Greg Salmieri
speaker
1,054 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2013
last heard Jan 2021
Greg Salmieri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, like egoism, altruism is one of these terms that's had a number of uses.
I
It was coined by Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century, and the term egoism had been around considerably prior to that.
But Comte created it as this other term that's a kind of contrast to egoism.
And the way he saw it
He was one of these theorists who tries to give a whole theory of uh animal life as well as human life and to integrate um human ethics into a theory of psychology.
And so the way he saw it, and I think it's a common way of thinking about it now, there were like two basic types of drives that living things have.
Uh drives to benefit themselves and drives to benefit other creatures.
uh particularly other species, and he called the former egoistic and the latter altruistic.
So egoism and altruism are sort of like two kinds of psychological poles or motivational factors within an organism.
So that's a matter of psychology.
And then his view was that the higher the organism, the more
altruism predominates.
And in the case of human life, altruism is the one that ought to predominate.
The whole problem of human life and human social organization is how do we make altruism predominate?
And uh his kind of slogan for acting altruistically was live for others.
And that's his motto.
So make your life, the whole purpose of your life, about serving others, about living for others, serving humanity as a whole.
He says things like, you know, humanity is the only thing that can labor for itself nobly, her servants for the present, but use the materials provided by her servants in the past, uh that is individual people, for the benefit of her servants in the future.
That's a paraphrase, but it's pretty close.
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