(April 12, 2023 at 11:55 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: I'm interpreting interest to mean personal gain. This is very different from saying there is always a reason for our actions, or even more abstractly that there's always a cause, in which case only actions born out of pure randomness would qualify.
There is some research in motivation suggesting that the wrong incentive can interfere with your decision to do something. For example, blood donations usually go down when a cash incentive is offered. This is because people donate blood altruistically to help others, but when you are paid to do so this interferes with your motivation.
In this case, it would be critical to ensure “personal gain” is defined in a way that does not serve to obscure the reason for our actions.
You may define personal gain as measurable financial enrichment, and thus conclude any act which does not lead to measurable financial enrichment as being qualitatively different from acts which do, when in fact there is no qualitative difference in the underlying cause of both acts. The underlying cause simply does not weigh financial gain per se very much, and in the case where the act result in financial gain, the gain is incidental.
