Hacker News Reader

Comment by rfrey | Hacker News Reader

It seems like this point of view is unassailable because for every example that, in regular understanding, would be selfless behaviour, the definition of self-interest is stretched to encompass it.

- Anonymous philanthropy => feelings of self worth

- Low reward public service (Mother Theresa) => fame and influence

- Parents sacrificing personal good for kids => some kind of evolutionary advantage

- Falling on a grenade => Avoiding survivors guilt

I don't mean to present strawman arguments for these scenarios - if they are silly I apologize. In any case, it seems to me that denial of altruism always ends up stretching the definition of selfish and shrinking the definition of selfless, so that any scenario can fit.

View on HN

Most of the sacrifices I make for my kids feel like the exact opposite of self-gain. "Do something I want to do" vs "do something the kid would benefit from" is a choice presented to every parent every day.

I don't think that the possibility that the latter might have some indirect self-benefit keeps it from being an act of altruism, for any reasonable definition of altruism. I mean, "some kind of evolutionary advantage" is a plausible explanation for pretty much any behavior by any animal on Earth.

That's easy to answer. Taking care of your children is not aultruism, it's a genetic inevitability. Your genes have a 'selfish' desire to propogate themselves into the future. Your children are the means of doing this. To protect this investment your genes have gifted you with hormones that make you a happy and willing slave to these little bundles of genetic immortality. :-)

This is a cop-out. There is nothing anyone does that couldn't be plausibly cast as an evolutionary imperative. You gave your kid the last bite of your dinner? Obviously you were trying to maximize his chance of surviving and reproducing. You kept the last bite for yourself? Obviously you were nourishing yourself to ensure your ability to provide for your kids in the future. You gave the last bite to the neighbor's kid? You must have been supporting your community because your kids thrive when your tribe thrives. You sent it off to starving children in Africa? Clearly you were trying to cultivate a reputation of charitable giving in order to increase your status in the tribe. This is a parlor game, not a reasonable way to talk about whether whales can display behavior we usually associate only with humans.

> Your genes have a 'selfish' desire to propogate themselves into the future.

Common misunderstanding, but this is not true. Genes do not have any desires at all.

Dawkins wrote "The Selfish Gene" to explore a metaphor, not explain how biology actually works. He thought it would be an interesting way of looking at evolution, and he was right. It was so interesting that people started taking him literally.

Anyway, it seems obvious that taking care of kids is not a genetic inevitability, because of the large numbers of parents who fail to do a good job of taking care of their kids.

I agree. I wonder if a better strategy would be to amend the definition of altruism to include doing something for someone else because it makes you feel good. Surely most would agree that "it makes me feel good to help someone" vs "I financially gained from helping someone" are not the same type of "selfishness" (excluding the genetic reductionist explanations).

My problem with this argument is there's an underlying assumption that the end of the day our basic core motive is selfish/egotistic, it might be so but many who use this assumption as a base of their arguments do not bother to prove it because believe that it is so.

Since when did the definition of altruism exclude acts just because they make a person feel good?

There seems to some serious latent Puritanism in this discussion.

This leads to more questions, among them: why does it make me feel good?

Why doesn't it make me feel bored, sleepy, nauseous, repulsed, angry, etc. ?

Another viewpoint: Did Mother Theresa perform her acts for fame and influence? Or did she receive fame and influence for performing the acts that she would have performed anyway? It just so happens that people like being helped, and will generally feel friendly and helpful to those who help them. Do this enough, and you'll end up with a pretty large sphere of influence, even if that was not ever a goal.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com