I know the heart of life is good

Today a remarkable thing happened: my philosophy professor and I agreed on an issue! My old philosophy teacher from last semester pretended to be unbiased by just arguing from every position, but it was fairly obvious that in reality he was not so much a dualist etc. Today I am fairly certain that the views my professor (new professor) expressed were actually his own.

As usual, I was set against the class in my opinion. We were debating selfishness and whether every action we make is egoistic because it's made out of some selfish motive. The example given was that saving a drowning pig from a stream makes us feel better because if we just kept walking it would bother us all day. Most of the kids in the class were either arguing the Randian point of view or just being really idiotic and nitpicking at a hypothetical situation our teacher brought up (if you could take a pill and psychologically you would feel exactly as if you'd saved the pig, or you could save the pig, would you really not be biased at all?). My teacher was defending my opinion, which is that no matter if there are selfish reasons for actions; they aren't the only reason.

He brought up the point I've been thinking about since reading Peter Singer, which is that we feel more morally obligated to save a drowning child right in front of us rather than to do something we know will save one far away. The kids in the class said this is because saving a child right here gives us self-gratification and a sense of pride. I, however, think the difference is empathy. We can feel empathy with those right in front of us; it's more difficult with people farther away. But empathy is a really good thing.

Examples I thought about:

1. Me not killing mosquitos.
I absolutely hate mosquitos. And I don't think that I'll be punished in hell or something for killing them. I used to kill them. I haven't recently because I've gained a new appreciation, almost scientific, of the miracle of life. With this perspective, I don't want to take life away from an organism because it deserves the miracle of its own existence. I know this is a weird example, but all egoistic action would point towards me killing the mosquitoes. However, I don't, and I can honestly say I don't get anything out of it, even self-gratification because I don't think it's a moral necessity. To me, it really is entirely because I'm empathetic. I know what it means to be alive, and I want all other creatures to have that.

2. One-sided Sex
This is a little thorny because there are some obvious selfish reasons for this, but I argue that there are plenty of non-selfish reasons. I'm taking about when one person does something for another person (ie oral sex or something) that provides really nothing for the person that does it (at least for women I don't think it does much), even if that person knows that nothing will be given in return. Still, even if you expect nothing back, when you love someone you want them to feel something amazing like that. So even though you gain nothing from it really (I know that it could be argued that you do, but really, largely it's a unselfish act), you do it because you empathize, and you want someone you love to have that.

3. Children and furry little animals
Children don't really have the developed since of moral consequence and guilt when it comes to things like little bunnies becuase they haven't really experienced any moral consequence for liking or disliking little bunnies. So the argument about the pig doesn't really work, since a child wouldn't really feel a sense of personal obligation. Still, though, children don't like little furry animals to die and will try to prevent it, even though they dont' really gain anything from it, and they're not hurt from not doing it. I argue this is due to empathy. Children don't have the most developed ideas about animal emotions either, so they ascribe their own emotional complexity to animals. Thus decisions to help animals are based on this empathy, not on selfishness of any kind.

4. Reciprocity
If you're driving along and you see a pig drowning, you get the same satisfaction from asking the driver to get out and save the pig as you get from saving the pig yourself, I think, for the most part. So really it doesn't matter who does it, you just want something's life to be saved. This supports the idea that it's an empathetic rather than self-gratifying tendancy.

Just some ideas.