Altruistic Morality and Victimhood
Altruistic morality is the view that people ought to be nice to other people, merely for the sake of being nice, and not for any other reason. The altruistic view of society is that the individual has intrinsic obligations to the collective and vice versa. The individual should contribute to society purely for the sake of doing so, and not for any reward. Likewise, society should help the individual just because the individual needs help, not as a reward for the individual’s contribution to society. That, in a nutshell, is altruistic morality. It is fundamentally incoherent. Here are some of its many problems: How do you know whom to be nice to? How nice should you be? How much should you sacrifice your own interests for the sake of others? How do you know what the interests of other people are? What are your own interests? How do you separate your interests from those of others? Altruistic morality is not a rational approach to decision making. I’m not going to go to the tr...