I mean, you’re not wrong, but your point is also kinda meaningless. Of course, you only ever do things because there’s something in it for you, even if that something is just feeling good about yourself. If there was truly nothing in it for you, then why would you do it?
But that misses the point of the “people are inherently selfish” vs “people are inherently generous” discussion, because it’s not actually about whether people do things only for themselves at the most literal level, instead it’s about whether people inherently get something out of doing things for others without external motivation. So your point works the same on both sides of the argument.
Of course, you only ever do things because there’s something in it for you,
No, sometimes you do things because you care about other people and want to help them. That you also probably feel better about yourself than you would if you did shitty things all day doesn’t mean that feeling is the only and single motivation.
Well, but what does “caring” mean? It means that their well-being affects your emotions. At its very core, you wanting to help people you care about comes from wanting to create positive emotions in yourself or avoiding negative ones (possibly in the future, it doesn’t have to be an immediate effect). If those emotions weren’t there, you wouldn’t actually care and thus not do it.
Edit to clarify: I’m not being cynical or pessimistic here, or implying that this means that everyone is egotistical because of this. The point I was trying to make is that defining egotism vs. Altruism is a little bit more complex than just looking at whether there’s something in it for the acting person. We actually need to look at what’s in it for the acting person.
Well, but what does “caring” mean? It means that their well-being affects your emotions.
That would be an extremely reductive definition that doesn’t really tell us much about how caring for others is actually experienced and how it manifests in the world. How would this for example explain sacrificing yourself to save another person, if the very core of caring is to create positive emotions in yourself? Dying is a pretty negative thing to experience and there will be no more positive emotions for you after that. I guess this idea that caring is in its essence transactional feels profound to people because we’re so ingrained with capitalist ideology… but it’s a lot more complex and multifaceted than that.
I might help people because it makes me feel good, sure. But I might also do it because those are my values, long since established, and I try to live by said values. So it’s about what following a self-imposed expectation, not about getting something. For some people, some of the time.
Similarly, the argument that “being selfless is selfish” is not useful and provably false. Just go ask people, and they’ll tell you why they did things and how they felt. Then you have to argue that many of them are either lying or mistaken, which doesn’t seem like a winnable argument.
the argument that “being selfless is selfish” is not useful
Yes, that’s my entire point.
and provably false
Depends on how you define “selfish”. Again, that’s exactly what I’m trying to demonstrate here. Reducing the definition of selfish to mean “getting something out of it” makes it meaningless because every decision is made in the hopes of getting something out of it in some way, even if it’s obscure. To make it useful, you need to look at what someone is getting out of it in order to get to a useful definition.
