Nonsacrificial Help To Others: Questions and Answers

by Dr. S. J. Adams

This post will respond to specific questions and objections raised to my previous post called Altruism and Mental Illness: Self-Sacrifice is Mind-Sacrifice. The primary point of that post was that one’s approach to ethics has implications for one’s psychological health.

Specifically, I argued that altruism, i.e., self-sacrifice, if accepted and committed to, leads to mental illness. It promotes a focus on, and self-sacrifice to, misery. Egoism, or rational self-interest, leads to mental health. It promotes a focus on personal happiness and achievement. One can use his mind to achieve his own rationally chosen values, or his mind can be put in the service of others’ needs.

I also indicated that most people don’t fall on either extreme; they are mixed in regard to their core beliefs, including ethics, which leads to a mixed psychological result. Sometimes they will pursue their own interests and sometimes they will succumb to irrational guilt.

The specific questions or objections raised had in common the issue of how to distinguish between rationally self-interested and altruistic acts, as well as a challenge to the respective psychological results I indicate.

As context and a general answer to many of these questions, these issues are what Ayn Rand referred to as instances of “nonsacrificial help to others.” Bear in mind that a sacrifice is giving up something of higher value for something that is a lower value or a nonvalue. Giving up a pair of sneakers and getting $5,000 in return is not a sacrifice. Paying the $5,000, especially if it’s all the money you have, is.

Altruism holds that only help toward others that involves self-sacrifice is virtuous. Thus, for altruists, the idea of nonsacrificial help is irrelevant. If you benefit in some way, then your action may be praiseworthy, but unworthy of esteem or considered moral.

If this is true—if nonsacrificial help to others does not earn virtue—then why do it?

This is the guilty secret of altruism: it fully understands that people want to be virtuous, because it does make them feel good. Rationality, virtue, and happiness are man’s natural state. Acting in accordance with such virtues as honesty, integrity, and independence makes one feel competent, proud, and clean. The psychological result is a state of happiness. You feel good about yourself, and should.

But it is here that altruism places its trap. Recall that if you feel any pleasure, even inadvertent, from your action, you are not moral. Thus, the moment you feel pleasure after an act of virtue, a pang of guilt muscles forcefully in—you’ve just realized you are immoral.

In a sense, altruists understand egoism more deeply than egoists. They are counting on the fact that people want to and will feel good about themselves when they act virtuously. Their game is to intellectually tie self-interest to evil, and psychologically replace pleasure with pain. However, by devaluing the concept of self-interest and tying it to emotional pain, altruism actually cuts off a whole realm of appropriate help to others. Nonsacrificial help to others, under altruism, is pointless. This is altruism’s “compassion” and “humanitarianism.”

Egoism, by recognizing that it is natural and good to feel happiness by achieving personal values, opens up possibilities for action that will have the effect of benefiting others. Rational and happy men strive to be so, and want others to be, as well. If they can help someone, they will, partly for the sake of the man they helped, but more basically because they felt good about themselves for doing it. Such men are precisely not the types who run around telling others of all their great works. They don’t need to, as they are content with themselves.

So, that provides some context-setting for my responses to questions from the original post and also a general answer to some of those questions. But now I’ll address the questions specifically. I’ll start with my good friend Dr. Paul White’s questions. (Paul is a psychologist in the U.S. Army serving overseas near the war zone but, thankfully, not in it. He deserves a lot of credit for his work there.)

Questions:

“What about family, the fruit of one's loins? Are they self or other? Do we assist and educate our children for our own sake, for their sake or for both?”

People vary in their motivations for having children. Hopefully, most couples have children because they value themselves and each other. For such people, a child is a product of their love. Both literally and symbolically, a child is a merging of themselves into a single and, hopefully, better form. But rational parents also understand that their child is an individual, with his own mind and interests, and will in all likelihood grow up to be an adult. So, there is a double personal value here for the parents: the child as a product of the parent’s love for each other and as a unique individual whom they want to experience all the wonderful aspects of life for himself. On these grounds, you assist and educate your children because they are not born capable of caring for themselves and their nature as living human beings requires that they learn how. Additionally, your child’s success and happiness make you happy, too. So, it’s for both of you.

“What about the educator? Is there a difference between the lady that volunteers to teach others to read or pass their GED at the local library on Thursday nights and the guy who teaches high school biology full time?”

The obvious difference is that one gets paid while the other doesn’t, but there’s not enough information to say if one person is more moral (or happy) then the other. Certainly altruists would say that doing something for free is more moral, especially if it’s a drudgery and undertaken as a duty. But that’s because altruism ignores the underlying questions of what values are and why man needs them. It takes the need for values as a given, then starts with the issue of who should provide them to whom.

But more specific to your example, let’s say the teacher became a volunteer because she really likes teaching and has the time to do it. She values the knowledge she possesses and her ability to transmit it to others; she enjoys watching the students learn and achieve their goal (the GED); she likes showing people that they can be successful in life. All these are perfectly rational and self-interested reasons for volunteering.

However, what if she had the same motivations but really didn’t have the time? For instance, maybe she has young children she needs to be home with. Or she doesn’t have much money and so can only take on additional work that pays. In either case, to go ahead and volunteer would be a sacrifice; she would be giving up time with her children or time that could be spent at another job that earns her money. Not even the pleasure she might receive from volunteering will last long if she has to give up a higher value in the process. Giving up something more important for something less or non-important does not result in happiness.

As to the biology teacher, the same principles apply. If he does the job because he enjoys it and earns money too, then that’s the best of all worlds. However, if he is like the second biologist I describe in my original post, then he is there for the wrong reasons; he is putting forth effort to fulfill someone else’s happiness and is, therefore, doomed.

“What if you are just doing what you are good or talented at (like writing about psychological/philosophical issues) and other people happen to benefit? Whose needs have been served?”

If the writer enjoys it and others find it beneficial, then everyone profits. That’s the beauty of egoism. By contrast, imagine what would be produced by someone who doesn’t like writing. The whole process to such a person would be a dreary boredom or frustration undertaken for non-self-interested reasons. Do you imagine that the product would be good or useful to someone? It might be, but that would be by chance.

This might be a true issue of semantics, but I don’t like the implication of “needs [being] served.” Obviously we all have needs, which range from the basic (food, shelter) to the advanced (self-esteem, romantic love). But I don’t think “serving needs” is the primary. Instead, I think achieving values, which serves the purpose of fulfilling needs, is primary.

The distinction may not be obvious, but it’s along the lines of arguing either that man’s behavior is motivated by the avoidance of pain or by the pursuit of pleasure. Need-fulfillment implies the former, whereas value-achievement implies the latter.

For instance, consider the last time you grabbed a quick lunch from the drive-through at a local fast-food place. That lunch served to fulfill a basic need (hunger) and, to that extent, it was an achievement of a value. But contrast that with the last time you went out for dinner with your spouse or a good friend. You are fulfilling the same basic need, but it’s obviously a lot more important. The meal itself is a full experience, and it fulfills a lot of needs simultaneously. But the primary motive is the value of both the food and the company, not the mere fulfilling of needs as such.

Based on that example, it’s obvious that one can do something simply to fulfill a need (and often it’s appropriate, such as a quick lunch when you have work to focus on). But, as a generalized characterization of human nature, I think it’s incorrect. (By the way, I’m not suggesting that this view is necessarily behind the question asked; I’m just taking a brief sidebar here to illustrate a point.)

Now I’ll respond to two other scenarios offered in the comments to my original post.

If your relative is sick and needs a kidney, why do the altruistic thing and refrain from killing your neighbor and taking his kidney? You should do the egoistic thing – kill the neighbor, take the kidney, and save your wife. What I’m saying is, if you play at the extremities of any value, you can make an easy case against it.

As the last sentence indicates, the scenario is an attempt to take altruism and egoism to an extreme point and, thereby, allegedly demonstrate their absurdity or unreasonableness. There’s only one problem: refraining from killing your neighbor then stealing his kidney to save your wife is not an example of altruism, just as killing your neighbor then taking his kidney to save your wife is not an example of egoism.

Man’s nature indicates that he has a fundamental right to his own property, his body being the most essential property he owns. To kill a man and take his kidney is to violate this right, i.e., become a dangerous criminal. Further, it is to uphold the idea that physical force against innocent men is a legitimate means of dealing with others. You need a kidney, another guy has one, therefore you are allowed to take it by force if he’s not willing to give it up voluntarily.

However, if one upholds the right of physically forcing others to comply with his needs, then how is it that other men don’t have the same right? How can the thug, when he gets it back, claim victimization? By violating the rights of others, the thug loses any claim to protection from the same actions by others. I believe this is the point James Grice (a.k.a. The Relentless Man) made in his comments.

Therefore, it cannot possibly be in one’s self-interest, i.e., egoistic, to kill his neighbor, steal his kidney, and use it for his wife. If anything, it puts his wife in more jeopardy. After all, perhaps the neighbor has a spouse, too, who doesn’t take kindly to the murder and seeks revenge by hurting the killer (or his wife who now has the kidney). Or, what if the killer simply gets caught by the police, tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. Now his wife is alone and has to live with the fact that her life continues because an innocent person died by her husband’s hands. This result is rationally self-interested? I don’t think so. In fact, it is precisely not killing the neighbor that is egoistic, for all the reasons I just indicated.

More than all this, the formulation of the scenario is not “play[ing] at the extremities of any value…” It is precisely assigning the wrong definitions to the concepts of egoism and altruism. As a result, one does not make an “easy case” against them. Instead, it only demonstrates how easy it is to accept altruism’s terms of the debate.

It is altruism that defines egoists as murderers. It’s part of the psychological manipulation I wrote about. It seeks to implant the idea that selfishness is the same as murder, thereby inducing a guilt reaction every time you experience a personal benefit and pleasure from your own actions. The irony is that a person who actually did murder his innocent neighbor would justify it not on egoistic terms, but altruistic ones. He would claim that his actions were to benefit his wife, not himself. Fulfilling others’ needs is the rationalization of all thuggery.

What if by giving money to a homeless shelter instead of buying a second sailboat, you help forestall the eventual violent revolution of the downtrodden until after your death? Are you a sneaky, successful egoist or a foiled, frustrated altruist?

In my response to this comment, I labeled it “philosophical buffoonery.” Here’s why. Before I would even consider answering this question, the questioner has to prove several things. First, he has to prove that the downtrodden are planning a violent revolution. Second, he has to explain how exactly the downtrodden, who aren’t always the most intelligent or motivated, will concoct and execute this formidable revolutionary war. Third, he has to prove that this revolution will occur in my lifetime (which requires omniscience). Fourth, he has to prove that my giving them money will forestall (rather than expedite) their revolution until after I die (which also requires omniscience). Finally, if the revolution is imminent, then why not buy a second sailboat, especially a bigger and faster one, so that I can simply get away from all the violence?

Obviously the situation isn’t provable (since it would require omniscience). Therefore, it’s a pure flight of fancy trying to pass off as a legitimate approach to ethics. Now, knowing the questioner as I do, it’s more likely a case of playful intellectual hoodwinkery. But it can be dangerous if taken seriously, because it means that one has fallen into altruism’s trap: one has presented as a legitimate ethical scenario a situation which he is unlikely to encounter, which doesn’t relate to the actual problems of his everyday life, and therefore leaves him with no moral guidance at all.

As an aside and closure, note that it is precisely the idea of “negotiating” with and appeasing terrorists that defines the radical Left’s foreign policy. These were the people who, after 9/11, were asking, “Why do they hate us?” and suggesting that “we should really try to listen” to them and understand. If we did, we’d realize that they see us as a bunch of Imperialists who are enslaving innocent, spiritual cultures around the world to monolithic materialism. They’re losing all their cultural traditions (such as collectivism, tribalism, civil war, barbarism) and it’s our fault. Maybe we should give them support (read “money”). After all, we are a vulgar, crass, materialistic society. We have no values or anything to be proud of. We once had slaves here, too, so we’re not so great. Who are we to say their culture isn’t better? It’s our job to understand. We’re a rich country, we can afford a little sacrifice. Can’t we?