The Glade 4.0

I believe the phrase popular on the left is "enlightened self interest".

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Profit =/= value

The way in which a person values their leisure time, family, and other such things translates poorly to monetary value.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Translating poorly to monetary value doesn't mean that it doesn't translate. Every time expenditure on tasks or endeavors that doesn't generate direct value (money or goods) is weighed in the brain on a valuation basis. It may be subconscious but it happens.



Correct. There are none.



Further potential motives are desire for potential reciprocity for the former and ideology-based advocacy of uniformity of law for the latter. Those are both, essentially, long-ranged profit decisions (even though Bora Bora reciprocating aid is of low probability).

Every human endeavor is a value based decision. Value being the sort of "code word" these days for profit. Human beings just don't do things without a return. It's the "lizard brain" influencing your decisions.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

So in other words, everything humans do is based on value because we are defining every reason for human action as value?

I don't disagree that humans conduct a cost benefit analysis of sorts for their actions, but that is not the same as measuring success based on profit. However that translates to profit in the sense of business only in the crudest fashion.

This sort of crudity is what leads to outrageous jury awards for "pain and suffering", for example. We have a vague sense that human suffering is more important than money, but we can't say by how much especially since we tend strongly to assess that based on how spectacular the suffering is.

Another example would be natural disasters. We estimate property damage in $, but even though we see immense human suffering we don't try to measure it in numerical terms. If we did, people would probably denounce the practice as cynical and callous at best.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Profit "in the business sense" is only one element of several definitions for "profit." General speaking, profit is simply "gain."

And yes, everything human beings choose to do is based on value, profit, or gain, depending on which of the three words you'd care to interchange.

As to your latter point, it's actually quite unfortunate that we haven't overcome our collective moral and philosophical distaste for an objective valuation of human life. Were we to do so, we could then objectively drill down to quantify "suffering" and distribute remuneration and "justice" more consistently.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

This is highly questionable. Essentially, you are redefining gain to include entirely intangible psychological benefits in order to make the argument work. It's circular reasoning.

Again, you are right int he sense that humans do engage in cost-benefit analysis, but acts that we normally regard as "selfless" result in minimal personal gain, or often significant personal loss in order that another person gains in some tangible fashion; i.e. someone jumps on a grenade to save the rest of a squad. The "gain" is at most a few seconds of final satisfaction that one did the right thing, the loss is the complete loss of life. In terms of the purely tangible, the balance sheet is wildly to the "loss" side.

A "selfish" act is the reverse, it generally implies a course of action that results in significant tangible gain at someone else's expense, or at the least, greatly reducing the other person's gain even when they don't deserve the reduction. For example, taking a minor upgrade in an MMO is usually considered selfish when another person would get a major upgrade from that item.

You are attempting to treat material, tangible gain and psychological "gain" (i.e. pleasure, good feelings, etc.) as if they were the same thing. This is highly questionable, and appears to rely on circular reasoning wherein we know that everything humans do is based on gain because humans calculate perceived gain in any given situation, which we know they do because all their actions are based on gain.

In other words, while "selfless" acts may be done because of the gain of a good feeling about onesself, a feeling of having acted morally, or whatever, they are not based on material gain, and the difference between the tangible and the intangible is quite significant.



That's backwards. We have distaste for objective valuation of human life because it is not possible to do so. When people try to do that, they tend to impose whatever valuation subjectively suits them. This is why it's regarded as cynical; it is invariably driven by entirely subjective assessment,.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

"Enlightened self interest" is more Rand than it is left. Way more.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Which has little to do with my statement.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

personal or social utility. You may invest funds in an enterprise generating lower returns than another because of the value of its product, rather than its profit

C.f. Recent press on banking behaviours

In which case the individual perceives a gain for themselves. Still a profit.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine