Selflessness
May 18, 2022•371 words
Being selfless is good. As I've discussed in [1], the inevitability of death makes any selfishness worthless as all the work will be pointless after you die. However, there are some nuances to being selfless.
For one, the idea of selflessness is to act without regard for yourself. Thus one can't be selfless towards one's friends and family, as any benefit they receive benefits you. This is true as the contrapositive is that you don't receive benefits from helping family/friends, and thus your friends/family don't either, which is true since friends/family should care about you, and you not receiving anything means they don't receive the benefit of you benefiting. It is also obvious as you care about friends/family, and their gains means that you should be happy for them, a benefit for you. Furthermore, in the case of certain relations like the parent-child one, acting positively towards the child as a parent should be a given as the parent decided to have the child (in most cases). Thus caring for the child isn't selfless, it is just one accepting your responsibilities. There is also a similar situation with friendship.
For two, the perfect ideal of selflessness is impossible to really reach. Any good act you do helps ease your conscience, so you are guaranteed to benefit. So there aren't really any fully selfless people with a conscience, and thus I don't think people can really have the attribute of selflessness. Instead I think actions can be categorized as selfless or not, as if two different people perform the same action (with references appropriately changed), then the category (selfless or not) should be the same. Thus whether the person performing the deed has a conscience or not shouldn't affect the selflessness or not of the action. This contrasts with the categorizing people as selfless or not, as this depends on whether they have a conscience or not. That being said, there are some people that can be perfectly selfless: people with antisocial disorder. Since they don't have a conscience, any selfless deed they do won't benefit their conscience, hence allowing them to truly have no regard for themself. Thus people with antisocial disorder are theoretically able to be selfless people.