Farmageddon said:
Really, greed in this sense is not limited to money, and a rich person giving money away is less impressive then a poor person. Still, no one donates without pressure unless they'll feel good for doing that (and under pessure means they'd feel worse not doing). People want money so they have things like power, fame and proprierty. But ultimately all of these are only longed for because they make you feel good, so buying a yatch or donating is really the same thing. The impressive donation comes from people who'll actually suffer from the donation and that's absolutelly not the norm. It's the poor guy who hasn't eaten for the past three days and has no idea when he'll get anything else to eat giving food away. Even then we could debate how selfless that really is when you look deep enought, but let's call that selfless for now.
There are two points I want to make out of that, but they're kind of tied togheter, so forgive me if I'm unclear.
First, you have these kinds of "selfless" donation on lots of other animals. It may not be in form of money but various species are capable of sacrificing their lives for others. You may argue they're not reasoning about what they are doing or don't even know what death is (which would be over simplifying the matter) but the fact is that donation is not exclusivelly human nor there's reason to believe very advanced rationality is necessary for that. A rational donation actually would be more in the lines of a buisness proposition, but that's beside the point. So, yeah, by now you realise I do see us as animals, and you can change that vision and yours with naturalistic and creationist in my first post and that should work.
The second point is there are reasons we feel good or bad for doing determined things, and we do have a basis, a natural instinct in ourselves. And those reasons are shared with many other animals. Saying we have free will and are detached from nature while "animals" have none is simply your bias talking. I could just as well point out that just as a child may decide to obey it's parents, so may a dog. You tell him not to do something he's about to do, he has two opposing urges, and this divergence has to be dealt with. How different is that really from "I wanna buy a yatch but donating to this charity would be great for those children"?
I mean, you may point the dog is just crudely balancing his wants and his fear of punishment, but how much would the rich guy be able to enjoy his yatch knowing that decision made all those children suffer? And how good wouldn't he feel helping them? Where's the practical difference? If free will is being able to resolve an internal conflict of interest, then every living being has free will.
Those basic instincts I talked about earlier, they're fundamental to our frame of mind, but as social and learning animals we build on that, and every decision we make we refer to those things. See, some people can buy that yatch and not feel bad with themselves. In fact, most people can. It's also natural to feel good helping others, but our needs and wants are central to us. But the fact is you can't make a choice at all without a personality, a background on which you run and weight your different options, and in our case that's our mind, our very definition of self. That's our identity, so our choises are made by us. They do have and impact on us and that framework, on our minds, but it's not like we decide if we're gonna be happy about donating or indifferent about suffering, we, just as any other animal, don't have that kind of control.
Again, I apologise, I was thinking as I typed and won't take the time to try and polish it up :P
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