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Onyx Shoham

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While talking to my father he reminisced that while growing up with his family, a Latvian pro-soviet emigrant, they had a custom to feed the dog before everyone else stated to eat. The justification was that the dog had no way to feed itself. 
This is the most ridiculous example of altruism and the morality of sacrifice I could find in my personal knowledge. 

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In spite thousands of words written by Ayn Rand and other Objectivist philosophers people still fail to distinguish between altruism and compassion. Dog cannot feed itself. If man adopted dog he took certain responsibilities on himself. Besides, dog is valuable and feeding dog is sort of trade, that is exchange of values.

Edited by Leonid
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Leonid

 

In spite thousands of words written by Ayn Rand and other Objectivist philosophers people still fail to distinguish between altruism and compassion. Dog cannot feed itself. If man adopted dog he took certain responsibilities on himself. Besides, dog is valuable and feeding dog is sort of trade, that is exchange of values.

 

This would be purely compassion if it was done on a moral choice. The fact of the matter (that i did not state well enough) is that the dog was fed on dogmatic principle. My dad even pointed out to one time that his family did not have much food to eat yet decided  to put priority of the dog first. Frankly i do not think that the family (at least my father) really liked the dog.

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Too bad. Sense of duty eliminates compassion because duty has no moral referral. Duty to whom and why? Duty is Kantian term and it presupposes means without ends. Duty denies a beneficiary of the moral action. In this particular case it"s even not a dog. 

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