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DanielLC comments on Rationality Quotes May 2014 - Less Wrong
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― Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men (Discworld, #30)
If you want to use your selfishness to help others, then you're not selfish.
Do we really need to go into the question what “selfishness” actually means? In ordinary situations I'd say that “the actual altruist [is] whichever one actually holds open doors for little old ladies”; maybe in certain situations we need different words to specify whether they do so because it's in their own utility function or because of religious/game-theoretical/superrational/acausal/whatever-they-call-it-these-days reasons, but...
I don't think this is just a problem with definitions. This is fake morality.
She's giving a fake justification for helping others as her own self interest. Someone who finds a way to justify buying a million dollar laptop is clearly just being selfish and doesn't really care about their claimed morality of altruism. Similarly, someone who tries to justify helping others is clearly just being altruistic and doesn't really care about their claimed morality of selfishness.
Of course you're not. But human nature is supposedly selfish, and if your true goals are altruistic, you will have to find a way to turn it around.
Emphasis on "supposedly", since the popular hypotheses about "selfish human nature" are far too simplistic to reflect any actual results of psychological research.
Of course they are. Unlike those about Pratchett's witches, though. They reflect the 'locally-selfish-globally-altruistic' concept surprisingly well.
Selfishness seems to be referred to as primarily a a mindset or attitude. Helping others as an outcome. I think they can co-exist at the same time, for example Adam Smith's invisible hand in capitalism.
I'm not saying that your selfishness can't result in others being helped. I'm saying that if you're trying to figure out how to use your selfishness to help others, then helping others is clearly your goal, which proves you're not selfish. If you're willing to game the system to help others, then you'd be willing to help others without gaming the system.
If you are selfish (this usually will cash out as "you alieve that selfishness is good") but believe it is virtuous or beneficial to act unselfishly, then you would rightly seek ways to act in ways that feel locally selfish but have unselfish consequences.
You have a left parenthesis but no matching right parenthesis.
I have now fixed this serious issue. (Is this sarcasm? You Decide!)
Shouldn't that be
?
I considered that but decided it was needlessly cruel. And now you did it for me, so I get the best of both worlds.
Now that I can understand your sentence:
If you are selfish, but believe it is virtuous to act unselfishly, then you'll seek ways to act in ways that look unselfish, but have selfish consequences.
Tiffany seems to be an altruist who thinks she's supposed to be selfish, and is trying to justify acting altruistically as somehow being selfish.
You're describing someone who believes it is beneficial to look unselfish but not be unselfish.
If you are selfish, but have reasoned out that helping others is the correct goal to have, you would believe not that it is beneficial to look unselfish, but that it is beneficial to act unselfishly. And if you believe that but do not alieve it, System 2 would look for ways to do unselfish things that System 1 would perceive as selfish, so as to better motivate yourself toward those goals.