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> Donating is not about you feeling good, it is about helping someone else. It's about both. There is nothing wrong with feeling good for helping someone. Of

> Donating is not about you feeling good, it is about helping someone else. It's about both. There is nothing wrong with feeling good for helping someone. Of course, you need to actually have helped someone, but that goes without saying.

danShumway 9y ago
I actually used to occasionally feel weird about helping people because it made me feel good. I would sometimes even go out of my way to make sure I didn't feel good when helping, to try and do it in the most painful way possible. What swapped me on that was that I realized I was often a more generous, effective helper when I could feed off the positive energy that came along with it. I want to help people because they have inherent value, not for my own gain or status. So I asked myself, 'would the type of person who is completely selfless make themselves less effective as a helper just so that they could be assured that they were selfless?' And of course they wouldn't. Being selfless is about considering other people to be more important than you. I was falling into the trap of treating my own moral status as the end goal; I was still considering other people to be less important than what I felt my actions said about me. It's like when people assume that the opposite of pride is self-deprecation and then spend the exact same amount of time and energy obsessing over why they're bad at something.
- firethief 9y ago
  That sounds like a self-enforced variant of do-gooder aversion, which seems to come standard in the human psyche. Here's a template of a conversation I have to actively avoid: > I'm making this lifestyle choice for ethical reasons > You must feel superior! > I guess that's a risk I'm willing to take?
Fnoord 9y ago
The feeling good is a (possible) by-product of the goal: helping someone. When too much emphasis is put on that (possible) by-product it can cloud the moral value of the goal. F.e. how donating becomes a pissing contest in certain rich circles.
- danShumway 9y ago
  Well sure, feeling good is not the end goal and shouldn't become the end goal. That doesn't mean it should be dismissed or avoided. Tasting good is not the end goal of food, nutrition is. I think the pushback might make more sense thinking about it that way. Suppose the OP had written a post talking about how healthy kale was: > "It's super healthy, and if you cook it right, it tastes amazing too!" > "That's disillusioning yourself just like every form of cooking does. The point of healthy eating is not to satisfy your taste buds." Lots of things in the world can become a trap, but that doesn't mean they should always be avoided. I think sometimes people forget that empathy and morality are work. It takes reinforcement. Being "good" is something you learn and practice, it's not a binary switch you turn on and off. So in other words, if I'm Cookie Monster, and I'm on the fence about donating blood, and somebody tells me that the Red Cross always supplies free cookies afterwards (and even apple juice sometimes, heck yeah) and that's just enough to push me over the fence to donate blood - good. I'm glad someone told me that then. I'm going to take advantage of any instinct that makes me more likely to help someone. And, yeah, maybe it'll become a problem sometime and I'll not want to help out with an event that doesn't have free cookies. Then I'll switch to a variable reward schedule to help ingrain the habit, or I'll start weaning myself off of cookies, or whatever. But the point is to start somewhere. If I start doing sit-ups, I'm absolutely going to have someone hold my feet because my core strength isn't going to be there at the beginning. Empathy is a muscle; treat it like one. Another way of looking at it is that the people you are helping usually don't care about your internal morality. So by all means, focus on your internal morality - but only if it doesn't get in the way of you helping them. During a blood shortage, you get no moral points for saying "well, I didn't donate blood because I didn't think I could do it in a truly selfless way."

danShumway 9y ago

I actually used to occasionally feel weird about helping people because it made me feel good. I would sometimes even go out of my way to make sure I didn't feel good when helping, to try and do it in the most painful way possible. What swapped me on that was that I realized I was often a more generous, effective helper when I could feed off the positive energy that came along with it. I want to help people because they have inherent value, not for my own gain or status. So I asked myself, 'would the type of person who is completely selfless make themselves less effective as a helper just so that they could be assured that they were selfless?' And of course they wouldn't. Being selfless is about considering other people to be more important than you. I was falling into the trap of treating my own moral status as the end goal; I was still considering other people to be less important than what I felt my actions said about me. It's like when people assume that the opposite of pride is self-deprecation and then spend the exact same amount of time and energy obsessing over why they're bad at something.

firethief 9y ago
That sounds like a self-enforced variant of do-gooder aversion, which seems to come standard in the human psyche. Here's a template of a conversation I have to actively avoid: > I'm making this lifestyle choice for ethical reasons > You must feel superior! > I guess that's a risk I'm willing to take?

Fnoord 9y ago

The feeling good is a (possible) by-product of the goal: helping someone. When too much emphasis is put on that (possible) by-product it can cloud the moral value of the goal. F.e. how donating becomes a pissing contest in certain rich circles.

danShumway 9y ago
Well sure, feeling good is not the end goal and shouldn't become the end goal. That doesn't mean it should be dismissed or avoided. Tasting good is not the end goal of food, nutrition is. I think the pushback might make more sense thinking about it that way. Suppose the OP had written a post talking about how healthy kale was: > "It's super healthy, and if you cook it right, it tastes amazing too!" > "That's disillusioning yourself just like every form of cooking does. The point of healthy eating is not to satisfy your taste buds." Lots of things in the world can become a trap, but that doesn't mean they should always be avoided. I think sometimes people forget that empathy and morality are work. It takes reinforcement. Being "good" is something you learn and practice, it's not a binary switch you turn on and off. So in other words, if I'm Cookie Monster, and I'm on the fence about donating blood, and somebody tells me that the Red Cross always supplies free cookies afterwards (and even apple juice sometimes, heck yeah) and that's just enough to push me over the fence to donate blood - good. I'm glad someone told me that then. I'm going to take advantage of any instinct that makes me more likely to help someone. And, yeah, maybe it'll become a problem sometime and I'll not want to help out with an event that doesn't have free cookies. Then I'll switch to a variable reward schedule to help ingrain the habit, or I'll start weaning myself off of cookies, or whatever. But the point is to start somewhere. If I start doing sit-ups, I'm absolutely going to have someone hold my feet because my core strength isn't going to be there at the beginning. Empathy is a muscle; treat it like one. Another way of looking at it is that the people you are helping usually don't care about your internal morality. So by all means, focus on your internal morality - but only if it doesn't get in the way of you helping them. During a blood shortage, you get no moral points for saying "well, I didn't donate blood because I didn't think I could do it in a truly selfless way."