Mixed motives and pure altruism<\/p>\n
Altruistic acts include not only those undertaken in order to do good to others, but also those undertaken in order to avoid or prevent harm to them. Suppose, for example, someone drives her car extra cautiously because she sees that she is in an area where children are playing, and she wants to insure that she injures no one. It would be appropriate to say that her caution is altruistically motivated. She is not trying to make those children better off, but she is being careful not to make them worse off. She does this because she genuinely cares about them for their sake.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, altruistic acts need not involve self-sacrifice, and they remain altruistic even when they are performed from a mixture of motives, some of which are self-interested. The driver in the preceding example may have plenty of time to get where she is going; slowing down and paying extra attention may not be contrary to her own good. Even so, her act counts as altruistic if\u00a0one\u00a0of her motives for being cautious is her concern for the children for their sake. She may also be aware that if she injures a child, she could be punished for reckless driving, which she of course wants to avoid for self-interested reasons. So, her caution is both altruistic and self-interested; it is not motivated by only one kind of reason. We should not be confused by the fact that \u201cself-interested\u201d and \u201caltruistic\u201d are opposites. A single\u00a0motive\u00a0cannot be characterized in both ways; but a single\u00a0act\u00a0can be undertaken from both motives.<\/p>\n
If someone performs an act entirely from altruistic motives\u2014if, that is, self-interested motives are entirely absent\u2014we can describe her act as a case of \u201cpure\u201d altruism. We should be careful to distinguish purely altruistic behavior from self-sacrificing behavior: the former involves no gain for oneself, whereas the latter involves some loss. If someone has a theater ticket that he cannot use because he is ill, and he calls the box office so that the ticket can be used by someone else, that is a case of pure altruism, but it involves no sacrifice.<\/p>\n
Nagel and the impersonal standpoint<\/p>\n
A conception of impartiality\u2014and a novel argument for the rationality of altruism\u2014can be found in the work of Thomas Nagel. In\u00a0The Possibility of Altruism\u00a0(1970), he seeks to undermine both psychological egoism, in its strong form and its normative counterpart (sometimes called \u201crational egoism or \u201cethical egoism\u201d), which holds that one\u00a0ought\u00a0to have no direct concern with the good of others.\u00a0Indirect\u00a0concern, the ethical egoist grants, can be justified: the good of others may be instrumental to one\u2019s own good, or one might happen to have a sentimental attachment to others. But absent these contingent relations to others, one has, according to the ethical egoist, no reason to care about their well-being.<\/p>\n
Nagel doubts that anyone actually is a psychological egoist (1970: 84\u201385), but his major concern is to refute ethical egoism by showing that altruism is a rational requirement on action. His idea is not simply that we ought in certain circumstances to help others for their sake; it is also that we are acting irrationally if we do not. That is because it is required of us as rational beings to view ourselves and others from what Nagel calls \u201cthe impersonal standpoint\u201d. As he puts it, to recognize others fully as persons requires a conception of oneself as identical with a particular, impersonally specifiable inhabitant of the world, among others of a similar nature. (1970: 100)<\/p>\n
Nagel likens the impersonal standpoint to the prudential policy of regarding all times in one\u2019s life as equal in importance. One has reason not to be indifferent to one\u2019s future because the present moment is not more reason-giving simply by virtue of being present. Similarly, he holds, one has reason not to be indifferent to other people, because the fact that some individual is me is not more reason-giving simply because he is me. Terms like \u201cnow\u201d and \u201clater\u201d, \u201cme and not me\u201d point to no differences that make a rational difference. A time that is later eventually becomes a time that is now; that is why it is arbitrary and irrational to discount the future simply because it is future. Giving greater weight to someone\u2019s good because that person is me is no less irrational.<\/p>\n
The \u201cimpersonal standpoint\u201d, as Nagel conceives it, is a view of the world from outside it, one that deprives one of information about which individual in that world one is. (It is, in the phrase Nagel chose as the title of his 1986 book,\u00a0The View From Nowhere.) From this perspective, one need not be a utilitarian or consequentialist\u2014one need not maximize the good, but can abide by the constraints of principles of the right. But certain principles\u00a0are\u00a0ruled out from the impersonal standpoint: egoism is, as well as any other principle that gives one individual or group a reason not shared by all others. For example, if someone has reason to avoid pain, that must be because pain\u2014anyone\u2019s pain\u2014is to be avoided. So, it cannot be the case that although I have a reason to avoid pain, others are permitted to be indifferent to my plight, as if that pain were not an objectively bad thing, something that gives only the person who feels it a reason to oppose it. Nagel called such reasons \u201cobjective\u201d, as contrasted with \u201csubjective\u201d. Parfit, in\u00a0Reasons and Persons (1984), speaks instead of \u201cagent-relative\u201d and \u201cagent neutral\u201d reasons, and subsequently Nagel himself adopted these terms. The critique of egoism in\u00a0The Possibility of Altruism\u00a0rests on the thesis that all genuine reasons are agent neutral.<\/p>\n
What Nagel\u2019s position and utilitarianism have in common is a perspective that is the opposite of the self-centered world of rational egoism: from the point of view of this self-less perspective, each individual is just a tiny part of a vast universe of moral subjects, each of no more importance or value than any other. Our common sense point of view, moving from our inner life looking outward, lulls us into a massive kind of insularity\u2014a tendency to downplay or ignore the fact that we are just one individual of no greater importance than any other. We put ourselves at the center of our world, and this can only be corrected by stepping back, leaving out of our picture the particular individual one is, and making general judgments about how human beings should behave towards each other. From this perspective, when one person ought to do something, some related requirement is imposed on all others as well \u2013some \u201cought\u201d statement applies to each.<\/p>\n
Nagel is faced with the problem of how to explain why self-interest is not regularly swamped by agent-neutral reasons. If anyone\u2019s pain imposes on\u00a0all\u00a0other moral agents a requirement of some sort, then one person\u2019s pain is everyone\u2019s problem. As Nagel says in\u00a0The View from Nowhere, (using the term \u201cobjective standpoint\u201d for the impersonal standpoint), when we take up the objective standpoint, the problem is not that values seem to disappear but that there are too many of them, coming from every life and drowning out those that arise from our own. (1986: 147)<\/p>\n
It would be consistent with this picture to add that the weight of reasons that derive from the situation of other people is extremely small and becomes increasingly so, as they are added together. Therefore, it might be said, they do not often outweigh reasons of self-interest. But that would be an\u00a0ad hoc\u00a0stipulation, and would differ only slightly from the egoist\u2019s thesis that the good of others has\u00a0no\u00a0independent weight. It is hard to believe that we are forced to choose between ethical egoism (which says that only one\u2019s own pain ought to be one\u2019s direct concern) and Nagel\u2019s conception of impartiality (according to which everyone\u2019s pain ought to weigh on me, because that of others is as bad as my own). The first demands no altruism of us, the second too much.<\/p>\n
Richard Kraut\u00a0and Charitable Giving<\/p>\n
A question about the relation between our sentiments and altruism arises when we ask about the proper basis for charitable giving. Consider, for example, someone who donates money to an organization devoted to fighting cancer, and chooses to do so because his mother has died of cancer. His gift is an expression of his love for her; it is meant, of course, to do \u201cgood\u201d to others, but those others are chosen as beneficiaries because he takes the reduction of this disease to be an appropriate expression of his feelings for her. Utilitarianism cannot easily accept this form of altruism, since it begins with the premise that charitable acts, like everything else, are right only if they do the most good\u2014and it could easily be the case that money allocated to cancer research would do more good if donated to some other humanitarian cause. But if one does not presuppose the truth of utilitarianism, it is not difficult to defend the practice of choosing one charity over another on the basis of one\u2019s sentimental attachments. If friendships and other loving relationships have a proper place in our lives even if they do not maximize the good, then sentiment is an appropriate basis for altruism. (For an opposing view, see Singer 2015.)<\/p>\n
That does not entail that it is always right to follow our feelings when we decide whether to help this person or organization rather than that. Suppose you belong to a group dedicated to reducing the number of people who die in drowning accidents, and you are on your way to an essential meeting of this organization. If you miss the meeting, let us suppose, the group will have to suspend its operations for many months\u2014with the result that the number of drownings will remain high. On your way, you pass a child who is in danger of drowning, and cries for your help. You must choose: either you can save this one child, or you can attend the meeting and thereby save many more from drowning. When you hear the child\u2019s cries for help, you cannot help responding emotionally; it would be cold and calculating to pass him by, even if in doing so you will be saving many more. What ought you to do?<\/p>\n
The fact that your emotions are fully aroused by the child\u2019s cries does not have the same bearing on this issue as does the love felt by a son for his departed mother in the previous example. The drowning child whose cries fill you with compassionate feeling is a stranger to you. So your alternatives in this case are whether to help one stranger (the one who is tugging at your heartstrings) or many (whom you do not see or hear at the moment). It would not be implausible to hold that sentiment plays an appropriate role in altruism when it is the expression of a long-term and meaningful bond, but not when it is a short-lived reaction to the cries of a stranger.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mixed motives and pure altruism Altruistic acts include not only those undertaken in order to do good to others, but also those undertaken in order to avoid or prevent harm to them. Suppose, for example, someone drives her car extra cautiously because she sees that she is in an area where children are playing, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-106008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-paper-writing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106008\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}