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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2051 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 30, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Kind of a silly question: is being concerned with living a moral life a reliigous/ideological affliction that you shouldn't need to concern yourself with if you're enlightened?

Is there anything, well, "wrong" with being 100% self-interested? E.g. when you do work for mutual benefit, it's to build credit, not because you inherently care the benefit of others.

Is this nihilism? Or something else?

What a fascinating question to phrase that way! Your thoughts and values are alien to me, yet each word is clearly comprehensible! There is so much bundled into every turn of phrase which I must clarify and/or dispute just to come to my own answer.

is being concerned with living a moral life a religious/ideological affliction that you shouldn't need to concern yourself with if you're enlightened?

I get the impression that you have an idea of enlightenment which is separate from the idea of living a moral life. To what truths or modes of being must one have been enlightened to that living a moral life is a lesser pursuit? What kind of morality is less enlightened?

Ayn Rand promoted the idea that freedom and self-interest go hand in hand, and disallowing one disallows the other. She railed against the altruistic morality that all men belong to all other men, and find their worth only in aiding others. Yet she did not discard morality; she insulted altruism as a bad morality and said that man seeking his own purpose is the highest morality.

If you’re looking for someone who, like me, agrees that self-interest is both rational and noble, read some Ayn Rand. Start with The Fountainhead, move on to The Virtue of Selfishness, and then read Atlas Shrugged. These answer the question I think you intend to ask.

I read quite a bit of Ayn Rand when I was a bookish teenager. Both her semi-pornographic fiction and also non-fiction essays. They were fun but I'm not ever sure I truly followed. She was like <start, law of identity> and then <virtues of selfishness, here> and kind of left out the middle steps from formal logic to complete human moral system.

But, why do I need to have warm fuzzies about it? Can't I just say self-interest is fine and any guilt I might feel about it is my socially obsessed brain trying to tell me lies and I should only worry about group dynamics in a game theoretical sense?

Apparently you have some sort of idea that living a moral life necessarily includes emotional rewards and excludes guilt. Guilt is a somewhat faulty instinct which, like all instincts, is only a thumbnail sketch of reality’s proper shape; treating emotions as reality has always been a fraught exercise in frustration.

As for warm fuzzies, there is a socioemotional component to the human mind which despairs if not fulfilled. Dunbar’s Numbers say that you should have four to eight really close friends and family you see weekly, to feed your brain.

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