The modern concept altruism - Plato, Aristotle, Christ, Augustine, Aquinas never use the term - rests on a logical error which is that actions towards others that involve effort or sacrifice on the part of the self are intrinsically at odds with the interests of the self. While there are individuals who are exceptional in their tendency to put other interests above their own they tend to argue - if they are able to rationalise their motives - that they are serving a transcendent good - such as justice or love - commitment to which they share with the other since both participate in a moral order that is given and not merely rationally constructed. Their identification of their interest with that good and hence with the good of others - and not an irrational preference for disinterested action - is what drives them. The reason so many modern scientists - natural and political - have become concerned to explain altruism is because for them it is irrational. This reflects the influence of classical economics on modern western, and especially Anglosaxon, culture. In my experience many nonwesterns - Malaysians for example - don't think like this unless they have spent a lot of time being trained by Western economists to abandon their own cultural conceptions of self-other relations, and hence of why action towards the common good, or on behalf of another, is rational.  For another example Japanese economics is very different to Anglosaxon in its account of the relative duties of firms to employees and shareholders. 

The paradox and the tragedy is that in the Anglosaxon world as modern economic accounts of rationality as selfish - and of the associated account of the self as unencumbered, unattached and unsituated - have grown in cultural power action for the common good, or the good of others, appears both irrational and as contrary to the interests of the individual. As a theologian I would refer back to the teaching of Christ that 'those who save their life will lose it' to make the point that this is a modern innovation in the Western tradition. But even empirical economists sometimes are sometimes driven by evidence to admit that volunteering on behalf of others in service of a transcendent good actually makes those who participate in it happier: see Francesca Borgonovi, Doing well by doing good. The relationship between formal volunteering and self-reported health and happiness. Social Science & Medicine 66 (2008) 2321e2334. 

Arne Naess devoted many words to contesting the modern concept of self interest and arguing that when individuals spend more time in the 'wild' or climbing mountains they find it possible to recover an account of self-interest that includes others, nonhuman and human. His Spinozist point was that this extended account of self-interest is neither novel nor irrational. For Moses, Plato, Christ, or more recently Gandhi or Leo Tolstoy, thinking like a mountain is not counterintuitive.

Michael Northcott


On 18 Oct 2010, at 13:08, harriet wood wrote:

> Isn't it
> a question of how to define altruism
> the problem of not knowing what other species "think"
> 
> Apparently altruistic behaviour can benefit the group, species or
> local ecosystem, as can selfish / aggressive behaviour.
> 
> Harriet Wood
> 
> 
> 
> On 18 October 2010 12:47, Barker, Tom <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> I’m afraid I don’t have time to elaborate. It is not altruism, though it
>> might look like it at first glance; it’s survival.
>> 
> 
> 
>> 
>> So I'm sticking with my contention that altruism is a key component of the
>> cement that binds tribes, and wolf packs, together. The trick for us is to
>> tap into that while linking it to the intellectual concept that the whole of
>> the human race is our tribe.
>> Brian
> 


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