Is it ok to do something nice for someone else for your own self-interest?

[benguino]

Usually, when person A does something nice for person B, society sees person A as a "good" person.

However, should we view person A differently if we later find out that person A had a net benefit out of doing that act?

At least for me personally, I don't think much of it, since in this case, I would see this as a "win-win" situation. One doesn't need to "lose" to be considered a good person.

However, in society's view, things start to change when large corporations do "good" things. The reason being is because it is painfully obvious that the company is getting huge gains in publicity for their supposed acts of kindness and those gains in publicity is more than enough to offset the costs of their "kind" act.

However, that doesn't change the fact that the company or corporation did something good for others. Did the company ONLY do this act of kindness for the publicity; do they really care about the people the have affected? We can't get into the minds of people that organize these things to find out so we'll never know.

One might be tempted to say that helping others and making huge gains from it like the ones seen in corporations are a bad thing. But what if a large company or corporation genuinely actually wanted to do something good? It would very difficult for them because unless the corporation actually took efforts to make sure their actions didn't spill out to the public, their act of kindness is going to become publicly known and then they will be accused of only doing the thing as a publicity stunt.

So, what are your views and thoughts when it comes to corporations doing supposedly "good" things for people?

PS This is the video that inspired me to make this thread:
http://distractify.com/people/westje...stmas-miracle/