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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9542933" data-attributes="member: 6790260">You have redefined "slavery" such that it includes being altruistic. That's the thing people are going to constantly push back against. As [USER=6796468]@Steampunkette[/USER] said, even Nietzche, the self-crowned king of hating on generally-accepted moral standards, didn't go that far. Hell, even Ayn Rand, who literally built a philosophy on the idea that selfishness was the only path to actual good, didn't actually oppose doing altruistic acts in principle.Edit: And, going back to the original post where you made this ridiculous claim, the whole argument falls down from the start. You said you want to be perceived as the best neighbor, not just an acceptable neighbor. If we consider this for any other context, the argument is obviously ridiculous. If you want to be perceived as the best musician, not just an acceptable one, you're going to need to create music that appeals to lots and lots of people, which means you're almost certainly not going to be free to choose whatever topics, styles, instrumentation, etc. that you might like. You're going to have to write a crapload of music, and you're going to have to both appeal to audiences and retain artistic creativity etc. Does that mean you're "enslaved" to your audience? Hell no! It just means that "I want to be perceived as the best X" always--always--entails engaging in behavior that others would desire.Same goes for literally anything else where the subject is developing a reputation. Want a reputation, not only as an acceptable chef, not only as an appreciated chef, but as being among the best of chefs? You'd better get used to pandering, to creating dishes you hate but which you know hungry diners love. Want a reputation, not only as an acceptable politician, not only as a successful politician, but one of being among the best of politicians? Congratulations, you're gonna have to do a HELL of a lot of things you find distasteful or annoying or even offensive, because cultivating that kind of reputation takes time and almost never involves coming out the other side with your hands completely clean. Etc., etc.If you want to be merely an acceptable neighbor, someone nobody would voice particular complaints about, then you need never do anything at all. But if you want to be known for being a good neighbor, both in the sense of "morally upstanding" and in the sense of "efficacious and/or useful", you're going to have to be morally upstanding and efficacious/useful. Being efficacious/useful to others almost always means at least occasionally helping them even when you don't have to. Being morally upstanding is, of course, a matter of debate, but in the context of neighborliness, it entails showing your neighbors that their lives, well-being, and happiness matter to you, that one of your goals in life is to have neighbors who are happy and successful and minimally beset by problems.That isn't slavery. You have a decision: Do you dedicate all of your time exclusively to yourself? Or do you choose to dedicate some reasonable portion of your time to assisting your neighbors? If you choose the former, you (almost surely) will not accrue a reputation of being the best of neighbors. You will be known for keeping to yourself, which isn't good, but it isn't horrible either. It's neutral in both the moral-ethical sense and most utility-practicality senses. (If you have neighbors that extremely highly value their privacy, they might like you better...but I doubt they would consider you the best of neighbors.)</blockquote>

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