This post examines the virtue of altruism. I’m less interested in breaking new ground, more in synthesizing the wisdom I could find about this virtue and how to cultivate it.

“Effective altruism” tends to take altruistic motivation as a given and investigates how to do it most efficiently. This post instead investigates questions like: Should we be altruistic? How can we practice altruism well (on more dimensions than efficiency)? How can we become genuinely altruistic?

What is the virtue of altruism?

Altruism, as I will use the term, means acting with the motivation of promoting the welfare of someone else, even at cost to yourself.^[1] This is broader than some definitions of altruism: it allows self-interested motives to also be present and does not require that the act be actually harmful or dangerous to the altruist.^[2]

A virtue is a characteristic habit that promotes or exhibits the flourishing of the person who exhibits it. This suggests a paradox (how can you best flourish by deprioritizing your own welfare?), which is something I address further on.

Altruism is action, which distinguishes it from some definitions of compassion, concern, consideration, pity, sympathy, empathy, etc. that can be satisfied by more passive emotions or evaluations. It includes an explicit motivation to promote the other’s welfare, which distinguishes it from some varieties of care, kindness, justice, etc. which may promote another person’s welfare while being motivated in some other way.

My definition excludes acts that are done for the sake of principle or for some other abstract thing (e.g. “for art’s sake” or “to honor my ancestors” or “for our flag”). Some forms of consequentialist or deontological ethical decisions might be interpreted this way: as altruistic sacrifice motivated not primarily by concern for the people served but by the principle that such service embodies.^[3]

My definition is neutral about whom to be altruistic toward. It might be better for various reasons, or in the service of various other virtues, to be preferentially or exclusively altruistic to particular people (people one is close to, people who are particularly needy, people who are deserving) but the definition I’m using declines to take a stand about that.

Egoist acts prioritize maximizing one’s own welfare. Egoism would be a doctrine that one ought never to be altruistic: that one ought always to do what one expects will be most helpful to one’s own welfare. Steadfast egoists may still act kindly or compassionately, but only when such acts have better expected benefits to the egoist than alternatives.

Maximalist altruism would be a doctrine that you ought to always promote the welfare of others as much as possible, considering your own well-being only to the extent that it enables you to offer further service to others.^[4]

Most people occupy a middle-ground, common-sense position between those extremes. They believe you ought to take others’ welfare into account, and at least on some occasions or to some extent you should promote it even at considerable cost to yourself, but that generally you may prioritize your own interests.

I don’t plan to discuss altruism as it appears in the evolutionary biology literature. That discipline investigates processes that have selected for behaviors or characteristics that (at least superficially) seem to harm the individual with those behaviors or characteristics while benefiting some other individual(s). Hot stuff, but not what this post is concerned with.^[5]

The dilemma of altruism as a virtue

“You say: How sad to think that the noblest altruism is, after all, merely a refined kind of selfishness. I say: How good to think that selfishness, when it is purified and stops being stupid, is exactly the same thing as the noblest kind of altruism.” ―Pierre Cérésole^[6]

A dilemma interrupts my presentation of altruism as a virtue:

1. How can altruism promote self-flourishing if by definition it means self-sacrifice?
2. If altruism does benefit the altruist, isn’t it just subsumed under self-interest?

This is often accompanied by the cynical assumption that all behavior must really be self-interested, ultimately.

Are our “altruistic” choices really egoistic deep down?

I’ll start by addressing that assumption, and then tackle the dilemma more directly.

We need to beware of assuming that altruism needs extraordinary arguments in its favor, while egoism ought to be considered the default that needs no defense.^[7]

The everything-is-egoism hypothesis is simple, aesthetically hard-headed, cynical, and somewhat contrarian, which appeals to certain biases. But it fails as a blanket explanation for observed human behavior. Altruistic motivation is unexceptional in people.

That altruism can benefit the altruist also does not debunk altruistic motivation. After all, we don’t conclude that egoism doesn’t exist when self-interested actions incidentally benefit others.

One might appeal to “revealed preferences”: If an altruist benefits someone else, this must reveal that they prefer someone else’s welfare, which means that by acting in such a way they fulfill their own preferences and so ultimately act in their own interests.^[8]

But this argument reinterprets rather than disproves altruism. If altruistic acts indeed stem from an egoistic interest in others’ welfare, we can then examine how some people develop these remarkably altruistic other-promoting interests while others do not.^[9]

This isn’t to say that all seemingly-altruistic behavior is actually altruistically-motivated. There is plenty of “virtue signalling” or “it’s the thought that counts” behavior that masquerades as altruism without a real motive of improving another’s welfare. And there is behavior that promotes another person’s welfare, but primarily from motives like justice (I owe them a favor), duty (I’m a paramedic; this is my job), conformity to social norms (I leave a standard tip), relieving distress (it annoys me to see you cry), etc.^[10]

It seems most plausible to me that people have a mix of egoist and altruist motives.^[11] Other “motives” also shape our behavior—like habit, social conformity, and Pavlovian conditioning—that do not easily fit into the altruist-or-egoist classification.^[12] A simple explanation for why people act the way they do is probably also a wrong one.

Can altruism promote the altruist’s flourishing?

But even if we grant that altruistic motivation is possible, we’re still left with the problem of how it can be a virtue. If you have genuinely altruistic motives, those motives encourage you to promote your own welfare less than some alternative, and so those motives must be suboptimal for your welfare. Right?

You can’t whisk this problem away by showing that altruistic acts are really more in your interests than the alternatives. If you do that, then altruism becomes an unnecessary distinction: self-interest does just as well as a blanket explanation for your motivation.

Maybe altruism serves a bigger self?

Maybe you have both a small self that is merely you and a large self that encompasses other people. You can altruistically promote other small selves at the expense of your own small self and as a result create greater benefits for your large self—it all works out when you do the accounting.

Several philosophers have toyed with this idea of an expanded self. Some of Aristotle’s musings about the polis in the Nicomachean Ethics can be interpreted this way. Schopenhauer thought we ought to identify with, and to consider our motives from the point of view of, an all-seeing “I” that includes everyone.^[13] Alan Watts described it as God playing hide-and-seek with Itself in all the small selves at once.

A more mundane version of this shifts the focus of altruism from the human individual to the interests of society as a whole, saying that we ought to be willing to sacrifice ourselves (or indeed each other) for the benefit of the hive.^[14]

An even more down-to-earth version simply acknowledges that no man is an island. We are all enmeshed in familial and social networks. An enlightened self-interest notices that our “altruistic” acts in the service of people in our networks redound to our own benefit.^[15] But this, again, seems to reduce altruism to self-interest. It is useful for debunking naïve forms of individualist egoism, but does not resolve our dilemma.

Maybe altruism serves a higher self-interest?

Consider tiers of self-interest: one that serves basic needs such as pleasure, security, love, health, and social standing; and an especially-prized tier above that: eudaimonic fulfillment. In such a scheme, we might willingly sacrifice some basic needs for a better shot at eudaimonia. Altruism might be one way of accomplishing this.^[16] 

But whenever I try to wrap my mind around this, I can’t seem to prevent it from collapsing altruism into self-interest as well.

Maybe altruism promotes flourishing but in a way that cannot be aimed at directly?

The most promising resolution of this dilemma I have found goes something like this: It can be the case that you have other-promoting goals, and also that having such goals and acting on them contributes to your self interest. Indeed, this is what the virtue of altruism amounts to.

This leans a lot on a nuanced distinction between the consequences of “goals” and “having such goals” (a metagoal, perhaps). You have altruistic goals, and also an egoistic metagoal to have altruistic goals (to be an altruist).^[17] When you behave altruistically, you act to meet your altruistic goals, and as an additional consequence you meet this egoistic metagoal of being an altruist.

The goal/metagoal distinction might be essential to how altruism works. If you do an altruistic act in order to become an altruist or to gain the eudaimonic benefits of altruism, it paradoxically will not work: you must instead act in order to help another person, even at sacrifice to yourself, in order to meet your metagoal.^[18] This is how this sort of thing works in fairy tales and folklore; maybe there’s something to it.^[19] It makes sense that if you do not actually care about helping the people you are helping, having helped them is less likely to goose your own well-being.

My gambit here in some ways resembles the “tiers” tactic, and I’m not entirely convinced that it avoids the same collapse problem. But maybe I just have to live with that. If so, I might reformulate the question about altruism from “how can other-promoting, self-sacrificing acts contribute to one’s own flourishing?” to “how do they actually contribute to one’s own flourishing?” I could then consider other-promoting acts that do not fall under the rubric of other virtues (justice, amiability, etc.) and why it is that they promote or exhibit human flourishing despite being superficially self-sacrificing.

Can altruism exhibit the altruist’s flourishing?

Maybe self-interest has diminishing returns beyond a certain threshold of well-being. After you have some basic needs met, you are free to pursue goals that have nothing to do with self-interest. Promoting the welfare of others is one well-respected goal of this sort.^[20] In this telling, altruism isn’t a strategy for improving your welfare, but a sign that you have already successfully improved it as much as necessary and you are now flourishing with surplus to give away.

Maybe I’ve been looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope: Altruism isn’t a way of developing eudaimonia, but is one way in which eudaimonia exhibits itself.

Ray Madding McConnell (The Duty of Altruism, 1910) rejected theoretical justifications for altruism, but believed that nonetheless it just happens to be that happy, well-developed, normal human beings are altruistic to some extent. We don’t have an obligation to be altruistic any more than we have an obligation to be healthy, it just happens to be what we’re like when we’re at our best:

The normal, healthy human being lives too much to live only for himself. He accumulates a surplus of life, a superabundance, which demands outlet, expenditure, a giving away. In his essential nature there are powers that press for activity in and through his fellows.…

Expenditure of life’s physical, intellectual, emotional, and volitional forces is not a loss for the individual, but is an enlargement.… The plant cannot prevent itself from flowering even when to flower is to wither and die… It is necessary that man’s life flower. The flower of human life is sociality, morality, disinterestedness. In man there is a principle of expansion which causes the individual’s life to be unable to be confined within self. The richest life finds itself the most driven to share with others, to be prodigal of its resources.… The mother is impelled by her own fullness to suckle her child. The charitable benefactor of humanity is impelled by his own fullness to succor the needy.…

The normal man is larger than his own body. He tends naturally to live in and through others. There is not often a preference of his own good to that of others; there is not ordinarily a distinction between his own good and the good of others.… Normal man says, I will live largely. The life of others is my life. I give my life unto them that it may be increased. I live my largest life only when living with, in, and through others.

Normal man does not regard it as an unpleasant compulsion to do good to his fellows. He does not think, when serving his fellows, “I hate to do this, but I am afraid not to do it.” On the contrary, he loves his fellows and rejoices in their good, and gives of his life to them.^[21] 

I see some traces of the “big self” argument in there as well.

This approach to the problem successfully dissolves it, but only if you agree with McConnell’s vision of human thriving, which he acclaims more than argues for.

Related virtues

Altruism involves promoting the welfare of someone else, but many other social virtues do too.^[22] For example: filial piety, courtesy, loyalty, compassion, respect, amiability, care, kindness, valor, friendship, tolerance, teamwork, hospitality, and fair play all benefit other people.

This post concentrates on altruism specifically, but this inevitably bleeds over into the altruistic elements of other virtues. The virtue of care, for example, can serve self-interested ends—fulfilling duty, gaining recognition, developing skills, raising children, or building relationships—but it typically centers on genuine concern for others’ well-being. You care for someone because you care about them, you care for them for their sake.

There are a few virtues that are particularly close relations to altruism, and overlap with it to a great extent—kindness, for example, or agape. Generosity/philanthropy/charity/munificence is another.

Empirical research demonstrates that empathy predicts altruistic behavior.^[23] Both scientific interventions and traditional wisdom tap empathy to foster altruism (more on this further on).

You need practical wisdom and know-how for your altruistic motives to translate into effective actions that meet your helpful goals.

Some people subsume altruism under the virtue of justice. They argue that it is unjust to have surplus resources in a world where some people lack necessities. To give of your surplus is not a matter of altruism, but of doing your duty to rectify an unjust situation.

Altruism involves some sacrifice by definition (in the definition I’m using anyway). But some definitions of altruism demand more than opportunity costs, but require actual harm or significant risk to the altruist, treating self-sacrifice as essential to altruism.^[24]

Not all views of human flourishing embrace altruism: Genghis Khan reportedly celebrated the opposite: gratuitously harming others once your own needs are satisfied. “The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.”^[25] A complete defense of altruism would explain how Genghis Khan arrived at this conclusion, and whether (and how) it is mistaken.

What good is it?

“Light has come into the world, and every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness.… Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’ ” —Martin Luther King, Jr.^[26]

Genuinely altruistic motives inspire you to actually help someone (you are not satisfied by merely wishing them well, appearing helpful, doing something praiseworthy but worthless, doing the minimum required by your job description, etc.). You want to choose well-targeted altruistic acts and to perform them carefully and effectively. The primary intended beneficiary of altruistic acts is not the altruist.

In addition to the good your altruistic act does for someone else directly, it also communicates to that person (and perhaps to bystanders) that they live in a world of people who help one another. It not only communicates this, of course; it also helps bring it about.

A variety of additional side effects of altruism, beneficial to the altruist, have also been observed or theorized.

Altruism improves health and well-being

Research links altruistic volunteering to better health and well-being. Such research wrestles with reverse-causation (does health and well-being make people more prone to volunteer?), selection effects (do volunteers come from a subpopulation that’s already inclined to better health and well-being outcomes?), confounders (does some third thing like conscientiousness or religiosity cause both volunteerism and health/well-being benefits?), and other such menaces to science.^[27] And it is also difficult to disentangle the effect of altruistic volunteering specifically from the effects of other things that are often associated with volunteering, like getting out of the house, socializing with others, doing something that seems valued by others, and so forth.^[28] But, for what it’s worth:

“The available studies are fairly consistent in suggesting that volunteering is associated on average with longer life, better self-rated health, better physical functioning, even after adjusting for numerous potential confounding variables.”^[29]

Altruism is evidence of developmental maturity

Developmental models track how ethical reasoning evolves with maturity. For example, in Kohlberg’s influential stages of moral development, a child begins by trying to anticipate and avoid punishment, then learns to identify and conform to laws and norms that differentiate “good” and “bad” children, and then finally emerges into a more nuanced conscientiousness governed by internalized principles. A child that fails to pass through these stages to the end is developmentally disadvantaged in some way, according to these models.

There is a similar model, based on Kohlberg’s, that purports to describe the development of altruism in people.^[30] Here is one description of how this is supposed to work:

[People] progress from egocentric accommodation, to instrumental co-operation, to mutual altruism (aimed at fulfilling shared role obligations), to conscientious altruism (marked by a greater sense of social responsibility), to autonomous altruism (based on universal dignity, equality, and rights for all). The final stage, not attained in reality except by a few moral saints, is a universal self-sacrificial love which echoes Kohlberg’s speculative utopian stage where people are so integrated that the line between “me” and “we” is hardly drawn.^[31]

In this model, one of the ways altruism benefits the altruist is just that it marks that the altruist has successfully matured as a human being, the same way that losing your baby teeth marks that you are developing according to plan. By describing the process of maturation as a series of characteristic and orderly stages, this could potentially help people who failed to develop altruism identify at which stage in the process they failed to develop “normally.”

Altruism reduces pathological self-focus

“In order to be successful in any kind of undertaking, I think the main thing is for one to grow to the point where he completely forgets himself; that is, to lose himself in a great cause. In proportion as one loses himself in this way, in the same degree does he get the highest happiness out of his work.” ―Booker T. Washington^[32]

Excessive self-focus can be harmful (rumination, narcissism, anxiety, shame, hypochondria, etc.) and can intensify suffering (for example if you are in pain, self-focus can make the pain more salient and more bothersome^[33]). Altruism can help by directing attention outward, overcoming excessive or painful self-focus.

Altruism demonstrates that the altruist is thriving

“Not less are all the higher virtues—philanthropy, compassion, and forgiveness—manifestations of power… [I]t is only the men that have energy to spare who are normally altruistic. On the physiological side, altruism is a mode of expenditure of any surplus energy that has been left over from successful individual struggle. The meek shall inherit the earth, not because they are meek, but because, taking one generation with another, it is only the mighty that are or can be meek, and because the mighty—if normally evolved—are also by differentiation meek.” ―Franklin Henry Giddings^[34]

Altruism flows from abundance. It is those who flourish who have plenty to give away. Generosity is a legible sign of personal thriving, which can be useful to the altruist in some contexts.

Altruism is esteemed by others

Society rewards altruists with praise and social capital. However the kind of altruism that is socially attractive is not necessarily genuine altruism.^[35] Some praised acts are not very helpful to anyone, and others are done from motives other than altruism. And some genuinely altruistic acts go unnoticed and unrewarded.

Obvious self-sacrifice is more apt to draw praise, I think because people feel they have been played for a sucker if they praise someone for doing something that was in that person’s own selfish interest. If someone discovers a cure for cancer but makes a mint off of it, it won’t matter how much suffering they prevent: to some people they will be more an object of envy than praise.

Richard Y. Chappell in this context defends effective altruism against self-sacrificial altruism, saying that the requirement of self sacrifice is more about “reliably signal[ling] altruism or virtue” and that such virtue-signalling “becomes morally vicious” if it makes altruism less effective.^[36] Socially, we use heuristics to distinguish virtuous altruism from common self-interest, and one of those heuristics is self-sacrifice. But if you want to be genuinely altruistic, not merely to appear so in order to reap the social benefits, then you must concentrate on the altruism rather than on checking the boxes on the heuristics.

Altruism models mutual-benefit coordination

Collective action can yield greater benefits than individual action. Successful cooperation requires participants who demonstrate willingness to subordinate personal gains to group welfare. If you have skill with (and a reputation for) altruism, you are better positioned to take advantage of these productive partnerships.

George Herbert Palmer championed “Mutuality” as the best form of altruism, exemplified by business partnerships, ship crews, military units, and sports teams. He even thought that ordinary free-market exchange was a sort of mutual altruism, since each party in such a transaction benefits from the action of the other—and suggested for this reason “that a commercial transaction is of a higher [moral] order than an act of charity” which only benefits one of the parties. He thought that these small-scale acts of mutual benefit, confined to certain areas of life like commerce, war, or baseball, hinted at the possibilities of a more comprehensive, large-scale variety of mutual altruism: love.^[37]

An act of altruism can also jumpstart a process of reciprocal altruism that can benefit the altruist. You do someone a good deed and they feel they owe you a favor. By doing a lot of good deeds, you can bank a lot of this sort of goodwill, which, though it may not be entirely reliable and predictable, may nonetheless be very helpful.

A person in a prisoner’s dilemma game who has empathy for their partner/antagonist is more apt to cooperate (even if cooperation is knowably worse for the cooperator), and is more likely to reset to cooperation in iterated cases when defection-noise is introduced.^[38]

Kant considered some altruism to be mandatory for a rational social being. To oversimplify a bit, he argued that any rational person would want it to be true that if they were in dire straits someone would lend them a hand. Indeed, were such a person the Universal Lawmaker, he would make such assistance mandatory. Because of this, he should also be willing to follow such a law as if it had in fact been established by such a Lawmaker.^[39]

Altruism improves romantic relationships

Romantic relationships thrive on mutual altruism, expressed through things like care, empathy, love, faithfulness, and kindness that cluster close to altruism. Romantic partners perceive genuinely altruistically motivated support to be more sensitive and more effective, and it is associated with greater partner satisfaction.^[40]

What bad is it?

“An ‘altruistic’ morality, a morality under which selfishness withers, is in all circumstances a bad sign.” ―Nietzsche^[41]

When discussing the downsides of altruism, we have to beware of the motte-and-bailey reaction in which someone who expresses skepticism of altruism is accused of being against care, kindness, love, and puppies. I focus here on criticisms of altruism as-such. Some criticisms focus on certain varieties or subtypes of altruism, like impartial altruism or maximalist altruism.

Altruism undermines itself

Some defenses of altruism make it perpetually demanding: there is almost always someone more needy than you, so shouldn’t you always prioritize their needs over your own? What prevents this from driving you to abject desperation yourself? If altruism were the governing principle of society, wouldn’t this result in a race to the bottom in which any personal advantage becomes an obligation to give?

Also: if my purpose is to help others, and their purpose is also to help others, what are we to help others to do? Doesn’t this eventually have to bottom out in people who can actually enjoy the benefit themselves? And then what is special about those people such that self-indulgence is fine for them, but not for me? Why is it immoral to serve my own self-interest but moral to serve somebody else’s?

“Does virtue consist of serving vice?” ―Ayn Rand^[42]

It seems that for altruism to work, it has to eventually terminate in the gratification of an egoist desire. I do something for you that helps you to accomplish something you value, and you reap the egoist reward of that value. A maximalist altruism that wants to abolish egoism has nothing left to be altruistic for, and so ends up abolishing both egoism and altruism.^[43]

Some critics liken the logic of altruism to a bus in which everybody is standing because nobody wants to take a seat they could offer to someone else.

While such universal altruism remains unlikely, even a spectrum of altruistic behavior is problematic. It threatens to create a pump that pulls resources from the more altruistic to give to the more unscrupulous.

Yet in the real world altruism is common, and it is not unusual for altruistic people to be well-off and for recipients of altruism to be in dire straits, so something must disrupt the operation of this pump. Maybe altruism and surplus-generation are correlated, so that people who are more than self-reliant tend also to be more altruistic, and they replenish what they give. Conversely, lack of scruples might be correlated with lack of other skills that people need to secure a surplus, so even though unscrupulous people would like to greedily squirrel away others’ generosity, they fail. Another possibility is that altruistic people are typically not impartial or arbitrary about their altruism, but target their altruism reasonably well toward people in genuine need rather than toward unscrupulous and unneedy people.

I’m inclined to think that these criticisms are most potent against a sort of ideal altruism that never leaves the armchair, but less relevant to altruism as actually practiced.

Altruism discourages morality

Emphasizing self-sacrifice in altruism undermines its appeal. If we present morality as fundamentally self-harming, we create resistance to moral behavior.

If it is indeed morally correct to be self-sacrificially altruistic, then there’s nothing to be done but to try to sprinkle some sugar on top and take the medicine. But if self-sacrifice is a mistake, or is overemphasized such that people get a mistaken impression that you only act morally if you’re willing to take the hit, then we ought to change the way we talk about altruism or about morality.

Similarly, treating altruism as purely selfless discourages people from finding personal value in helping others.^[44] This creates a false dichotomy: either complete selflessness or pure self-interest. Such framing makes it difficult to conceive of altruism that enriches both giver and receiver.^[45]

Altruism can be unethical and can hide unethical behavior

Just as an egoist can behave unethically in pursuing their own welfare, an altruist can in pursuing someone else’s. But the halo around altruism can mask this. If you do something unethical “but had no thought of gaining by it myself” this can almost sound like a good excuse.^[46] The FTX scandal is a good cautionary tale about how seemingly altruistic motives can deflect criticism from shady actions.

Altruism is often biased and poorly-targeted

Altruistic acts are commonly triggered by empathy. Indeed, empathy is the most well-studied and reliable predictor of genuine altruism.^[47] But empathy is demonstrably biased in terms of whom we are likely to empathize with and in what situations and in what manner.^[48] These biases are hard to defend as wise bases for our altruistic acts. If we rely on empathy to guide our altruism, we may import those unwise biases.

This strengthens the case for effective altruism—that is, of not taking your altruistic impulses at face value but subjecting them to rational scrutiny before acting on them.

There are other ways altruism can go awry, even when it is not provoked by empathy. Unfocused altruism-for-altruism’s-sake can cause you to misprioritize your efforts and do less good than you hope or intend. It can also make you neglect other aspects of your own life that support your altruism. For example, it can put you in a sort of altruism local-minimum because of trade-offs (e.g. you altruistically simplified your life to reduce negative externalities of an expensive lifestyle, but now you have a lower budget for generosity than you would have otherwise). The sunk-cost fallacy may also encourage you to over-prioritize those altruistic issues you put the most work into even if those aren’t actually the best ones to concentrate on.^[49]

Altruism is inefficient and so less effective than alternatives

When you give someone a gift, you almost inevitably give them something that is less valuable to them than what they, given the equivalent value in time and money, would choose for themselves. On many occasions this doesn’t matter, since there is an additional value from the gift-giving action (e.g. it shows that you care, or that you recognize the importance of the occasion) that cancels this out.^[50]

But if you imagine a society in which altruism is primary, in which buying things for yourself is frowned upon but buying things for others is praised, then this begins to look pathologically inefficient. And even in our existing society, it is easy to find examples of philanthropy gone awry. The effective altruism movement is in part a reaction to examples of costly philanthropic interventions that had altruistic intentions but negligible or even harmful consequences.

People also tend to value earned possessions more than gifts. George Herbert Palmer tells a story of a colleague who, recognizing this principle, chose in his will to auction his book collection rather than donate it: “They were books he had so much loved that he could not bear to have them fall into unappreciative hands. If he gave them away, what warrant had he that they would be prized? If they were sold, nobody would obtain one unless he were willing to get it by some sacrifice.”^[51] This would not typically be classed as an altruistic decision, but it was arguably a better stewardship of the collection, and even arguably an other-respecting way of maximizing its value to its next owner, one that can seem generous when looked at from the right angle.

Altruism is paternalistic

“ ‘Generosity’ may be a form of egoism, which needs to be purified by a patient use of intelligence and a sense of justice.” —Iris Murdoch^[52]

Altruists may demonstrate power, ability, and resources in contrast to the relative powerlessness, inability, and poverty of the recipients of their altruistic deeds. People sometimes refuse altruistic gifts in part because they wish to deny or refute this imbalance.

Recipients of altruism may carry psychological burdens of guilt and obligation. For example, parents who remind children of their sacrifices transform gifts into debts, making their altruism a source of resentment rather than gratitude.

In giving a gift, you may implicitly say to the recipient “here’s something that’ll help you along” in a way that’s condescending: I know what’s best for you, dear little one.^[53] It takes uncommon humility to accept some forms of generosity without feeling a little resentment about this reminder of inferiority.

On the one hand, this suggests that altruism can be ironically other-harming (degrading), and not as other-focused as it seems. On the other hand, it may help show that it is empowering or evocative of prospering in the grantor, and so is more evidence for why altruism can be a virtue. So to some extent the answer to this criticism of altruism depends on how you resolve the altruism-as-egoism or altruism-as-a-virtue debate.

Altruism and the state: it’s awkward

Altruism is especially contentious where it mixes with politics.

If altruism is a duty, then this may justify coercive state mechanisms of altruism such as the welfare state or foreign aid. (It is arguably not an imposition to tax you for the benefit of the needy, but merely an extension of the state’s responsibility to enforce justice.) But if the state takes charge of altruism, altruism may atrophy in individuals, to the extent that the duty of altruism means acting with altruistic motives (rather than just obeying an “altruism”-enforcing state).

Or, seen the other way around, if you emphasize the importance of individual altruism, this can excuse government neglect of social needs. The more you praise (or rely on) philanthropic billionaires coming to the rescue, the more you let the government off the hook for doing what it ought to be doing.

Another example of the awkward fit between law and altruism is the case of blood and organ donations. In some jurisdictions it is illegal to compensate donors, but economists insist that if market-value compensation were allowed there would be more donors for those in need, and those donors would be better off. One argument for unpaid donation is that when donation is voluntary, it builds social solidarity: we help each other. If donation becomes an economic transaction, that is lost.^[54] Though economists from Adam Smith forward insist that self-interested actions can be socially-enriching, one rarely gets a sense of solidarity—“look at all we are doing together for one another”—in, say, a shopping mall. That may be irrational from the economists’ point of view, but that sense of we’re-in-this-together is a valuable thing that is hard to buy with mere cash.^[55]

Altruism is an over-generalization or misunderstanding

People strive to objectify our subjective experiences: to make them into objects that can be publicly shared and whose reality can be affirmed by others. Accomplishing this is how we become intelligible to others and gain access to the hard-earned wisdom of human culture. Failing to do this, we risk becoming psychotics or mystics.

Social morality might be an outgrowth of this striving. I notice subjectively that I have a desire (e.g. to be happy, not to suffer), and I am eager to objectify that by turning it into a universal (we all desire to be happy, not to suffer). But when I do this, I am forced to admit that my own personal version of this thing is not universally special (I fail narcissistically if I try to universalize it as “we all desire that I be happy, that I not suffer”). In order to get the affirmation I desire for my version of this desire, I have to reciprocally affirm others’ versions.^[56]

Some altruists may be mistakenly over-correcting here, and coming to believe that the only things they ought to value are things with objective value (e.g. “we all desire to be happy”) rather than things with subjective value (e.g. “I desire to be happy”). Nietzsche in particular thought that this was an unwarranted overstep: an irrational fetish for the objective or a psychologically unhealthy insecurity about the subjective.

If I understand Nietzsche right,^[57] he believes that altruism actually functions as a sort of egoism.^[58] But he rejects either of the common interpretations of this: that enlightened egoism converges with altruism, or that altruism doesn’t really exist. Instead he says altruism exists as a corrupt, decadent form of egoism—a desperate adaptation when direct pursuit of self-interest becomes taboo.

Nietzsche anticipates and mocks the attempts I’ve made on this page to reconcile egoism and altruism:

The calumniated instincts try to demonstrate that they are necessary in order that the virtuous instincts may be possible.…

[People] try to grant both the egoistic and altruistic impulses the right to exist—equal rights for both—from the utilitarian standpoint.

People go further: they see greater utility in placing the egoistic rights before the altruistic—greater utility in the sense of more happiness for the majority, or of the elevation of mankind, etc. etc. Thus the rights of egoism begin to preponderate, but under the cloak of an extremely altruistic standpoint—the collective utility of humanity.

An attempt is made to reconcile the altruistic mode of action with the natural order of things. Altruism is sought in the very roots of life. Altruism and egoism are both based upon the essence of life and nature.

The disappearance of the opposition between them is dreamt of as a future possibility. Continued adaptation, it is hoped, will merge the two into one.

At last it is seen that altruistic actions are merely a species of the egoistic—and that the degree to which one loves and spends one’s self is a proof of the extent of one’s individual power and personality. In short, that the more evil man can be made, the better he is, and that one cannot be the one without the other.… At this point the curtain rises which concealed the monstrous fraud of the psychology that has prevailed hitherto.^[59]

Altruism is evil

Ayn Rand famously took this to the next level, out-polemicizing Nietzsche on the subject.

To Rand, altruism is not a virtue but a doctrine that “elevate[s] the issue of helping others into the central and primary issue of ethics.” She wrote that altruists believe “man has no right to exist for his own sake, [but] that service to others is the only justification of his existence.” Altruism “declares that any action taken for the benefit of others is good, and any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil.” It “holds need as a claim” and therefore “rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw.” Because of this, altruism amounts to a doctrine of “self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction” that, because it values lack and need, ultimately “holds death as its ultimate goal.”^[60]

It is as though altruism were the evil invention of a kind of Bizarro-Kant: “always treat yourself as a means merely, and never as an end.”

Rand’s polemics often don’t critique altruism as a virtue so much as they critique altruism as the morality or as the bedrock of modern morality. This may make her critiques less relevant to our discussion here. However she would likely grumble that the inclusion of altruism as a virtue in a sequence like this is an example of that morality showing its ugly face.

A defender of altruism might reject the doctrinal altruism Rand criticizes—“the doctrine that concern with one’s own interests is evil”^[61]—but still insist that it is important to be altruistic to some extent and on some occasions: It is fine to serve your own values primarily and up to a point, they might argue, but you also owe it to others in desperate need to help them reach the point where they too have the hope of achieving their own values. Rand doesn’t buy this, either. She believes that what typically distinguishes people who cannot satisfy their own needs is their lack of value to others (they are unable to exchange that value straightforwardly for the things they need), whether this is a misfortune or a deserved consequence of vice. However the altruistic mentality sees it as corrupt if you can satisfy someone’s needs by means of exchange of value for value. According to altruism, even in this milder form, it’s only if you satisfy someone’s needs because they don’t deserve it that you get credit. This puts you in service of what you do not value rather than what you do value, which is a sort of anti-ethics.

This seems at first to suggest that paradoxically only people who don’t need your help ought to have it. But Rand does think that it is reasonable to help someone in need because you value them directly, not just because they are able to offer you something you find valuable. You could do something for someone for their sake so long as it is also for your own sake. As a simple metaphor, if I repair my hammer, I want to do so for the hammer’s sake (in some sense): to make it the best hammer it can be. I’m not repairing it purely for my sake (because I like tinkering with hammers). But I’m also doing it for my own sake: so I can have a hammer that’s in good repair. If I help a friend for their own sake, that is, in my friend’s own terms of what they will find helpful,^[62] this also can be the best thing I can do for my own sake to the extent that I value that friend and want them to flourish on their terms. If I were to help a friend selflessly, on the other hand, this would imply that I do not get much value from helping them, which seems a strange way to indicate friendship.

All of which to say there is some fundamental disagreement about altruism:

How to develop the virtue

Cultivating altruism requires both authentic motivation to help others and practical wisdom about when, how, and whom to help. The following are some suggestions on how to acquire this motivation and this wisdom.

Common characteristics of altruists

We can get hints of what goes into an altruistic character by looking at what (other than their altruism) distinguishes altruists. Researchers have searched for such distinguishing traits. J. Philippe Rushton summarized the findings (as of 1980) this way:^[63]

It would seem that there is an altruistic personality and that it can be described as follows: This person is more motivated to engage in altruistic acts. He or she has internalized higher and more universal standards of justice, social responsibility, and modes of moral reasoning, judgment, and knowledge, and/or he or she is more empathetic to the feelings and sufferings of others and able to see the world from their emotional and motivational perspective. On the basis of such motivations, this person is likely to value, and to engage in, a great variety of altruistic behaviors—from giving to people more needy than themselves, to comforting others, to rescuing others from aversive situations. Altruists also behave consistently more honestly, persistently, and with greater self-control than do non-altruists. As a result of his or her altruistic activity, this person will have a reputation for being altruistic among his or her peers and colleagues. Furthermore, the consistently altruistic person is likely to have an integrated personality, strong feelings of personal efficacy and well-being, and what generally might be called “integrity.”

The subclass of altruists known as “rescuers”—for example, people who risked their lives to save others in Nazi-occupied Europe—also had some distinguishing characteristics:^[64]

• They believed that they could make a difference, that their choices mattered.
• They were proactive about creating opportunities to help, rather than waiting for such opportunities to arise.
• They “regarded themselves as part of humanity in a way non-rescuers did not.”
• They were more likely to have been raised as children in a way marked by “closeness, care, reasonableness, lenient punishment, and high moral standards”), according to some researchers; other researchers did not find much to distinguish how rescuers were raised.
• They were ordinary people in most ways. They also tended to believe that their (in fact) extraordinary rescuing behavior was also ordinary—assuming that other ordinary people would also have done the same in their position.

The subclass of altruists who donate a kidney to a stranger also have some distinguishing characteristics:^[65]

• They are less likely to believe that people can be purely evil.
• They are better at detecting fear in others (a proxy for empathy perhaps?).
• They too think of themselves as ordinary.

Situational or environmental conditions

There seem to be situations or conditions in which people are more likely to behave altruistically. These may suggest ways we can alter our own environments to encourage our altruism. For example, experiments have found subjects:

• to be more altruistic when they are in a good mood^[66] and less altruistic after viewing a sad movie;^[67] happy and sad reminiscences also seem to respectively promote or suppress altruism^[68]
• to be more altruistic when they have recently succeeded at or been praised for doing well at some task^[69]
• to be more altruistic when they have recently received an unexpected gift or bit of luck or have been overpaid relative to expectations (and less altruistic when underpaid)^[70]
• to be less altruistic in a competitive atmosphere^[71]
• to be less altruistic when there is distracting background noise^[72]
• to be less altruistic when they feel late or rushed^[73]

Social influence and role modeling

Sometimes altruists are criticized for “virtue signalling”—showing off what swell people they are, playing to the crowd. But most of the experimental evidence I came across suggests that people are less likely to behave altruistically when they think they are being observed or evaluated by others. Being watched can make you self-conscious, which interrupts empathy and the other-focused attentions that facilitate altruism.^[74]

People more often second-guess other people’s altruistic acts (for instance, to check them for ulterior motives) than their self-interested acts.^[75] This may exacerbate the problem.

Role modeling is a form of social pressure that may help to develop altruists. People are more likely to volunteer (for instance, to join a blood drive) if they see volunteering modeled for them.^[76] You may become more altruistic by exposing yourself to more altruists or to more stories about altruists. It is more effective to consider cases of “ordinary people just like you and me” who enact skillful altruism, rather than extreme or quasi-mythical philanthropic superstars.^[77]

Positive reinforcement

Another way social influence can promote altruism is through socially-mediated rewards. You can encourage altruism in others by, for example, expressing gratitude for their altruism.^[78]

It seems to me unfortunate that many popular models of altruism insist that it’s purer, or only amounts to real altruism, if it is not at all rewarding to the altruist… and ideally if nobody knows about it who might spoil it by applauding. People who commit altruism shamelessly out in the open as if they’re enjoying themselves are bound to get the stink-eye from someone.^[79]

You don’t have to wait for someone else to reward you when you behave altruistically. Reward yourself. An important motivator for altruistic acts are self-generated internal rewards.^[80]

A number of perspectives you can take on altruism can increase the internal rewards you receive from it. For example, people feel satisfied by meeting goals, so if you are altruistic in a goal-achieving way (e.g. successfully helping someone in some discrete way, or donating as much as you pledged), you can reap that reward. You can take satisfaction at becoming the sort of person you admire, assuming you admire altruists. You can accept thanks gracefully. You can empathically adopt some of the relief felt by those you help.

If being altruistic feels good, lean into that. And then go ahead and toot your own horn. Modeling altruism as something that is self-rewarding can encourage altruism in others (especially people who have been discouraged by a joylessly puritanical idea of altruism).^[81]

Develop and practice empathy

Thanks to the methodical and clever experimental research of C. Daniel Batson, the empathy-altruism hypothesis provides a well-tested mechanism for prompting altruistic behavior. This hypothesis, in short, is: “Empathic concern produces altruistic motivation.”^[82] This means genuinely altruistic motivation (focused on actually helping the other person), and this motivation endures even in the absence of social rewards, or when escaping the situation is another option.

Empathic concern is defined as “other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need,” and has two components: “perceiving the other as in need” and “valuing the other’s welfare.” It requires focusing on the other person (e.g. not merely on one’s own reaction to the situation).^[83]

A “need” is “a negative discrepancy between the other’s current state and what is desirable for the other on one or more dimensions of well-being” such as “the absence of physical pain, negative affect, anxiety, stress, danger, and disease, as well as the presence of physical pleasure, positive affect, satisfaction, and security.” (Vulnerability is also a variety of need or can contribute to prompting empathic concern.) One reason why we may be partial in our altruism is because we are partial in our empathic concern in this way. For example, “we may feel that people who bring suffering on themselves get what they deserve… [and] that people should get what they deserve” in which case “there is no discrepancy between our perception of their current state and the state we deem desirable for them,” so no “need,” so no empathic concern. However in people we especially care for, such discrepancies may appear to us even if the present misfortune is arguably earned or deserved.^[84]

Most typically, you determine that you value the other person’s welfare first, and then you begin the empathic sub-process of taking the other person’s perspective. But you can hack this as a way to prompt altruism. Experimentally, if you induce perspective-taking in someone, they will also come to value the person (or animal) whose perspective they take. Batson suggests that this is because on some level they assume that if they’re perspective-taking this must be because they already concluded that they have such a value.^[85] Conversely, if you suspect that empathizing with someone will give you uncomfortable urges to help them at expense to yourself, this can motivate you to turn away before your empathic concern has a chance to operate.^[86]

Empathic concern is an emotion, and Batson says that emotions have two functions: they inform us how we feel about something, and they prompt us to take action. Empathic concern gives us information about another person’s neediness and the value we place on that person’s welfare; it also urges us to do something about it. This goal-oriented urging coexists alongside (and may be in conflict with) a variety of goals and urges, and so does not guarantee that we will follow through with altruistic action. We may instead choose another action with a better expected cost-benefit payoff.^[87] This suggests that some things we can do to become more altruistic might include 1) having fewer competing needs (taking care of yourself and of things you are responsible for, simplifying your life), 2) valuing other people’s welfare more highly (so the cost-benefit ratio of helping them is more favorable), and 3) choosing easier and more efficient ways to help (again, to improve that cost-benefit ratio).

Empathy may not be the only source of altruistic motivation, but it is a reliable one: the more empathic concern, the more altruistic motivation. (However empathy may also motivate helping behavior that is not altruistically motivated, and the same stimulus that causes the empathy may also trigger other egoistic motivations, so one has to be cautious about one’s interpretations.)^[88]

Becoming characteristically more empathic, or getting training in how to empathize better, may make you more characteristically altruistic. When a group of deputy ministers in Pakistan undertook a one-month training program about “the utility of empathy and how it can benefit them in their personal and professional life,” their altruistic behavior increased in such areas as personal blood donations, volunteering, and visits to orphanages, and in artificial laboratory game scenarios. They also were more “altruistic” (albeit with taxpayers’ money) in their budget requests and allocations (allocating more or requesting more for e.g. orphanages).^[89]

There are also strong critics of empathy-prompted altruism. They insist that because empathy is biased, it is unwise to let that emotion guide your altruism. They urge a more coldly calculating compassion instead.^[90]

“I have had occasion to meet with, in convents for instance, literally saintly examples of practical charity; they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed and slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, and no fear of hurting it, the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the sublime face of true goodness.” ―Marcel Proust^[91]

Build personal capacity

You can be more helpful to others if your own needs are well taken care of. An altruism that cuts into your necessities to provide for others is not sustainable. To be altruistic usually implies being in surplus, living a bountiful life, having extra to give away.

Two ways reach this surplus point are (1) to accumulate and stockpile enough that nothing you desire is out of reach, or (2) to simplify your life such that fewer things are to you “necessities.”

A problem with the first technique is that people tend to ratchet up their idea of necessities as their wealth rises. People who follow that technique may find that the finish line recedes further into the distance the faster they run to catch up with it.

@jefftk suggests a technique that altruist donors might use to prevent that ratcheting: Right now, choose some percentage of your income you are comfortable donating to altruistic causes, and also a much higher percentage of any future increase to your income, and then give that amount each year: “For example, 10% of your (inflation adjusted!) 2024 salary plus 50% of any amount over that.”^[92]

Give wisely

Altruism as a virtue is altruism practiced well: at the right time, to the right recipients, in the right manner, to the right extent, and so forth. I found a mixture of not entirely compatible advice about how to do this.

Since altruism is other-focused, it seems likely that the best sort of altruism will be so judged from the other’s point of view. It is important that you give them what they actually need, and that they are actually needy. This is another way empathy aids altruism, by helping us better identify a person’s needs and obstacles and what will relieve them.

Aristotle said that the most highly-esteemed charis (favor) is that “shown to one who is in great need, or who needs what is important and hard to get, or who needs it at an important and difficult crisis; or if the helper is the only, the first, or the chief person to give the help.”^[93]

In another context (discussing the virtue of “munificence” or megaloprepeia, a sort of civic philanthropy), Aristotle said that it can be done poorly in two ways: by giving stingily (hoping to get credit without paying the full cost) or ostentatiously (trying to show off how much you’re spending rather than spending wisely and well).^[94] In both cases you lose focus on what you are trying to accomplish (what you are spending money for) and concentrate instead on your self-interest (how much is this costing me? am I getting enough credit for it?). If this generalizes to altruism, then a key to doing it wisely and well is to keep your focus on whomever it is you are being altruistic for, and which of their needs you are trying to relieve.

Cicero thought it was wisest to practice generosity in proportion to how we have been treated by the person we’re being generous to, with respect to our relationship to that person, in a way that does not inadvertently do harm (wisely, not merely with good intentions), in a way that does not harm others (robbing Peter to pay Paul), and in a manner that is within our means. He believed you should certainly be generous to strangers as well, as long as it costs you little or nothing (it doesn’t make your fire go out to light somebody else’s lamp with it). He also recommended being generous in time and labor more than with money, both because this is more appreciated and because it is less likely to deplete your own resources.^[95]

While some people think, like Cicero, that altruism ought to be partial—that we should favor people close to us, the good, the deserving, etc.—others believe need or suffering is enough of a claim by itself, and that the altruist should be blind to these other concerns.

Ayn Rand, as already mentioned, thought that need or suffering was a poor metric to use when targeting our beneficence, but that we should act to benefit others according to how we value them and by extension how we value the use to which we expect our beneficence will be put. She might argue that universalizing that maxim both encourages beneficence on the part of the giver, and being-valuable-to-others on the part of the receiver.

Effective altruists say that it is not good enough to be altruistic here and there as opportunities arise and the mood strikes, but that you really ought to seek out opportunities to provide the most assistance where it is needed the most, which takes a lot more deliberate planning.

Influential philosopher Peter Singer, who helped to launch the effective altruism movement, espouses something closer to maximalist altruism. He argues that altruism should be impartial, that many people around the world are in dire need, that anyone who can help relieve that need “without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance” ought to help, and that most of us do in fact have the opportunity to give this help and so must do so.^[96]

Make altruism habitual

To build the virtue of altruism, altruism needs to be part of your character. Your character is composed of the sorts of choices you habitually make. For this reason, to develop the virtue, it is better to be altruistic regularly than all-at-once or occasionally.^[97] This contradicts some effective altruist advice, which counsels you to put all your altruistic eggs in one marginally-ideal basket.

If you are, for example, “earning to give” and you give effectively altruistic donations at rare intervals, you might want to try to build more regular and frequent altruism into your routine in some other way, or you might want to make more salient, during your “earning to” phase, the “to give” payoff. This may help you to get some of the character-building and other benefits of altruism and make your altruistic inclinations more enduring.

There are some habit-forming techniques that apply generally, and these may be of help in developing altruism. For example

• Implementation intentions—for example, “when I get my paycheck, I will donate 15% to such-and-such a charity.” (This could be better than automatic deductions because it reinforces the habit of consciously doing the charitable action.)
• Graduated exposure—start with small and easy acts of charity that barely stretch your comfort-level, and ramp up to larger acts over time. Track your progress. Measure your impact against what you hope to accomplish with your altruism.
• Habit stacking—link new altruistic behaviors to existing strong habits; for example, whenever you go to the grocery store, also buy some canned food for the food bank; or make your browser’s home page display news about the impact of your donations.

Conclusion

Altruism is complex virtue with a paradoxical appearance: It promises to contribute to the flourishing of the self by prioritizing the needs of others. It is also a component of many other social virtues.

The empirical evidence suggests that altruism correlates with human flourishing on several dimensions. These benefits may best emerge not from calculating pursuit of advantage, but from genuine other-regarding motivations.

Altruism can be biased, inefficient, or paternalistic when practiced poorly. It is challenging to practice this virtue wisely—maintaining genuine other-regarding motivation while avoiding the pitfalls of naïve or extreme approaches. This challenge includes concerns about effectiveness, but also attention to the effects of altruism on your character.

1. ^{^}

   There are many definitions of altruism out there, and many differ in significant ways from the one I’m using. Several proposed definitions require that an altruistic act be damaging to the actor and/or that it include no benefits to the actor.^[24] Some focus on the behavior, others on the motivation behind the behavior. Here are some examples I came across:

   • χάρις is “helpfulness towards some one in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped” ―Aristotle (Rhetoric Ⅱ.7)
   • “The question of egoism and altruism is then this: In the case where I regard my own best interest to be in conflict with the interest of another or others, which interest ought I to seek, and why?” ―Ray Madding McConnell (The Duty of Altruism, 1910, p. 9)
   • “any behavior motivated merely by the belief that someone else will benefit or avoid harm by it” ―Thomas Nagel (The Possibility of Altruism, 1970)
   • “behavior carried out to benefit another without anticipation of rewards from external sources” ―J. Macaulay & L. Berkowitz (Altruism and Helping Behavior, 1970)
   • “social behavior carried out to achieve positive outcomes for another rather than for the self” ―J. Philippe Rushton (Altruism, Socialization, and Society, 1980, p. 8)
   • “a regard for the good of another person for his own sake or conduct motivated by such regard” ―Lawrence Blum (Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, 1980)
   • “a fundamental orientation of the agent that is primarily ‘other-regarding,’ in contrast to one that is primarily self-regarding.” ―Stephen G. Post (Altruism and Health: Perspectives from Empirical Research, 2007)
   • “a desire to benefit someone else for his or her sake rather than one’s own” ―C. Daniel Batson (Altruism in Humans, 2011, p. 3)
   • “a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing another’s welfare” ―C. Daniel Batson (Altruism in Humans, 2011, p. 20)
2. ^{^}

   A formulation I’ve considered is: “An act is altruistic to the extent that promotion of others’ welfare acted as an independent motivational force in choosing among available alternative acts—beyond what would be suggested by self-interest or demanded by duty, fairness, or other moral obligations.” This defines acts as more-or-less altruistic, not absolutely altruistic-or-not in a binary way. I think that helps to capture the insight from effective altruism that it’s not just the thought that counts (which could conceivably simply be, or not be, an altruistic thought), but that altruism is quantifiable. On the other hand, it defines this quantity by measuring acts relative to the alternative acts available to the actor, not by measuring the results of those acts from the point of view of the recipient, so it diverges from how I imagine a typical effective altruist would define it.

3. ^{^}

   “Principlism is motivation with the ultimate goal of upholding some moral principle—for example, a principle of fairness or justice, or the utilitarian principle of greatest good for the greatest number.” ―Batson (2011) pp. 220–24. Batson considers the existence of principlism to be understudied and unknown.

^{^}

This may sound like an unlikely extreme to encounter in the real world, but it is what August Comte, who is credited with coining the word “altruism,” had in mind. Here are some quotes from his The Catechism of Positive Religion (1891):

• “[Positivism] condenses the whole of sound morality in its law of Live for others….” (“General Theory of Religion” Ⅰ p. 54)
• “[T]he great problem for man [is] how to subordinate egoism to altruism.” (“Man—First, as a Social Being, Secondly, as a Moral Being” Ⅷ p. 262)
• “To live for others is seen to be, then, for all of us, a constant duty, the rigorous logical consequence of an indisputable fact, the fact, viz., that we live by others.” (“Private Life” Ⅹ p. 309)
• “Our harmony as moral beings is impossible on any other foundation but altruism. Nay more, altruism alone can enable us to live, in the highest and truest sense. …to live for others is the only means of freely developing the whole existence of man.” (“Private Life” Ⅹ pp. 310–11)
• “The wisdom of antiquity summed up morality in this precept: Do to others as you would be done unto. This general rule had at the time very great value, but all it did was to regulate a mere personal calculation. Nor is the great Catholic formula, if you sift it, free from the same character: Love your neighbour as yourself. It does not compress egoism, but sanctions it. … ¶ Positivism alone holds at once both a noble and true language when it urges us to live for others. This, the definitive formula of human morality, gives a direct sanction exclusively to our instincts of benevolence, the common source of happiness and of duty. Implicitly and indirectly it sanctions our personal instincts, as the necessary conditions of our existence, with the proviso that they must be subordinate to those of altruism. With this limitation, we are even ordered to gratify our personal instincts, with the view of fitting ourselves to be better servants of Humanity, whose we are entirely.” (“Private Life” Ⅹ p. 312–13)
• “For if we exceed the very moderate limits set by the requirements of the service we owe to our Family, our Country, and Humanity, we are consuming provisions which in moral fairness belonged to others.” (“Private Life” Ⅹ p. 314)

^{^}

“Evolutionary altruism is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce psychological altruism.” ―Batson (2011) p. 24

^{^}

P. Cérésole For Peace and Truth (1954)

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“Self-interest is the default position. We no more seek to explain it than we worry why it is that people generally walk forwards. …¶… [T]he idea that it is altruism which requires an explanation makes sense only against a background where it is assumed that most human behaviour is egoistic.” ―N. Scott & J. Geglow Altruism (2007) pp. 61–62

The theory that people can be assumed to be single-minded egoists is a useful simplification in economic models; people sometimes forget that it’s just a simplification and not a discovery. (A.K. Sen “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1977)

^{^}

“given a sufficiently capacious view of self-interest, virtually any kind of behaviour can be defined in terms of it” ―Scott & Geglow (2007) p. 93

The concept of revealed preferences, hand-in-hand with the “subjective theory of value,” can be used to reject the idea that there is any such thing as objective self-interest and to insist instead that self-interest can be defined solely in terms of preferences. This helps to resolve the quandary for the everything-is-egoistic theorist of why some people are egoistically kind, polite, generous, etc. while others are egoistically mean, rude, stingy, etc. They can insist that neither set of characteristics is objectively more self-interested; it’s just a matter of which set the egoist happens to prefer.

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Batson (2011) pp. 22–23 discusses the similar “psychological hedonism” argument. He rejects the strong form of this argument (that the goal of human actions is always one’s own pleasure), but accepts a weaker form, which is that goal-fulfillment is pleasurable, and humans have both egoistic and altruistic goals (among others). He also rejects the idea that to be an altruistic act, it must be self-sacrificing. This framework allows altruism to be personally-rewarding without losing its character as altruism: “[g]oals, not consequences, must be used to distinguish altruism from egoism.”

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Batson (2011) pp. 23–29 discusses some of these false altruisms.

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Batson (2011) p. 209

“We should not be confused by the fact that ‘self-interested’ and ‘altruistic’ are opposites. A single motive cannot be characterized in both ways; but a single act can be undertaken from both motives.” ―R. Kraut “Altruism” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2020)

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F. Gęsiarz & M.J. Crockett “Goal-directed, Habitual, and Pavlovian Prosocial Behavior” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (2015)

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The World as Will and Representation (1891)

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R.M. McConnell The Duty of Altruism (1910) pp. 4–7

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e.g. “Where love is, there is no superior or inferior, no giver or receiver. The two make up a conjunct self with mutual gain.” ―G.H. Palmer Altruism: Its Nature and Varieties (1919) p. 67

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An evolutionary psychology version of tiered self-interest might posit that we have conscious drives for this or that, and these define our conscious self interest, but these drives have been selected for because they have the function of enhancing our inclusive fitness, which is our ultimate, unconscious self-interest. So for example I might feel driven to give up some of my own well-being for that of my children, in a way that has genuinely “altruistic” and self-sacrificing conscious motives, but is nonetheless functionally self(ish gene)-interested. The definition of altruism used in evolutionary biology diverges in important ways from what I am interested in in this post, so I don’t want to engage with this stuff too much. But it does provide another mechanism by which a genuinely altruistic motivation can be compatible with a self-promoting result. 

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I notice some resemblance between this and Sen (1977)’s discussion of “rankings of preference rankings” or what I think is now more commonly referred to as “second-order preferences.”

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Michael Stocker “The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories” Journal of Philosophy (1976) makes a similar point about love, saying that a steadfast egoist might conclude that being in a loving relationship is in the egoist’s self-interest, and might try to develop such a relationship for that reason, but so long as she remains an egoist, she will not be able to, because part of the definition of love is that it is for the sake of the beloved.

See also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1985): “It is of the character of a virtue that in order that it be effective in producing the internal goods which are the rewards of the virtues it should be exercised without regard to consequences. For it turns out to be the case that… although the virtues are just those qualities which tend to lead to the achievement of a certain class of goods, none the less unless we practise them irrespective of whether in any particular set of contingent circumstances they will produce those goods or not, we cannot possess them at all.”

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For example, the Frau Holle story from the Grimm brothers collection, in which the good sister goes into the Oz-like underworld and is kind and helpful to those she meets there and is rewarded with gold upon her exit. Her wicked sister then plunges in to try to get some gold for herself, but because she is merely reward-seeking, she fails and is covered in tar. See also Diamonds and Toads and The Three Dwarves.

Fairy tales aside, this is not very different from common-sense intuitions about goals in many areas of life. For example, though the goal of a baseball pitcher may be to win a game, a wise pitcher does not keep that goal in mind while pitching, but the more immediate goal of throwing a skillful pitch. It’s considered bad luck and a serious breach of etiquette to mention to a pitcher that he is so far pitching an excellent shutout or a no-hitter, for fear that distracting him with this laudable game-scale goal will jinx his performance on the immediate task of pitching.

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“The generality are the worse for their plenty. The voluptuous consumes it, the miser hides it; it is the good man that uses it, and to good purposes. But such are hardly found among the prosperous.” ―William Penn Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections & Maxims (1718)

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McConnell (1910) pp. 229–239

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See for example @Zvi noting that you shouldn’t make altruism the highest (or only) virtue in your system: “[Returning a lost envelope, for example,] mostly isn’t altruism at all. ¶ Returning a lost envelope is honesty… honor. You return the envelope because it isn’t yours… it is your honor-bound duty to make sure that it reaches its intended destination, to the extent that you are willing to go out of your way to do so even if the cost to you in lost time exceeds the expected benefits to the recipient of this particular envelope. You are defending the system, upholding the public trust, and reinforcing the habits that make you the person you want to be.” (“Altruism is Incomplete” Don’t Worry About the Vase 20 August 2017)

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Batson (2011) is a good summary of the research into the “empathy-altruism hypothesis” (that “empathic concern produces altruistic motivation”). Batson has devoted his career to ingenious experimental methods of testing it. He defines empathy in such a way that it also integrates compassion.

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For example:

• “We characterize a behavior as altruistic when (1) it is directed toward helping another, (2) it involves high risk or sacrifice to the actor, (3) it is accompanied by no external reward, and (4) it is voluntary.” ―S.P. Oliner & P.M. Oliner The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (1988) p. 6
• “Action designed to benefit another, even at the risk of significant harm to the actor’s own well being” ―K.R. Monroe The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity (1996) p. 4

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Rashid al Din “Taʾrīkh-ī Ghazānī” Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh (~1300)

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M.L. King, Jr. “Three Dimensions of a Complete Life” Strength to Love (1963) p. 72

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D. Oman “Does volunteering foster physical health and longevity?” Altruism and health: Perspectives from empirical research (2007) p. 25

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Oman (2007) pp. 17–18

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Oman (2007) p. 28

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D.L. Krebs & F. van Hesteren “The Development of altruistic personality” Embracing the other: Philosophical, psychological, and historical perspectives of altruism (1992) pp. 142–169

⸻ “The development of altruism: toward an integrative model” Developmental Review (1994)

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Scott & Geglow (2007) p. 70

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B.T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901)

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Wang, et al. “Altruistic behaviors relieve physical pain” PNAS (2020)

Maybe another explanation for the results is predictive (i.e. if I am behaving altruistically, I must not be under threat, therefore my pain must not be very bad).

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F.H. Giddings, Democracy and Empire (1900)

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It is interesting in this context to consider Aristotle’s treatment of virtues-as-such in the Nicomachean Ethics with his treatment of ascribed-virtuousness as a rhetorical strategy in Rhetoric. In the latter (Ⅰ9), he says: “If virtue is a faculty of beneficence, the highest kinds of it must be those which are most useful to others, and for this reason men honor most the just and courageous, since courage is useful to others in war, justice both in war and in peace. Next comes liberality; liberal people let their money go instead of fighting for it, whereas other people care more for money than for anything else.” …¶… “[T]hose actions are noble for which the reward is simply honor, or honor more than money. So are those in which a man aims at something desirable for some one else’s sake; actions good absolutely, such as those a man does for his country without thinking of himself; actions good in their own nature; actions that are not good simply for the individual, since individual interests are selfish.… Also, all actions done for the sake of others, since these less than other actions are done for one’s own sake; and all successes which benefit others and not oneself; and services done to one’s benefactors, for this is just; and good deeds generally, since they are not directed to one’s own profit.” …¶… “And those qualities are noble which give more pleasure to other people than to their possessors; hence the nobleness of justice and just actions.”

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R.Y. Chappell “QB: Is Self-Sacrifice Especially Virtuous?” Good Thoughts 11 October 2024

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G.H. Palmer Altruism: Its Nature and Varieties (1919) pp. 88–90, ch. Ⅴ–Ⅵ

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Batson (2011) pp. 170–71

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I. Kant The Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) Ⅱ

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B.C. Feeney & N.L. Collins “Predictors of care-giving in adult intimate relationships: An attachment theoretical perspective” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2001)

⸻ “Motivations for care-giving in adult intimate relationships: Influences on care-giving behavior and relationship functioning” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (2003)

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F. Nietzsche The Twilight of the Idols (1889)

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A. Rand “Galt’s Speech” For the New Intellectual (1961)

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See McConnell (1910) p. 10 (riffing on Jean-Marie Guyau La Morale Anglaise Contemporaine, 1879).

You can try to fix this by finding your end-point elsewhere. For example, Comte left the human race behind and posited that we should all be altruistic for the sake of society itself, seen as something with its own interests, not for the sake of the people in that society. In Christian agape, Christians practice worldly altruism, sacrificing worldly welfare for the welfare of others, in order to ensure their own post-worldly welfare in the Kingdom of God.

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Such a person may feel “that any love, respect, or admiration a man may feel for others is not and cannot be a source of his own enjoyment” ―A. Rand “The Ethics of Emergencies” The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

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See the LessWrong comments by Cornelius Dybdahl and Thenamelessone for more on this in the context of Ayn Rand’s critique of altruism. To Rand, the practice of replacing your own values with the values of others was epitomized by the doctrine of altruism and did indeed result in a hollowing-out of the self (a sort of “selflessness” indeed), but there were also other ways you might inflict this harm on yourself, for instance by looking to others for approval and validation rather than judging yourself by your own standards.

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There is a “widespread belief… that altruistic motivation is necessarily good and inevitably produces a moral outcome” ―Batson (2011) p. 205 (see also 195–196)

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Batson (2011)

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See my Notes on Empathy for details; also Batson (2011) pp. 193–195 

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See for example, @jefftk “When Does Altruism Strengthen Altruism” LessWrong 21 January 2024

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“The important part of the gift is not its intrinsic worth but its expression of the giver’s will.” ―Palmer (1919) p. 61

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Palmer (1919) p. 56

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I. Murdoch Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals p. 325

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“If… altruistic motivation is based on cognitive generalization of human parental nurturance and tenderness, then it involves seeing the person in need as metaphorically childlike—as vulnerable, dependent, and in need of care. It also implies a status difference…”―Batson (2011) p. 190

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R. Titmuss The Gift Relationship 1970

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Some libertarian propaganda, for example the “I, Pencil” story, attempts to correct for this and to impart a more visceral sense of working invisible-hand-in-hand with each other in the free market. (L. Read “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read” The Freeman 1958)

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I’m riffing off of McConnell (1910) pp. 79–80, who was himself riffing off of A. Fouillée (“Critique des systèmes de morale contemporains”, 1883)

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which I sometimes suspect is false for all values of I

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“An altruistic attitude of mind, when it is fundamental and free from all hypocrisy, is the instinct of creating a second value for one’s self in the service of other egoists. As a rule, however, it is only apparent—a circuitous path to the preservation of one’s own feelings of vitality and worth.” ―The Will to Power Ⅲ

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The Will to Power Ⅲ

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“Galt’s Speech” For the New Intellectual (1961)

“Introduction” The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“The Objectivist Ethics” The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“The Ethics of Emergencies” The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

“Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World” Philosophy: Who Needs It (1982)

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“Introduction” The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)

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(as a general rule; you might also genuinely help a friend in a way that is not at first welcome, for example by confronting them with some unpleasant but important news or letting them know that their obsession is getting out of hand and damaging their friendships)

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J.P. Rushton Altruism, Socialization, and Society (1980) p. 84

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S. Oliner & P. Oliner The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (1988)

K.R. Monroe, et al. “Altruism and the theory of rational action: rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe” Ethics (1990)

K.R. Monroe The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity (1996)

Scott & Geglow (2007) pp. 77–81

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Michelle Quirk “4 Qualities of Extraordinary Altruists” Psychology Today 13 June 2023 (reporting on the studies of Abigail A. Marsh and others)

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D.L. Rosenhan, B.S. Moore, & B. Underwood “The social psychology of moral behavior” Moral development and behavior: Theory, research, and social issues (1976)

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B. Underwood, et al. “Attention, negative affect, and altruism: An ecological validation” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (1977)

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B.S. Moore, B. Underwood, & D.L. Rosenhan “Affect and altruism” Developmental Psychology (1973)

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A.M. Isen “Success, failure, attention, and reaction to others: The warm glow of success” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1970)

L. Berkowitz “Social norms, feelings, and other factors affecting helping and altruism” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology v. 6, (1972)

A.M. Isen, N. Horn, & D.L. Rosenhan “Effects of success and failure on children’s generosity” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1973)

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A.M. Isen & P.F. Levin “Effect of feeling good on helping: Cookies and kindness” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1972)

P.F. Levin & A.M. Isen “Further studies on the effect of feeling good on helping” Sociometry (1975)

G.T. Long & M.J. Lerner “Deserving, the ‘personal contract,’ and altruistic behavior by children” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1974)

D.T. Miller & J. Smith “The effect of own deservingness and deservingness of others on children’s helping behavior” Child Development (1977)

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M.A. Barnett & J.H. Bryan “Effects of competition with outcome feedback on children’s helping behavior” Developmental Psychology (1974)

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D.R. Sherrod & R. Downs “Environmental determinants of altruism: The effects of stimulus overload and perceived control on helping” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (1974)

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J.M. Darley & C.D. Batson “From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situation and dispositional variables in helping behavior” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1973)

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L. Berkowitz “The Self, Selfishness, and Altruism” Altruism and Helping Behavior (1970) pp. 143–151 reviews some of the experimental evidence showing that if you induce self-consciousness in subjects they behave less altruistically

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Lone Pine “A Bias Against Altruism” LessWrong 23 July 2022

I notice that Ayn Rand often did the opposite, assuming that people’s altruistic acts were as terrible as they sounded to her, but scrutinizing ostensibly selfish acts that were really done for the approval of others. 

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S. Schachter & R. Hall “Group-derived restraints and audience persuasion” Human Relations (1952)

M. Rosenbaum “The effect of stimulus and background factors on the volunteering response” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology (1956)

J.H. Bryan & M.A. Test “Models and Helping: Naturalistic Studies in Aiding Behavior” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1967)

J.P. Rushton & A.C. Campbell “Modeling, vicarious reinforcement, and extroversion on blood donating in adults: Immediate and long-term effects” European Journal of Social Psychology (1977)

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H. Han, J. Kim, C. Jeong, & G.L. Cohen “Attainable and Relevant Moral Exemplars Are More Effective than Extraordinary Exemplars in Promoting Voluntary Service Engagement” Frontiers in Psychology (2017)

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M.K. Moss & R.A. Page “Reinforcement and helping behavior” Journal of Applied Social Psychology (1972)

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There is legitimate concern that if you highlight the benefits to the self of altruistic acts, or if you incentivize them through self-benefits, this “can backfire by undermining other prosocial motives… [and] lead people to believe that the reason they show concern is to get the inducement. They interpret their motivation as egoistic even if it originally was not… As a result, the behavior becomes dependent on the inducement… The assumption that there is only one answer to the question of why we act for the common good—egoism—becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy…” ―Batson (2011) pp. 224–225

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Robert Cialdini has done a lot of research into this:

• R.B. Cialdini, B.L. Darby, & J.E. Vincent “Transgression and altruism: A case for hedonism” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (1973)
• R.B. Cialdini & D.T. Kenrick “Altruism as hedonism: A social development perspective on the relationship of negative mood state and helping” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1976)
• R.B. Cialdini, D.J. Baumann, & D.T. Kenrick “Insights from sadness: A three-step model of the development of altruism as hedonism” Developmental Review (1981)
• R.B. Cialdini, M. Schaller, D. Houlihan, K. Arps, J. Fultz & A.L. Beaman “Empathy-based helping: Is it selflessly or selfishly motivated?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1987)
• R.B. Cialdini “Altruism or egoism? That is (still) the question” Psychological Inquiry (1991)
• R.B. Cialdini, S.L. Brown, B.P. Lewis, C. Luce & S.L. Neuberg “Reinterpreting the empathy-altruism relationship: When one into one equals oneness” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1997)

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H.A. Hornstein, E. Fisch, & M. Holmes “Influence of a model’s feelings about his behavior and his relevance as a comparison on other observers’ helping behavior” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1968)

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Batson (2011) p. 11

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Batson (2011) pp. 11, 34.

Note that this distinguishes Batson’s empathic concern from the broader empathy I discuss in my Notes on Empathy, which is not necessarily directed toward someone in need.

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Batson (2011) pp. 33–35

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Batson (2011) p. 44

See the “Empathy causes unconscious favoritism” section of my Notes on Empathy for some more evidence of how this mechanism can be exploited.

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Batson (2011) pp. 191–192

L.L. Shaw, C.D. Batson, & R.M. Todd “Empathy avoidance: Forestalling feeling for another in order to escape the motivational consequences” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1994)

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Batson (2011) pp. 11, 30–31, 59–60

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Batson (2011) pp. 29–30, 61–63

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S. Mehmood, S. Naseer, & D.L. Chen “Training Effective Altruism” (2022)

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In particular, Paul Bloom Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (2016); see my Notes on Empathy for a summary of this criticism.

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M. Proust “Combray” In Search of Lost Time Ⅰ: Swann’s Way (1913)

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@jefftk “How Much to Give is a Pragmatic Question” LessWrong 24 December 2024

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Aristotle Rhetoric Ⅱ.7

See D. Konstan “The Emotion in Aristotle Rhetoric 2.7: Gratitude, not Kindness” Influences on Peripatetic Rhetoric (2007) pp. 239–250 for why I’m going with the “favor” translation

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Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics Ⅳ.2

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Cicero De Officiis Ⅰ.14+, Ⅱ.15

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P. Singer “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1971). He argues that such altruistic action is not merely supererogatory or something that might exhibit an admirable virtue, but is a moral obligation.

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Joey “Altruism sharpens altruism” Effective Altruism Forum 26 December 2023

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