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[...] everything that everyone does is out of satisfying their needs [...] we are all continually acting out of selfishness. If you want to posit feeding the h

[...] everything that everyone does is out of satisfying their needs [...] we are all continually acting out of selfishness. If you want to posit feeding the homeless at a soup kitchen as satisfying a desire to feel helpful or fulfilling the wishes of a deity you wish to please in order to secure your place in the afterlife which is ultimately selfish then sure. Let's go one step further and admit we're in a deterministic universe and we have no free will. That takes care of everything. It helps the next beer go down knowing that, despite saying I wasn't going to drink today, it was always going to happen and was determined nearly 14 billion years ago :-)

DigitalJack 10y ago
Non sequitur.
- icanhackit 10y ago
  I actually agree with you, everything is driven by individual desire i.e. selfishness - even helping others, but it's a bit of a grim way of looking at things. The point I was making is that if we reduce everything to the simplest underlying principal we miss what makes life interesting and we may as well not even be having a discussion. You could, quite correctly, classify my responses as selfish acts of showing off to gain meaningless kudos in an online forum...or more charitably classify them as thoughtful discourse between people interested in esoteric topics.
  - dan00 10y ago
    > I actually agree with you, everything is driven by individual desire i.e. selfishness - even helping others, but it's a bit of a grim way of looking at things. Like you're saying, it's a grim way to look at things and it's even a quite simplified view. Sure, people sometimes help because of more selfish reasons, that they want to be praised, but I'm pretty sure that pure empathy for people can also be a quite big motivation to help.