Why Helping Others Helps Yourself

I don’t believe in the soul in the traditional Christian sense. I believe rather that our brain responds to external stimuli. When input is received that hasn’t been dealt with before, the brain repurposes neurons, so that they will fire under these new conditions. This would allow us to have both an emotional and logical reaction to anything, and it would also allow for complicated structures to arise that would give birth to what we call consciousness.

Of course that is a rather simplified explanation, as genetics would play a large role in our neural development. This model predicts that my conscious self is entirely deterministic (if you knew the state of every neuron in my brain, you would be able to predict my next action), and my consciousness is merely a perception created by every experience I’ve ever had, and the internal neural structures the have formed due to these experiences.

Then therefore, a logical question would be, where do I derive my morals from? The simple answer is that I was raised in a Christian society and therefore primarily base my morals off the bible, however, I can actually justify why I still hold these morals, rather than just accepting that this is what god intended.

Logically you would think that you would be most successful if you only looked out for yourself, and cared about nobody else – but this is an extremely naive view, and we can see how it breaks down in real life. A beggar on the street is a cost to society, in the sense that he will get some form social benefits, or even if he doesn’t, there is a sunk cost in his life, as money has at some point been spent on raising and educating him to some extent. Therefore, by the beggar not achieving his full potential, he is actually costing economy money. So if there were some way to educate and motivate the beggar so he began being a productive member of society, he would contribute back and strengthen the economy. It follows then that if I donate money, either through taxes to social welfare schemes, or directly to charity’s, even though I won’t directly see a benefit, the economy will be boosted slightly, which will then benefit me.

The simple premise is, that non-functioning members of society are costs, in that we have to support them, and also in terms of the time and money that has already gone into bringing them thus far. So it becomes obvious that rehabilitating them into productive members of society benefits everybody. This same argument is applicable to why social healthcare is a good idea.

The reason that this argument is not usually considered is because in our modern society, expense and reward have been slowly brought together until it has finally become expected that a reward will directly follow the action. This is a problem we see in many facets of life, such as a student’s reluctance to study. This mindset of reward immediately following expense is not only detrimental to ourselves, but to society in general.

Now of course using this argument may provoke a reaction from people who claim I am being inhuman as I am valuing people in terms of their productivity, sort of like cattle to be slaughtered, but I respond with a question to yourself in this case: what then do you base your morals on?