The Good Things We do
 

So, I've been thinking: When we do something "good" something genuinely "good" that one can't really argue is bad, like sharing your lunch with someone who doesn't have one, offering someone a ride home who needs one but is too shy to ask, talking to a kid who is being left out, picking up litter. Whatever, it is, big or small, it could be joining the peace corps to help people in less fortunate countries, or it could be donating your 40 cents for lunch-milk to charity.

When we do these things, ultimately, donating that 40 cents ends up making one feel better than if they drank that milk. When we include the kid who was left out, it ultimately makes us feel better because we don't feel bad for the kid, and we feel good that we included him.

Well then, when we do these things, how can one be sure he isn't simply doing them for personal pleasure, instead out of genuine love and care for the people the good deed is helping?

I'm not sure, sometimes I know I genuinely care for the person, I can tell because those are my only thoughts in doing what I do, but sometimes I'm not so sure. Thoughts?

I think everyone does good things in mind of other people, but it's undeniable that people feel good about it afterwards. I think the motivation is often for personal feeling (unless of course, in situations like serious relationships), but the act itself is always for another.

I remember I read something before that suggested optimistic and altruistic people often lived long, happy lives - survival of the nicest. :D

^ This is a great response, it's similar to what I was thinking as well. Often we do good deeds without a second thought because we see someone in distress or in a bad situation and needs help and we react and help them. Of course if you look at sociological conditioning you could argue that we are made to feel like we should help someone in a society such as ours like when our parents teach us right from wrong and we see cartoons where there is a good moral message to help us. This helps to reinforce our behaviour in a way, also we could be made to think that if we don't help someone then no one else will, which is why you can see people looking around to see if anyone else might step in but then they will help when no one else makes a move to help.

However, I think that we would automatically step in to help someone as you see this happening in places throughout the world, even when their values and societies may be different from our own.

Ultimately I'd say that we have an innate desire to help others which is humanistic in nature, ie it's something that helps to define humanity. Although some people can ignore this impulse, we often do it without thinking of reward or regard for ourselves. It's only after when we get a good feeling that we say to ourselves, "Maybe I'll do that again."
Of course when that time comes again, we may not even be thinking that in our minds when we help someone because normally when someone needs help it's a sudden thing and you just go and help them.

Perhaps we achieve self pleasure because it's a natural effect of doing the right thing. So everybody wins!

Do you think that it takes away from the "goodness" of a deed if one only does it for personal pleasure. If we are merely a being seeking pleasure and that so happens to come in the form of doing "good?"

Like if a Cancer Awareness Campaign needs to find someone to fund them, but the only company they can find is a cigarette company, so that company gets its ads as the sponsor of the Cancer Campaign, is the campaign the same? Or is it slightly diminished?

I know it's not exactly the same as good deeds, but I'm kinda troubled by the fact that my good deeds might be merely selfish. If being selfish ends up making you selfless, but you are ultimately seeking selfish pleasure, is it the same? I'm kinda troubled by this.

Think of it this way: regardless if you do it for care or just pleasure, at the end of the day, somebody will be grateful for your kindness. I find that to be well worth the cost.

You can't. Saying people don't do it for personal pleasure is devaluing it, because some people do.

Helping others is done with the expectation of reciprocity when needed, and is even seen in animals, but some people do feel good for having done t, which is a motivation in itself.

I don't help people expecting or hoping that they will help me in return.
I just help them because I see that they are in trouble. I'm sure I'm not the only one who does this either.

But why do you do that? Because it gives you a positive feeling?

Whether consciously or not, that's a mental reward, because it's evolutionarily programmed as advantageous. Of course, for that reason, not only is it a good thing to do, but it also feels good to help :)

So what if you feel good about yourself after helping someone? Perhaps that's the natural reward for doing good.

I like the question. However, let me propose another question which I think might bring us closer to a conclusion.

If you could no longer feel happiness, would you still act kindly to others?

Of course. Because regardless if you feel happy about it or not, somebody has to be the optimist in these sort of situations. Not only that, but I can imagine it would affect your reputation in the eyes of the people.

If I were incapable of happiness, I can't say how often I'd get out of the house, but I'd still be a nice person :P Or, I'd try my best I suppose. Either way, it would still be important to me.

Nope, as I've said before because I can see someone in trouble so I help them, I use empathy/reasoning to imagine how much they are struggling. There's no remembrance of positive feelings because 1. I can't remember fellings from past events very well, including positive feelings after helping someone because you don't normally get the opportunity to help people every day, which means that you can't really recall the feeling you get from helping people.

2. When people need help it's such a instantaneous event that you have to drop whatever you were doing and help so you don't have time to think "Oh I might help them out because last time I helped I got a good feeling back."

Some people might find it hard to understand but there are people out there who genuinely help because they want to, because they see someone in trouble. There doesn't have to be rewards or advantages..Some people are just helpful or naturally selfless or they become selfless after time.

I like that, because I would say most the time I help someone, it just happens right away. But sometimes, I'll think like "Finally, finished mowing all the greens and raking all the bunkers I was supposed to do, now I can go home. Then I'd be driving back to the maintenance shop and see someone else hadn't finished, and think "Ehh, I should help them, but I really don't want to." Then, I'd go over and help them, even though I didn't want to. So it's not like I did it for personal reward, nor because I wanted to, just because I thought I should for some reason.

That describes some people in my family really well. ;) I think that's how some people go about helping people, it just pops up and they feel like they should do something..It could be because they've been taught that it's the right thing to do but before people say that people are somehow forced to do the right thing let me say that a good amount of those people who feel like they should help might decide not to, simply because they aren't forced to..Or they might feel like they have something else to do instead that is more pressing.

Personally I don't think that you can really achieve a selflessness in toto. In your case the "reward" would the positive feeling you get when you help someone. You said that you cannot remember such a feeling by helping. That can be true (although I would say that's only true for the minority of good things), but passively you still get such a feeling in your brain. You don't have to actively know about that feeling. Many things you dont know straight, but they still influence you. And I can think of just a few such good actions that don't give you any positive reaction at all.

This - of course - doesn't diminish the worth of good things. Just because you also get a positive feeling by doing something good doesn't mean that this is your primary motivation. Actually, it reflects your personal morale towards a society. So even if you get a inner reward for something, that doesn't make the action worse or even egoistic, in my opinion. I mean, some people even think that really every thing you do is per definition egoistic and selfish. For me it's a matter of priority and proportion between the worth of action on the one and the reward on the other hand to judge, if something is egoistic or not.

Still a quite interesting topic anyway.

I guess I agree with Cassio. Sometimes you can't be completely selfless anyway, since you must first be in good working condition in order to help someone else out. If you're dead tired from mowing a lawn, it's better to be selfish in the case that if you did try to help someone else, you'd pass out and then nothing would get done :P Sometimes making decisions in your best interest can help others out in the long term.

That's true in a way as most people would prefer to consider their own safety but you still have people who deliberately put themselves in harms way, even if they do have disabilities or problems to help another person.

IMO that is not wise. Helping others should always (unless it's like your child or some other serious situation) be very calculated, or else it is for me. I'd rather retain my ability to help for the future than endanger myself and risk losing it.

I know but then how would you factor in all these average people who are hailed as heroes because they save people from burning buildings or jump off small bridges to help old ladies who jump in rivers? http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/...n-river-rescue

How do you mean "factor in"? Do you mean how would I consider them? Awesome guys. Jumping into a river isn't exactly life threatening, and in the matter of saving a life, of course you should get a little wet. I was under the impression we were referring to helping people in the everyday manner.

I just meant factor in as in don't take them out of the equation when you consider the population as a whole. Besides I thought this thread was about people doing anything good and trying to look at the rationale for them doing such things, this can apply to "heroes" or those of us who just help people out from time to time.

:S Confuzzled. I wasn't referring to any type of equation or to what people as a whole do, I was really only talking about myself.

You were in the beginning of your post, then went on to talk about what you'd do. :P

Anyway..I think it's better if we go back on topic.

I said IMO. I think that means that's what should be done in my opinion. I never said other instances of courage didn't happen outside that parameter, I just said those are the precautions I think one should take before trying to help someone or throwing themselves into a rescue operation.

Everything we post here is in our own opinions unless they are straight facts like numbers and the like. People debate using their own opinion..which means that what people say can be taken as being a statement.

IMO or not, (I agree with you there, I find all the IMOs painfully redundant) it was plainly a statement of what "should" be done, not what is done.

True, but I could still take it as a statement and reply to it as I had done. Anway this thread is getting into semantics quite a bit so I think we should swing it back on topic.

Very true. Someone who knows that he always gets help won't even try anymore to get things all done. He'll tend to rely too much on others, which may be a problem in many situations.

Sometimes the hard thing is to know when it's in someone's interest to help him and when it's not. Okay, most of the time it is pretty clear. If a child is about to drown in a lake, you probably won't think "Hey, that's a good chance for him to learn swimming!" :D

Well, on the other side, the idealist side, the person will think "Hey, I liked being helped, I'm going to start helping people!" Then the helpingness gets spread along.

Of course, ideally, everyone is in the right situation to help everyone else and no one has to pass on helping someone due to their own lack of safety.

By creating an expectation of doing something, people eventually engineer a situation that benefits themselves too. Of course, the majority of people do not want anything bad to happen to others if they could reasonably prevent it, but they generally don't put themselves at a greater risk for people they don't know, only make a reasonable attempt.

Good point. That's a clash beteen idealism and materialism. The truth is probably somewhere in between and relative to the personality of the helped person. One will then lean back and will get dependend on help, while the other one will see it as an incentive to do it himself. I think it really depends on which kind of help we're talking about. By helping someone in daily life, he won't change into a selfless human that saves people by endangering himself. At least I just cannot imagine this to happen.

One may say that by helping someone you'll always have some kind of a ulterior motive. In general you'll help someone because you are sorry about his position. Some part of yourself will always think "Geez, if I was in his position, I'd just hope that there is someone that will help me too." Again, I'm not valuating or relativizing the help itself. I am just not convinced that it is utterly selfless. This doesn't mean it's selfish.

I think as well as what you've said Cassio that sometimes people can also think to themselves "I can't watch this person struggle, and no one is helping them so I'd better help them". To be honest I think that it's up to the individual and their values and personality on whether they help people or not.

Absolutely! What I was trying to say is that a motive consists of many different motivations that are important for our decision of why doing something good and why not. The original question of the topic was, if we do help simply because of the personal pleasure we get from it and not because we want to be kind. So referring to my last answer my post my answer to this would be no. But it would also be no, if the question was the exact opposite. :D

In my opinion it's just a mixture and proportion of all these things that brings you to the point doing something good. Generally when you're doing something good, the help motivation that you're meaning will certainly be the by far strongest motivation in your consideration. But is it really the only motivation at all? Since that's what the topic was about in the first place - just in the exact contrary direction by stating that it's maybe not 100% help motive, but 100% personal pleasure motive. For me, neither statement really seems to be right. Even the most simple decisions we make have so many different motivations behind them, so I can't see why doing something good shouldn't. So I'd rather say it's more like 80% help and 20% pleasure or whatever (just random numbers to clarify what I mean). Whether one motive is stronger or weaker, is what I think to be up to the values and personality that you mentioned - and the concrete situation. One person will have it at 90% vs. 10%. The other one at 30% vs. 70%. I just have difficulties in saying that it's 100% vs. 0% or the other way round. It just appears to be quite too simple for such a complexe thing.

That's what I think too Cassio, but suppose it is 100% for personal pleasure, is it a 'good' deed then would you say?

I would say that the deed would be helpful but with the wrong intentions.
So I suppose you're determination on whether or not it is a good thing is if you think that good actions overweigh bad intentions or motives.
I'd say no but it's up to anyone to decide.

Actually, let me rephrase that, not necessarily if it's a "good deed" cause the deed done is obviously good, but if it's a "good thing" cause obviously the deed is good, but is the whole thing good in general? Hope that clears it up.

Hmm well if you take it like that it's a bit harder to answer but I suppose I'd say yes . It's like a person donating to charity because they want to look good..It's not the best thing to do but overall it's good in general because it benefits the people who really need help.