Within the endless web of ethical dilemmas, the question of postponing decisions is always raised. Is it better to donate one hundred today than two hundred tomorrow? Is it better to set in motion a revolutionary political process that promotes long-term and lasting social justice, rather than participate today in merely palliative charitable actions?
For those with a clear vision of human nature as determined by its capacity for cultural evolution, the obvious answer is to find means and ends compatible with participation in a process of improving ultimately moral behavior. Any altruistic action that contributes to spreading cultural patterns of moral improvement must take priority over any other that does not make this contribution to the same degree.
There is no greater altruism than promoting altruism, and postponing the recognition of this evidence is tantamount to sabotaging our own altruistic intentions. Ignoring the existence of the phenomenon of human moral evolution is, from a logical point of view, far worse than ignoring climate change, pollution, or the mistreatment of non-human animals. And it's worse because moral evolution would automatically solve all these other problems.
Truly effective altruism should prioritize promoting moral evolution. Altruism that fails to recognize that the source of altruism is the altruistic personality is pure denialism.
Everyone agrees that if all the children in the world were raised with intelligence and love, the world would be a paradise in the short term... but most refuse to accept that in order to educate children, adults must first be educated in rationality and benevolence. And how is that achieved? It is something that has already been actually happening through a gradual evolution throughout history and that depends on mechanisms of social psychology that we have always been aware of.
This is a question that civilization has addressed since antiquity through the dissemination of wisdom, spirituality, religious doctrine, and, more recently, with the help of the social sciences. The altruistic community, irrationally and senselessly, seems uninterested in this issue.
The reality is that, until now, no social movement has existed based exclusively on improving human behavior in the sense of benevolence. This deficiency is what urgently needs to be remedied.
Those who believe their altruistic motivation is a product of free will fall into a lamentable superstition... just as much as if they believe it is caused by "fate." Altruistic behavior doesn't exist because, miraculously, a few people today have given altruistic behavior a relevance it previously lacked. If altruistic behavior has come into existence, as an embryo of a behavioral ideology movement—altruism being a behavioral trait—it is probably as a consequence of prior ideological social phenomena. The spread and persistence of moral demands? The failure of socialism? The exhaustion of the "ideology of human rights"? The obsolescence of religious movements?
In his 1935 work, the British psychologist Ian Suttie was scandalized by the existence of a taboo against love and tenderness. For him, love was not a poetic matter, but an empirically definable behavioral fact, and therefore subject to being rationally cultivated.
There is a taboo on tenderness every bit as spontaneous and masterful as the taboo on sex itself (p. 78).
Love still remains the affair of poets, romancers, and the religious—not of science (p. 65).
“How is the comforting conviction of being loved arrived at?” Words will not produce it, though pitch and timbre of voice are important. Quickness of response, readiness of understanding, sympathetic emotional responses, even laughter—(not of the malicious-pleasure sort), posture, the width and shape of the palpebral fissure (eye), dilation of pupil, amount of fluid in the eye as well as facial color and expression, all these and other signs which individually are meaningless, are intuitively apprehended as a harmonious whole, and so produced in us some reaction which is both pleasant and encouraging. (p. 73)
Ian Suttie “The Origins of Love and Hate” 1934
You constantly read in this forum people writing that they act altruistically BUT THEY ARE NOT SAINTS... What do people think "saintliness" is? These are perfectly definable, humanly viable and culturally significant behavioral models. Just as happened a hundred years ago with Mr. Suttie, today we are once again confronted by the superstition of the taboo against "saintliness"... that is, against altruistic, psychologically viable, and rewarding models of behavior that are logically and ideologically consistent.
Ignorance, superstition, and prejudice are not utilitarian.
