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Comment count is 20
fermun - 2009-01-14

The straw men! You're destroying them all! Won't somebody please save the straw men?


Dib - 2009-01-14

If I punched him in the face, that would be a very good deed and entirely selfless act.

The exception that proves the rule!


UnderANeonHalo - 2009-01-14

Because you wouldn't get any sort of pleasure or satisfaction from it right?

The man's a dick but he has a point, be it delivered in a dick manner. Humans are driven by their desires, if something doesn't benefit you directly or give you a sense of self satisfaction you don't do it. But yeah, the guys a dick, and I'd like to jump right in line to punch him as well.


Cleaner82 - 2009-01-14

Luckily there are those crazy souls out there who believe in what they do, or else we'd be a world of lazy, stupid, twitchy rat-men and nothing would ever get done. We're close enough to that anyway.


oddeye - 2009-01-14

What you do is almost always a lot more important then why you do it. It doesn't really matter if you save someones life because it made you feel good or because you expected a reward, the most important thing is that you saved someones life.

Again anyone with half a brain realises this.


Bort - 2009-01-14

It doesn't always come down to making you "feel good", unless you're going to play circular definitions and any course of action you choose, for whatever reason, is said to make you feel good.

If the guy said that people opt for whatever seems like the best option at the time, he'd be hitting the nail on the head. But then he'd have to acknowledge that he's not any smarter than the sheeples around him, and suddenly masturbating would no longer be an act of proud defiance against a hypocritical world.


Doctor Arcane - 2009-01-14

Wow, this was totally me when I was 12. I was kind of a douche.

Also, plenty of people/animals will die defending their young, their tribe etc. Some would argue it's more about perpetuating your genes than seeking pleasure.


Dib - 2009-01-14

Personally, I have to confess to the opposite of what this guy is claiming.

Donating money doesn't make me feel good at all. In fact I feel like a sucker after the fact, and have to mentally force myself to justify it with ideas like "it's for a good cause". The difference is that if I spend my own money, I know what will come as a result of it: I'll have a new video game, or new clothes, or whatever, and that would make me happy. Giving it away to somebody else, I don't really know what happens. It could go to the intended place, or it could get spent on commercials or a steak dinner for an employee. Either way, I have lost some money and somebody has gained it for nothing, and that never makes me feel good.

I do it anyway for the fact that I believe a life worth living is one where you do right by other people and not just yourself, even if that means occassionally feeling stupid and like a sucker. I don't need the moral superiority, and anybody that knows me knows that the thing I resent most of all is recognition or praise for anything I've ever done. I believe that if you've done a good deed properly, they'll never know the difference. So I'm less likely to do anything for anybody if there is a good feeling of satisfaction or appreciation to be gained out of it.

So yeah...fuck this douchebag.


Camonk - 2009-01-14

Okay this is literally from an introduction to philosophy textbook but:

If we say that you only do good things because it makes you feel good, then we still basically get down to the fact that there are some people who feel good when they help people. So they still honestly desire to help people, which brings right back to the beginning.

God help us if he ever reads Hobbes.


pastorofmuppets - 2009-01-14

The great thing about studying philosophy is for all of these little "gems" you have floating around in your head like turds in a toilet, you teacher can say, that's great, now here's somebody who stated that better than you did, and here's 10 guys who had legitimate a counterpoint, and all of them have been dead for 300 years.

Like the "brain in a jar" idea, his idea is rendered meaningless by a single question:

"so?"


Cleaner82 - 2009-01-14

So who does this guy hang out with that they're constantly bragging about all the good things they've done?


kingofthenothing - 2009-01-14

The first draft probably had something like this:

"I'm tired of you telling me about all the good you're doing. Look, if it wasn't for you being sentenced to community service, you wouldn't do any good at all."


oddeye - 2009-01-14

Well done, you've managed to grasp what anyone in the rest of the world with half a brain has known by the time they were 14. Now run along and play.


LetsFistAgain - 2009-01-14

WE ARE DA PRIESTS! OF DA TINNPOLLZ! OF SYRINX!


Randroid - 2009-01-14

There seems to be some kind of rule that all rat-faced men, with horrible dress sense, at one point in time will purchase a camera and start recording monologues. Maybe it's some kind of initiation rite into the objectivist tribe.


Poor Excuse - 2009-01-14

Neckbeard, Blah.


glendower - 2009-01-14

Because I like being back in my high school philosophy class.


charmlessman - 2009-01-14

Well, he's a logically flawed dick, but he did get my voice JUST RIGHT!


Burnov - 2009-01-14

The selfish gene and a portion of the God Delusion by Dawkins effectively refutes this hairbrained argument.

Yes, the motivating factor behind nearly everything we do is personal gain. So define personal gain?

How you define personal gain says more about you than it does society in general. Simply put, not all personal gain is created equal. Especially if we're talking about personal gain that's motivated by hyperbolic discounting.

Reciprocal altruism is present in less sophisticated life forms than ours. Bees for fuck sakes. BEES!

This is a very pathetic attempt at rationalizing parasitic behavior versus social awareness.


Binro the Heretic - 2009-01-14

We need to get this guy and the cock-smiling ''racist test'' guy a show together.


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