Cosmo, in my experience, the people who most like to bring up the disinterestedness/altruism vs. selfishness/egoism issue are folks who believe there is "no such thing" as altruism. (Not true of Neo, I should say.)
The argument generally goes something like this: if you get pleasure from performing a disinterested act, it is no longer disinterested, because you are primarily seeking to satisfy yourself rather than "the Other".
I find this a very primitive argument -- which may be why it keeps on coming up. <g>
For one thing, it does not address key questions. For example, why do some people -- but by no means all -- get pleasure from performing disinterested acts? Do all "pleasures" have equal value, or are some "higher" than others in a hierarchy of values? Is the capacity to get pleasure from disinterested acts simply an indicator of superior moral/spiritual "talent" (at compassion & empathy, for example)? For that matter, why does the capacity to obtain pleasure from a disinterested act rule out other motivations (e.g., love for the beneficiary of the act)? Generally speaking, unicausal explanations of human behavior are not very illuminating.
Then, of course, there is the separate, if related, question, which I tried to address with the Bill Gates example. Does it really matter whether the motivation for performing a disinterested act is "true altruism," or disguised selfishness? In the practical sense, I would say no. Objectively, a good deed is a good deed, and as such it deserves applause.
OTOH, if you are concerned with the spiritual state of the performer of the good deed, it does matter. If he performs the deed only for the sake of the applause, then he will not be developing spiritually. Personally, however, I doubt whether anyone could continue, year in and year out, acting disinterestedly without becoming disinterested, to at least a certain degree. The good things one does rub off on one, it seems to me, just as much as evil deeds do. Eventually, perhaps, one is what one does. |
