Hi ExMachina. I’ve condensed your original argument below (I know you presented it as a puzzle, not as a certainty):
[1] “there is little to no noblity in true altruism.
[2] philosophers like Kant believed that a person should do a good deed strictly based on the fact that it is morally correct to do so. That no good act should be required have its own reward.
[3] The part that I find hard to believe is that if a person does the right thing with no personal reward such as feeling good to do the right thing,
[4] then that person technically becomes robotically altruistic.
[5] In other words he does the act just to do it.
Note the different subjects: [1] is about altruism (it lacks ‘nobility’), but [2] is about kantian moral obligation in general. I think the discussion so far simply ignores the specific issue of altruism, so let’s be explicit: this thread - so far - is about Kant’s claim about morals - specifically, what about morals obligates us. Your argument should so far apply to *any* morals, even the ‘egoistic’ ones. (Eat right, be honest with yourself, etc.) Many people feel egoistic morals are the ‘easy’ part of moral theory, but why follow *any* moral? Suppose the skeptic replies ‘Well, why ought I eat right?’ and you want to avoid Kant and give a non-moral reason: because that’s how you stay healthy (health is better classed as a good, not a moral). Well, why *ought* I stay healthy? And on to the races. This problem is one reason why Kantian ethics still has legs, as they say.
Statement [4] doesn’t follow from [3]: If I choose to obey a rule simply because it’s the right thing to do, that’s still a choice. Just as written, [4] makes a false move from ‘Mr A has no non-moral reason to obey this moral’ to ‘Mr A is being robotically empty about his obedience.’ Kant’s point is interesting: somehow a moral to be *moral* has to have something irreducibly moral about it - and he decides that it’s as a kind of rules that they are essentially moral - that the reason to obey a rule is *because* it is a rule, that’s moral. And by ‘moral rule’ one must mean a *really* moral rule: you have to do the hard work of figuring that out *before* you can say that you obey that rule *because* it’s a moral rule. Maybe that’s what you’re worried about, blind acceptance of morals?
Note:
There’s three big strands of ethics. Think of doing something: You, a subject, perform some action or operation, and something then results. Let V = you, D = the actions (mental or physical), U = the results or consequences:
V———D———> U
DE: Kantian ethics is a ‘duty’ ethics: it thinks of morals as essentially rules for acting.
UE: The ethical theories of Bentham or JS Mill is utilitarianism or utilitarian ethics: it thinks morals are really tied to results.
VE: Aristotle’s ethics is a ‘virtue’ ethics: it thinks the primary thing is the person, and his ‘flourishing’ as a full human being.
All of the three make important points. To my mind we need the pre-modern approach: all three of these parts, the subject, the action and the result, are necessary and not really derivable from just one of the three, although virtue ethics was the major way of thinking before 1600. Towards the end of that period there was lots of debate on moral rules and obligation, and this gained steam when the success of mathematics in science persuaded people like Kant that moral theory could be exactly patterned on mathematical systems like euclidean geometry, with a single fundamental axiom and logically impervious rules.
The ethical theorist and historian Stephen Darwall claims the change occurred because people no longer believed in the ‘metaphysical guarantee’ as he puts it, that in reality, all real goods harmonize. In the Modern Age, the assumption is that your goods and mine - even our real goods - can conflict. Think of *Les Miserables*, where the goods of the gendarme (punish wrongdoers) and the starving bread-thief (sustain life) tragically conflict.
Does this help?
Lastly, you asked “Where is the line between doing something right because it’s the right thing to do and doing the right thing because it makes you feel good about you?”
Well, i don’t think those two reasons are like neighboring kingdoms with a difficult border to negotiate. They are just different categories, and you can have both reasons or only one motivating you. (I help people because I like to *and* because it’s the right thing to do - one in fact helps get the deed done when the other is at a low-point, no?)
btw: No-one’s really proven that millions of people are wrong every day when they claim to decide to act for no other reason than that it’s right to do. That’s what every decent good samaritan says. Frankly, if that’s robotic, call me a robosexual.
Nobility is subjective.
Quoting Inthegobi: 
