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.
Agreed. And it’s not surprising to find it in a communist society, even while the people are suffering. It’s just that kind of thinking that got the society into that spot in the first place.
Not much context to go on here. If we’re just talking about your standard household pet, it’s a simple fact that they can’t feed themselves. Face value, I don’t see it as altruistic, just a bit odd.
Maybe the dog was just the best person in the family and actually deserved to eat first.
1 Like
Maybe the dog was just the best person in the family and actually deserved to eat first.
:lol:
I have never met a mystic-altruist-collectivist dog before, in my entire life.
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.
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.
If he didn’t like him why he kept him?
he answered “someone has to keep him”. i dont think he felt too much compassion for him. He probably did it from a sense of duty.
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.