Moral masturbation

"Further, while one might narrate anything within a great range of possible moral values and possible transgressions, the most basic moral proposition, which is contained in some form by all first-person narratives, is I am a good person."

Charlotte Linde, Life Stories. The Creation of Coherence.

The problem of course is that, no matter what we do, we want to reach out to the often-cited other, while at the same time it seems that trespassing the nombrilical cosmos of narcistic self-satisfaction is quite impossible. You want to, in one way or another, make a difference, make a contribution, leave something behind. You want to matter in some way, not only to yourself and the people to whom you - for reasons of consanguity, or because they're your friends, or because you have good sex with them, or because they love you, or because you work with them - matter, but to anyone or anything out there. So you plant a tree, you buy fair trade products, you pursue a teaching career, you try not to walk around and kill people just because you don't like their face, you go out and adopt 25 children from third-world countries (n'est pas, Brangelina?). Throughout time, people have tried to live good lives - and thus behave like moral beings - because of various reasons: because they thought it was aesthetic in the old Greek sense (the old trinity of the good, the beautiful and the true), for example, or because they hoped for a redemption in a life to come (and hence to make a difference in the eyes of God).

But in the end, isn't all of this about yourself, about the satisfactory feeling of doing "the right thing", that is somewhat indecent because it proclaims doing something good only for the benefit of others, or for the benefit of the good in itself? Isn't a moral life, a good life, always some sort of self-rewarding enterprise? Is it ever about the (human or non-human) other?