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 Originally Posted by BorisTheSpider
ultimately I think charity/philanthropy is a selfish act in a sense - we help the people we want to help because it gives us pleasure to do so, it's not a burden, it's a pleasure. When people are compelled to help everyone who "needs" help indiscriminately, for me, that sucks all the moral decency out of the act of giving.
Human philanthropy is just a biproduct of the benefit that cooperation provided humans over mutations that didn't want to cooperate. Strength in numbers etc. So yeah it's selfish in the sense that I feel better, but I also become stronger for helping you. In a modern sense this plays out in more complicated ways than it did in tribal humans where this evolved from. But it doesn't matter if it's selfish because that's just the way we are, it's the basis for all our common morality.
A selfish motive for welfarism is a safer society for me. Desperate people do scary things, so if a reasonable baseline standard of living can be maintained for everyone, there will be less desperate people, less scary neighborhoods etc.
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