Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

You have a common misconception about altruism, that it is defined as some sort of self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, but through using a twisted interpretation of psychological models, claim that any voluntary action, no matter how detrimental, is intended to improve one's state and therefore altruism can't exist. Seriously, it's like a phase people go through.

Regardless of whether you feel better about yourself or not, intentionally self-sacrificing for the benefit of others is altruism (time, effort, or money are the usual) - there's nothing in the definition saying you must endure some sort of pain or end up less of a person as a result.

I'm not sure what you are saying. I think you are saying that altruism requires self-sacrifice, and that self-sacrifice is not self-serving. But this is silly.

Altruism doesn't have anything to do with self-sacrifice. It is about doing an act that benefits others. Saying, as the person I was responding to said, that someone is not altruistic if they do something "just because" that was their passion, and not because it would help others, is myopic.

Then there's the evolutionary biological sense of altruism, or the philosophical variant of "Pure Altruism", requiring that you suffer for a gift to be truly selfless. People who get really bogged down in this kind of nit-picking would do well to go outside and breath deeply. (points at self)

The concept of altruism doesn't mean "hey, as a side effect, people are better off". The inventor of Teflon isn't altruistic because people have better frying pans these days.

Altruism is doing something where the balance is for the betterment of others, and costs you in some form, such as time (and it is also not atruistic to donate someone else's resources). But that cost does not have to be suffering.

Ultimately, the core of altruism is really whether you're primarily doing -foo- for yourself, or for the benefit of others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com