Kraichgauer wrote:
How is it a moral ideal to selfishly not help others?
Nobody said it was.
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Even most atheists
I'm not asking even most atheists, I'm asking you (and anybody else who wants to base public policy on the 'ideal' of altruistic self-sacrifice).
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hold loving your neighbor to be an utmost value.
That doesn't even make sense. Love is an emotion; an emotion is an
involuntary response. Can you
will yourself to love somebody?
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The fact that we are social animals
There are obvious advantages to living in a
civilized society (but I'd rather be alone on a desert island than in a slave-pen society like Stalinist Russia) and most people enjoy some amount of voluntary social interaction. This may not be the ideal forum in which to argue about what a "social animal" the human is.
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means we, by our very nature, have to depend on one another, otherwise our society ultimately collapses.
Nonsense. I need groceries, the grocer needs customers; we trade to our mutual advantage – but it's an abuse of the language to say that we "depend" on one another, as a baby helplessly depends on its parents.
You're having trouble staying on topic here. Aside from 'Because Jesus says so,' why do you hold altruistic self-sacrifice to be the moral ideal?
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"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission – which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force." – Ayn Rand
27 Aug 2016, 10:02 pm
