Excessive altruism

Altruism is an ideal which is almost universally approved. It is argued here that such almost universal acceptance of altruism may be grounded on a failure to interrogate the complexity both of the philosophical construct and of the human motivation underpinning its implementation.     

Empathy and altruism.

The psychophysiological responses of 60 subjects were measured as they observed a performer play a roulette game. Half of the subjects were led to believe that they were similar to the performer in personality and values, and half were led to believe that they were dissimilar. Half of the subjects in each condition believed that the performer won money and experienced pain as he played the game, and half believed that he performed a cognitive and motor skill task. Subjects who observed a performer who ostensibly experienced pleasure and pain exhibited greater psychophysiological reactions than subjects who did not. Subjects who believed they were similar to the performer tended to react more strongly than subjects who believed they were different from him. Similar subjects also reported identifying most with the performer and feeling the worst while he waited to receive shocks. It was concluded that the similar subjects empathized most with the performer who appeared to experience pleasure and pain. When required to make a choice between helping themselves at a cost to the performer or helping the performer at a cost to themselves, the subjects who reacted most empathically behaved most altruistically. The results were interpreted as casting some light on century-old questions about the human capacity for altruism.     

The roots of human altruism

Human infants as young as 14 to 18 months of age help others attain their goals, for example, by helping them to fetch out‐of‐reach objects or opening cabinets for them. They do this irrespective of any reward from adults (indeed external rewards undermine the tendency), and very likely with no concern for such things as reciprocation and reputation, which serve to maintain altruism in older children and adults. Humans' nearest primate relatives, chimpanzees, also help others instrumentally without concrete rewards. These results suggest that human infants are naturally altruistic, and as ontogeny proceeds and they must deal more independently with a wider range of social contexts, socialization and feedback from social interactions with others become important mediators of these initial altruistic tendencies.     

Normal and pathological altruism.

The psychoanalytic literature on altruism is sparse, although much has been written on this topic from a sociobiological perspective. Freud (1917) first described the concept in "Libido Theory and Narcissism." In 1946 Anna Freud coined the term "altruistic surrender" to describe the psychodynamics of altruistic behavior in a group of inhibited individuals who were neurotically driven to do good for others. The usefulness and clinical applicability of this formulation, in conjunction with the frequent coexistence of masochism and altruism, encouraged psychoanalysts to regard all forms of altruism as having masochistic underpinnings. Since then, there has been a conflation of the two concepts in much of the analytic literature. This paper reexamines the psychoanalytic understanding of altruism and proposes an expansion of the concept to include a normal form. Five types of altruism are described: protoaltruism, generative altruism, conflicted altruism, pseudoaltruism, and psychotic altruism. Protoaltruism has biological roots and can be observed in animals. In humans, protoaltruism includes maternal and paternal nurturing and protectiveness. Generative altruism is the nonconflictual pleasure in fostering the success and/or welfare of another. Conflicted altruism is generative altruism that is drawn into conflict, but in which the pleasure and satisfaction of another (a proxy) is actually enjoyed. Pseudoaltruism originates in conflict and serves as a defensive cloak for underlying sadomasochism. Psychotic altruism is defined as the sometimes bizarre forms of caretaking behavior and associated self-denial seen in psychotic individuals, and often based on delusion. We consider Anna Freud's altruistic surrender to combine features of both conflict-laden altruism and pseudoaltruism. Two clinical illustrations are discussed.     

Fertility technologies and trans-kin altruism

Journal of Medical Humanities -     

Equity, justice, and altruism

According to traditional equity theory, justice is motivated by selfishness. However, critics of equity have argued that it is only one rule of justice that people can apply, and that sometimes other rules of justice are used, such as equality and need, that appear to be altruistically based; that is, they involve sharing and caring in a way that ignores contributions or “inputs” and the probability of receiving outcomes in return. Disagreements have arisen, however, as to the status of these alternative rules as elements of justice, the roles of altruism and selfishness within them, and the relative status of altruism and justice as moral principles. The main aim of this article is to help resolve some of these difficulties by examining the relationship between altruism and justice from the perspective of Wagstaff s theory of Equity as Desert (EAD). This theory integrates a number of allocation rules (including those related to the treatment of offenders) with the concepts of equal opportunity and personal responsibility. One of the advantages of this position is that it enables a conceptual and an empirical distinction to be made between helping and responsiveness to need as altruistic norms, and helping and responsiveness to need as justice norms. It is concluded that there may be something to be gained from viewing core rules of justice in the form of EAD as the sophisticated descendants of the sociobiological concept of reciprocal altruism, that is, a set of algorithms designed to limit both unbridled selfishness and indiscrimi-nate altruism.     

Constraints on Constraints: Surveying the Epigenetic Landscape

It is now relatively commonplace to advocate the need for some sorts of constraints on learning and knowledge acquisition. The critical issues to cognitive science concern the sorts of constraints that are able to best model various phenomena of learning and development. Four types of constraints on learning are proposed to be used as an interpretative framework within which to: 1. Better understand the nature of current research: 2. Allow the exploration of alternative models of learning related phenomena, and 3. See more clearly needs for further research. Superficially similar learning phenomena can be modeled by very different configurations of underlying constraints with strong implications for the sorts of representational states that are involved. Each of the five papers in this issue (Brown, Gelman, Markman, Newport, and Spelke) is considered in terms of the configuration of constraints after which each author intends to model their phenomena and in terms of alternate configurations. The papers are construed as illustrating a diverse set of models of how constraints might guide learning, and while the evidence generally favors the configurations suggested by the authors, in each case alternative models are possible and motivate quite specific future research questions. More broadly, it is suggested that asking detailed questions about the sorts of Constraints types that could potentially model complex cases of natural knowledge acquisition helps motivate fundamental questions about learning and the nature of knowledge and that the five papers in this issue are superb examples of how adopting this kind of perspective has been fruitful research orientation.     

Equity, justice, and altruism

According to traditional equity theory, justice is motivated by selfishness. However, critics of equity have argued that it is only one rule of justice that people can apply, and that sometimes other rules of justice are used, such as equality and need, that appear to be altruistically based; that is, they involve sharing and caring in a way that ignores contributions or “inputs” and the probability of receiving outcomes in return. Disagreements have arisen, however, as to the status of these alternative rules as elements of justice, the roles of altruism and selfishness within them, and the relative status of altruism and justice as moral principles. The main aim of this article is to help resolve some of these difficulties by examining the relationship between altruism and justice from the perspective of Wagstaff s theory of Equity as Desert (EAD). This theory integrates a number of allocation rules (including those related to the treatment of offenders) with the concepts of equal opportunity and personal responsibility. One of the advantages of this position is that it enables a conceptual and an empirical distinction to be made between helping and responsiveness to need as altruistic norms, and helping and responsiveness to need as justice norms. It is concluded that there may be something to be gained from viewing core rules of justice in the form of EAD as the sophisticated descendants of the sociobiological concept of reciprocal altruism, that is, a set of algorithms designed to limit both unbridled selfishness and indiscrimi-nate altruism.     

Evolution and the problem of altruism

Genuine altruism would appear to be incompatible with evolutionary theory. And yet altruistic behavior would seem to occur, at least on occasion. This article first considers a game-theoretical attempt at solving this seeming paradox, before considering agroup selectionist approach. Neither approach, as they stand, would seem to render genuine, as opposed to reciprocal, altruism compatible with the theory of evolution. The article concludes by offering an alternative game-theoretical solution to the problem of altruism.