends... the same way.

Absolutely. And while such attitudes are not incredibly widespread, there are enough folks who do so that we have a name for exhibiting such behavior. We call it Narcissistic Personality Disorder[0].

Which is a terrible thing to do of course, as it stigmatizes a whole group of people that just want to live their lives and use the the objects in their environment to their advantage. What's bad with that?

[0] https://www.helpguide.org/articles/mental-disorders/narcissi...

Your wrong about this. The actual term for this (as I mentioned above) is psychological egoism. This topic has been publicly debated for a very long time. You can look at the history of the debate between egoism and utilitarianism (and the further debate about whether there’s a meaningful difference between those two ideas) if you want to learn about it.

People have debated for a very long time whether a person who derives satisfaction from benefitting others is truely motivated by the benefit of others, or simply the benefit of themselves by way of that satisfaction. A narcissist is a completely different thing. They would not derive satisfaction from benefitting others, for reasons such as their narcissistic lack of empathy.

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