Altruism

I think there's more than one reason that people decide to perform selfless acts.

For one thing I think it can be a matter of deciding to empathize with the suffering of others. And once one has made that choice, then they are in a sense suffering also. And then alleviating/lessening the other's suffering alleviates their own suffering. Whenever we're empathizing we're in a sense connected and thus selfless acts are selfish in the sense that we're also that other person or animal.

Why do we ever choose to empathize with others?

In seeking to understand the world around us we naturally try to see the other's point of view. This means that we often end up empathizing with the suffering of others. Or just empathizing in general. Thus we end up being connected and performing acts just for others that in a sense don't feel selfless... And some of us are simply better at empathy than others.

Then the question is concerning those who aren't so altruistic. Is it because they're not as good at empathy? Partially yes. Or because they just aren't trying because they don't care as much about understanding the world? Partially yes. Or because they're consciously turning off their empathy when it's for helping creatures that won't help them personally in return? Partially yes.

The other concept of altruism I can think of is that it's actually just selfishness when looking at a very long term frame of view. Trying to create a world where instead of people bouncing anger and indifference all over the place we instead try to make compassion and happiness echo, reverberate, bounce through eternity...

To eventually come back to ourselves.
---
And then all that morality is really is altruism, actually.

All our actions are a combination of the selfish and altruistic. At every moment we are attempting to be happy either in the long term or the short term. The case of altruism is what appears the most obvious exception. But above, it's explained away. It is either a strange sort of long term selfishness or an attempt at understanding the world that connects us to the suffering of others.

The latter half of the previous post about morality... It's not so well explained. Not well written. There is something of two levels to it that causes confusion. But still badly explained.