Altruism

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

Altruism is defined as, “A selfless concern for others,” (1) and it has become my argument that a selfless concern for others is impossible, therefore, true altruism cannot exist. The reason I believe this way is because I think that if one is concerned for others, it is a necessity that one is concerned for his/herself, and furthermore, only cares about others because of the concern for him/herself.

If all human beings are rational and the rational thing to do is to commit actions that benefit yourself, then truly selfless acts are a logical anomaly.

I would offer anyone to give me an example of a seemingly altruistic act to determine if either myself or someone else can’t counter it with reason to prove that not only is it not a selfless act, but that it is in fact a selfish act.

“altruism.” The American Heritage® New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005. 02 Jul. 2007.

2

Which Philosopher most accurately represents altruism? is a good thread on the topic.

Me, I am pretty much convinced by the Mencian example – When you hear a child crying down a well, you cannot help but feel distressed at the sound. So, the person acts not because he thinks the child’s parents might repay him someday or because he hopes to gain fame for saving a child, but simply because his innate benevolence compels him to do so.

Joseph Campbell talks about a similar situation where a man is dangling off the edge of a bridge and a police officer hung over the edge to save him, greatly putting his own life in danger. When asked why he did it, the police officer answered, “I that moment, I was man who was about to fall and to not act would have been to let myself fall.”

Now, you can take these examples and take them through all sorts of gyrations to make them ‘selfish’ acts, but using the same pretzel-logic coupled with the fact that motivations can’t actually be know only inferred, you could also demonstrate that these people acted because they wanted a sandwich or some other absurd reasoning.

Altruism is an expression of co-humanity.

3

I’m not going to reason that the person in your example acted in that way because they wanted a sandwich.

Is it possible, though, that the person in your example saved the child because he could not live with himself (or at the very least would lose sleep) had he taken any other action. He may have committed the action, in short, because he would not have felt good about himself had he done otherwise, therefore, he may have committed the action in order to (or to continue to) feel good about himself and his sense of morality.

4

But it is just that sort of mental gyrations that people don’t go through in situations like that. They don’t sit and go, "Gee, if I don’t do this, well, errr, ummm, but if I do I risk this . . . "

Altruistic actions are usually impulsive because they are, at the end of the day, irrational. The police officer, for example, seriously endangered himself while committing a high-risk rescue operation. I’m not proposing anything like Moral Math here, but I do think that it is logical to say that given the choice between one person dying and two people dying, it is better to have one.

Now, after the event, people will acknowledge that they couldn’t have lived with themselves had they done it, but the acts themselves are generally highly spontaneous where those sort of thought processes don’t function.

Going through gyrations after-the-fact is, at the end of the day, arguing they are doing it for a sandwich.

5

The question is, can doing what would come to many people as the moral thing, thus protecting one’s sense of self-worth and ego be as instinctive as catching a ball when it is thrown to you as opposed to letting it hit you in the face? I would say yes.

If that is the case, it is not altruistic, it is merely ego preservation.

6

The final act of altruism is to sacrifice ones life for another. No matter what tortured gyrations of logic you perform to contort all instances of altruism into some form of selfishness it’s difficult to construct the scenario where someone benefits from their own death.

7

I think it’s pretty easy: If one didn’t sacrifice their life the rest of their life might be a neverending agony of cognitive dissonance (that would only end with one’s suicide). I think that an understanding of Empathy + Cognitive Dissonance + (as Pavlovian mentions) Ego preservation and morals easily refutes any arguments for the possiblity of a truly selfless altruistic act.

8

I don’t think that works. You may or may not experience great agony, but from a biological point of view your life (or more accurately, your genes) is the most valuable commodity you have. It makes no competitive sense to sacrifice your genes to ensure the survival of mine. Feelings vs existance is a no-brainer.

Helping others may make one feel better about themselves (selfish). It may raise social status (selfish). But none of those things matter to you if you’re dead.

9

Good evening, guys.

Phaedrus

Why does it seem noble to sacrifice your life for a cause?

Yes, we need to be dedicated, we need to believe. But taking the belief too seriously is already to become something else–that is, a puppet, to a system of power and control, which therefore structures your reality and everything you know.

Break free! The point of life is to liberate desires, to affirm difference, to explore and sing and make love and break the rules. We have to be serious about play: structures should not always be taken lightly. We forget the seriousness we had as children about play; also the inherent altruism.

As children we are naturally socially predisposed; that is not to say that being a child is not lonely, or confusing, or difficult. But the process of enculturation, of being brought up in society, is always a social one, done apparently from the goodness of our hearts. Having a child is more or less sacrificing your life for twenty-odd years…

Xunzian

I’m 100% with you here.

You know, Emmanuel Levinas goes so far on this point as to even define the subject as hospitality.

So is altruism simply empathy, merely a concern for another who “might as well” be myself? Or does altruism point to a deeper difference, a subdivision within the subject where a legitimate concern for the other arises autonomously?

Pavlovianmodel146

An interesting persepctive on this question is raised by psychoanalysis. Altruism is unconscious. It is imaginary though in intense cases it has real effects. I am tempted to claim it is even always political. Where is the self, after all, if not precisely prefixed in social relations? Since society seems to presuppose cooperation, altruism seems like a going-beyond the human, in a way that is in fact quite similar to the inhuman excess we find in extreme cruelty, torture and so on.

We have to distinguish, then, between three ways of going ‘beyond’ the commonsense human reality: first, through neurosis: by stressing (and bending!) the rules, or curving the space of the social field by imposing an ethical injunction. Second, through psychosis (and this is just an extension of neurosis): by bursting the system, by rejecting and spuring the other dimensions of existence in favor of this one that I desire. Finally, we have schizophrenia: the descrambling of all the codes, a decoding of even altruism and greed, the proliferation of new forms which are irreducible to these sorts of historically contingent (as it were) socio-political categories. The schizophrenic, of course, can just as easily break down as break through.

The question of a mental breakdown is raised poignantly by altruism. What ‘breaks’ in our natural instinct for self-preservation that causes us to leap to the aid of the other, possible at great risk or danger to ourselves? What causes us to risk the traumatic encounter with the real, if not the impossible object–that is, life itself? Caring for life, surviving, affirming existence–this is what it means to reject nihilism, in favor of subjectively engaging with our reality. We have to take responsibility for who we are, and this always means taking responsibility for other people.

10

I never said it noble, just that it was final- in the sense that you’ll do no more after that. In that sense it’s the most drastic as well. In any event, I wasn’t refering to a cause, I was talking about a direct exchange of your life for another.

11

Well if you’re going to limit the words “selfishness” and “altruism” to biology then I don’t disagree with you. But I don’t think we can seriously limit it in this way. After all, if one does (consciously) sacrifice themself for another, it is for some nonbiological reason, right? If we are only concerned about living matter then what makes one cell, or one body of cells, more important than another?

12

Yeah. I’m not disagreeing. I think that sacrificing your life is or can be noble.

The problem is politics. This logic works so great for conversion reasons. “Look at how much I’m sacrificing myself for you.” Don’t all great leaders ‘play Jesus’, as it were? Acting as though their public life, the service they render to the masses, were the entire objects, the pure essence. With the same swiftness with which they concel the true means of control, they conceal also their private faces. Yet with Jesus this difference of the private man and the public God is written back into the leader/follower himself as both man and God.

But my issue really isn’t theological. My issue here is not that sacrifice isn’t good, but how a logic of individual (rather than collective) sacrifice get transformed so easily into a transparently silly show of faith and deception-- at any rate: opinions, which people really ought not to die for.

13

An often used example is to push someone out of the way of a moving vehicle and putting yourself in the way. Yes, you may die, but would a person rather die, or suffer by living the rest of their lives as the person who stood and watched while someone else died? Again, instinct may take over here in the form of preservation of self value and ego.

14

I see your point, but I disagree that in a purely selfish universe a being could put secondary concerns like ego or self value above the Ultimate Value of existance.

15

Anxiety is anxiety, and humans are (self)conscious of their anxiety. The ultimate value of existence may very well be (physical) survival, but most humans, with their flaws and their delusions that exist as a result of their ego, sense danger in the conflict of abstract concepts and, as when presented with an actual physical danger, seek to avoid it. One doesn’t question “wait a second, is this painful psychological state arising due to a primary or secondary concern?”, one just attempts to escape the present discomfort.

“Selfishness” is not a bad thing. It is an inevitability. The negative connotation results from people who, wanting to make sense out of why they were unable to achieve a certain goal, have pointed the finger of blame at another (a reflection of language molded by the fundamental attribution error).

16

The question of altruism, for me, hinges one a crucial concept: in that fleeting instance where I have a split second to hurl you out of the path of an oncoming train, with the absolute certainty that it will result in my death, do I have the time/capability to “crunch the numbers” and determine if I can live with the negative ramifications of letting you die vs dying myself? Or can I even roughly guestimate them? Given years to contemplate the issue I’m not sure I can say how guilty I’d feel or if my life would be worth living after seeing you die- so how can I make that computation in the bare instant I have to make the choice? Your theorum seems to require a near godlike understanding of our fundamental motivations that seems far beyond our actual faculties.

17

Okay, so we’re talking about a situation in which you react to a stimulus; there is no introspection (conscious analyzing of your perceptions of reality). You perceive an other in danger, and your body reacts to preserve the other.

Do you actually think to yourself, before springing to help the other, that you know you will die? Or does this realization occur after the action has been initiated (or not at all)? In the latter case, I assume, given that it all happens in a split second, you can’t take back the decision.

If you spring into action without considering what you are doing, I’d argue that the word “selfishness” doesn’t even apply. What is the self, in this case, when you are not self-conscious? Your entire physical body as you and another would perceive it? Your DNA?

It is important to ask why you spring into action, before deciding whether or not it was “selfish” or “altruistic” to do so. Is this because of your genes (a natural selection argument–those that react to protect others (that have some significance to them) have arranged themselves into groups, families, communities, etc that have better ensured survival) or because of how that other is significant to you? How you perceive that other, and why you react to preserve what it is about them that you strive to preserve?

Would you only perform such an action for a single, close loved one? Any other person who looks like you? Any healthy individual?

I argue that at that moment you are acting selflessly, but it is still a result of your having programmed your mind selfishly.

You may say that, biologically speaking, it is an altruistic act, but this is only under the context of how we humans perceive ourselves as having individual bodies that are “us”. You may argue it is about preserving one’s unique, individual DNA code, but this entire idea rests on making sense out of the first-person consciousness. Outside of that assumption of individuality, a family can be seen as the individual unit, or the entire earth itself.

What I am trying to say is, each action has to do with a particular situation, and how one deals with it. When you perceive someone in danger and react to save them, you are acting based off a situation, not a consequence, and the situation is completely subjective (even if it consists of things that exist in objective reality). You do not spring into action due to a conscious choice to prevent the other from an imagined demise, you react according to the psychological physics (haha I know that sounds a bit strange, I just think it is a good way to describe it) you, as the creator of your own universe, has set in motion. You want to preserve what it is about that other that drives you to rescue them. It is the result of how you had previously programmed your mind–an action taking place in a deterministic universe. You act according to your perceptions/beliefs.

18

The problem I had with that thread is that if altruism could be backed up by logic and justified, it wouldn’t be altruism anymore. It’s not supposed to be represented, it’s supposed to be done.

19

I agree with that, in-the-moment, which was the basis of my objection to Pavlov’s assertion.

However, I do think it is worth exploring why altruism exists. It seems to go against a variety of other philosophical and biological postulates. Of course, once you’ve penetrated past a mere superficial understanding of those thought processes (such as rejecting Spencer’s claptrap for the nonsense it is) and that threat tried to investigate that.

20

The only people that can do those kinds of things disagree with that (or dont know), so its still selfish.

You can consider it more altruistic if you want but acting under your own will completely unselfishley is an impossibility.