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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

That's at the nub of it! Do you volunteer at the soup kitchen to help people? Or to make yourself feel something? If the latter, that's a form of tourism and maybe a little lower on the totem pole of noble actions.

A boyfriend (long gone) of my niece did a form of this. He got a Stanford Engineering degree then volunteered at soup kitchens etc. She dumped him. A waste of his life and her emotional investment, in her view.

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I think it's fine if you want to make yourself feel something, that's rational self-interest, no harm done to anyone. I would think less of it if it was just to impress others, in that case you harm yourself (do something you don't like) to make others feel something.

Or perhaps it's more complex, there may be secondary effects that are beneficial to you, perhaps some form of status. Regardless, it feels disingenuous.

> Do you volunteer at the soup kitchen to help people? Or to make yourself feel something?

This makes no sense. An altruistic person is precisely someone who feels good about helping other without receiving anything in return.

Unless you interpret in a charitable way instead of a pedantic one. Is it just about pleasing yourself/looking good or is it about a moral imperative to help other people?

Unless you interpret it in a charitable way instead of an incredibly misanthropic one. Have you considered that you are introducing a false dichotomy?

If helping other people pleases you, doesn’t that just make you a good person?

Is it possible that such people exist, and that helping others need not only be the consequence of following the dictates of a rule based ‘imperative’?

If I needed help, I would far rather receive it from someone who was doing it because they received personal satisfaction from doing so, than someone doing it because they were trying to avoid violating an imperative.

If helping other people pleases you, I consider you a good person indeed! This is why egoism has bit of a strange connotation, because in this case, helping others is egoism.

I think egoism should just not be a bad word. Is a true altruist someone who helps others while hating it?

Egoism vs altruism is not bad vs good as is often presented in our culture. We consider someone who helps others while enjoying it of higher morale than the person who does it reluctantly. The first is an egoist, the latter is a true altruist, she sacrifices herself for others.

And it's logical, the most "good" is achieved in the case of helping others AND enjoying (dear I say "enriching") yourself in the process, win win for the social human with a rational self-interest and her peers.

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