feel goodisms? or cold, hard rationale?

...personally, I'd take the latter.

In Robert Musil's magnum and unfinished opus, The Man Without Qualities, the great skeptic and contrarian Ulrich identifies every strength and weakness in, essentially, every strength and weakness. I remember the great iconoclast as saying something to this effect: Within altruism lies a certain degree of self-interest, and unintentional benefit comes to the world when even the most self-interested act.

Excerpt from the slate article: It would almost always be more effective to volunteer less, work overtime, and give more. A Dutch banker can pay for a lot of soup-kitchen chefs and servers with a couple of hours' worth of his salary, but that wouldn't provide the same feel-good buzz as ladling out stew himself, would it?

So it goes, so it goes.