"Are all actions in life based on interest only"?

[Angrboda]

What is the self?

[Anomalocaris]

I think it should be noted people who glorify ultraism probably do so out of the non-altruistic motivation of hoping to profit from the sacrifice of others.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Half of our daily consumption of cat food goes to feed whomever shows up for the daily offerings.

[Mister Agenda]

Doing good feels good. It's almost amazing how shitty we act en masse considering how good it feels to do good.

https://www.lynn.edu/news/2017/why-doing...themselves.

Of course, that feeling is a benefit.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

One essential question is the following: "Are all actions in life based on interest only"?

By interest I mean warmth and love (love  son/daughter so she love you back), give money to employee (so they work hard), give pleasure to a mate (so she/he pleasures you back....

It's probably impossible to eliminate some level of self-interest in any good thing we do. 

Even if there is no reward in money or in publicity. Or in direct pay-back. We still reward ourselves by telling ourselves that we have done a good thing. 

~ I did a good thing.
~ I have a good character because I do things like this.
~ I am a good person.
~ I am better than those who don't do things like this. 


I mean, if you've done a good thing, you obviously have a right to feel pleased by that. But that's still a form of reward.

If you didn’t have 50% of the membership on ignore, you’d know that’s bollocks.

Boru

[Anomalocaris]

Maybe everything is. You say that holding a door for someone or giving money to a homeless person has no personal benefit for "you", but even these things are seen as transactional because a person holding a door or giving money does expect it to be paid back somehow by someone when they need it one day. They hope that their good deeds will be remembered by society.

I don’t. For me, things like that are reflex actions. 

Boru

It may be reflex now, but it got that way because it was nurtured.  Why was it nurtured?

[Anomalocaris]

One essential question is the following: "Are all actions in life based on interest only"?

By interest I mean warmth and love (love  son/daughter so she love you back), give money to employee (so they work hard), give pleasure to a mate (so she/he pleasures you back....

Not all actions.   Some may be based on pre-wired reaction.

But for those actions which results directly or indirectly from cognative decision making,  I think it is possible to trace the decision to internal perceptions of self-interest.   

Note internal perception of self-interest is not the same thing as common benchmarks used in external analytical evaluation of self-interest.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that the notion of disinterested volition is incoherent - which will lead to all sorts of trouble without a doubt.

However, within the context of the question, I'd say no. The full set of interested act is not exhausted by the subsets of transactional relationships or self interested acts or both combined. Consider a situation in life (if you can) where you decided on some course of action that you neither expected anything in return for, or in fact expected a negative return for. Something...perhaps.... that you did not want to do, but felt compelled to do. This subset evades not only transactional relationships, but self interest as well.

Self interest and transaction are, ultimately, easy to resolve in singular fields. They're not dilemmas. That we spend a great deal of our life running essentially on autopilot in a thick soup of such circumstances is only interesting in the confluence and conflicts between them. In the presentation of more complex decision fields. The type of decision field our most pernicious dilemmas occupy is a subset of all fields itself - the exclusively suboptimal. Where all possible resolutions to a given x are negatively weighted...where no single explanation for a given decision can satisfy. Otherwise, there'd be no underlying dilemma or conflict to explain in the first place, eh?

[Anomalocaris]

I think that the notion of disinterested volition is incoherent - which will lead to all sorts of trouble without a doubt.

However, within the context of the question, I'd say no.  The full set of interested act is not exhausted by the subsets of transactional relationships or self interested acts or both combined.  Consider a situation in life (if you can) where you decided on some course of action that you neither expected anything in return for, or in fact expected a negative return for.  Something...perhaps.... that you did not want to do, but felt compelled to do.  This subset evades not only transactional relationships, but self interest as well.  

Self interest and transaction are, ultimately, easy to resolve in singular fields.  They're not dilemmas.  That we spend a great deal of our life running essentially on autopilot in a thick soup of such circumstances is only interesting in the confluence and conflicts between them.  In the presentation of more complex decision fields.  The type of decision field our most pernicious dilemmas occupy is a subset of all fields itself - the exclusively suboptimal.  Where all possible resolutions to a given x are negatively weighted...where no single explanation for a given decision can satisfy.  Otherwise, there'd be no underlying dilemma or conflict to explain in the first place, eh?

I challenge the contention that you would be motivated to make a decision on a course of action at all if you truly expect no return of any sort from it.

[The Grand Nudger]

Challenge away, I may in fact be the most self interested person in the world. Utterly incapable of doing anything -other- than return seeking. That would not address the conceptual set of possible actions and motivations that are not valid members of that subset.

Ultimately, if a person can't even imagine a counterfactual to return seeking..then they've failed at logic..but more importantly..at life.