Still need to be convinced to be kind? Read on. Here are some specific, science-based activities for cultivating altruism from our new site Greater Good in Action :. Here are some broader ways to nurture our own altruistic instincts—and help motivate altruism in others. Become a subscribing member today. Why Practice It? How Do I Cultivate It? What are the Limitations? By Juliana Breines Qualities like gender, ethnicity, and nationality tend to define us more than being human.
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Altruism makes us happy : Researchers have consistently found that people report a significant happiness boost after doing kind deeds for others. Some studies suggest giving to others makes people feel happier than spending money on themselves; this has even been found among kids. As Aristotle observes at the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics , whenever we act, we aim at some good—but goods are not all at the same level. Lower goods are undertaken for the sake of more valuable goals, which are in turn pursued in order to achieve still better goods.
This hierarchy of value cannot continue endlessly—a life must have some ultimate goal, something that is valuable in itself and not for the sake of anything still better. On the contrary, he holds that the common good the good of the whole political community is superior to the good of a single individual. Is this an implausible assumption? That is the accusation of many systems of modern moral philosophy, but one must be careful not to attribute to Greek and Roman ethics an extreme endorsement of selfishness.
One way to see that this would be unfair is to recognize how important it is to Aristotle that we love others for their sake. It is clear, then, that he explicitly condemns those who treat others as mere means to their own ends. It is crucial, at this point, that we keep in mind the distinction, drawn above in section 1.
We should recall a point made in section 1. For Aristotle, altruism should always be accompanied by self-interested motives. His system of practical thought could be dismissed out of hand if one begins with the assumption that moral motivation must be purely altruistic, free from all taint of self-regard. Otherwise, it would not count as moral. That idea has some currency, and it is often attributed rightly or wrongly to Kant.
But on reflection, it is open to question. In section 1. Such a person seems insufficiently altruistic, insufficiently willing to make compromises for the good of others.
He is to use the term introduced earlier never altruistic in the strong sense. To be fair to him, he does not deny this; on the other hand, he does say that treating others well never makes one worse off. The idea underlying this objection is that we should be directly concerned with others: the fact that an act one performs benefits someone else can already provide a reason for undertaking it, without having to be accompanied by a self -interested reason.
There is no argument to be found in ancient ethics —none is offered—that purports to show that the only way to justify having other-regarding motives is by appealing to the good it does oneself to have them. At the same time, that gives us no reason to dismiss out of hand the efforts made by these authors to show that in fact one does benefit by having altruistic motives.
As noted earlier section 1. The examples used there were excellence in the arts, the sciences, and sport. But excelling at ethical life is also a plausible example, since it consists in developing and exercising cognitive, emotional, and social skills that we are pleased and proud to have. We turn now to the idea, central to one modern approach to ethics, that when we think morally, we reason from an impartial or impersonal perspective. Moral thinking is not self-centered. Of course we all have an emotional bias that attaches special weight to self-interest, and we are often partial to our particular circle of friends or our community.
But when we look at the world from a moral point of view, we try to set aside this self-centered framework. It is as though we forget about locating ourselves as this particular person; we abstract away from our normal self-centered perspective and seek the solution to a practical problem that anyone similarly impartial would also arrive at. It is not clear how these ideas can be made to fit within a eudaimonistic framework. One way of looking at the history of ethics would be to say that modern ethics salvages the impartialism that occasionally appears in ancient ethics, and rightly abandons its attempt to derive a justification of altruism from a prior commitment to self-interest.
Contemporary eudaimonists, of course, would tell a different story see, for example Annas ; LeBar ; Russell The notion of impartiality has thus far been described in highly general terms, and it is important to see that there are different ways of making it more concrete.
One way of doing so is adopted by utilitarians, and more generally, by consequentialists. The utilitarianism of Bentham , Mill , and Sidgwick holds that one is to maximize the greatest balance of pleasure over pain—treating pleasure and the absence of pain as the sole constituents of well-being.
Consequentialism abstracts away from this hedonistic component of utilitarianism; it requires one to maximize the greatest balance of good over bad.
See Driver But the same point applies equally and with equal force to the well-being of anyone else. But that is not the only way of taking the general notion of impartiality and making it more specific. The general idea, as stated earlier, is that moral thinking, unlike prudential thinking, is not self-centered.
He makes no special exceptions for himself or his friends. Suppose, for example, that you are a lifeguard and one afternoon you must choose between swimming north to rescue one group and swimming south to rescue another. The northern group includes your friend, but the southern group, full of strangers, is much larger.
The ideal of impartiality described in the previous paragraph does not by itself determine what one should do in this situation; what it requires is simply that it should make no difference that the lifeguard faced with this dilemma is you and the northern group includes your friend.
What you should do, if you are the lifeguard, is what any lifeguard ought to do in that situation. If it is right to take friendship into consideration, when making this decision, then it would be right for anyone to do so. What would be right, in that case, would be for each individual to choose the good of his or her friend over the good of strangers. The consequentialist has a more radical interpretation of what impartiality means and requires.
His ideal of impartiality does not allow the lifeguard to take into consideration the fact that by swimming north he will be able to save his friend. After all, the well-being of his friend is not made more valuable simply because that person is his friend. Just as my good is not made more valuable than the good of others simply because it is my good, so too the well-being of my friend deserves no extra weight because he is a friend of mine.
So, the lifeguard, according to the consequentialist, must choose to save one group rather than the other solely on the basis of the greater balance of good over bad. As a rule, I have more knowledge about what is good for me than I have about what is good for strangers. It often requires fewer resources for me to benefit myself than to benefit others. I know immediately when I am hungry without having to ask, and I know what kind of food I like. But additional steps are needed to find out when others are hungry and which food they like.
Even so, there is only one individual who is me; and the number of other individuals whom I can benefit, if I make the effort, is very large. When all of these factors are taken into consideration, it will often be the case that self-interested reasons ought to give way to altruistic motives. Consequentialism evidently does not recognize certain ways in which each human being has a special relation to her own well-being—a relation different from the one she has to the well-being of others.
When each of us becomes an adult, we are normally charged with the special responsibility of having to look after our own welfare. Young children are not expected to be in command of their own lives; they are not yet competent to occupy this role. But the point of their education is to train them so that as adults they can be responsible for themselves. A fully mature person is rightly expected by others to care for someone in particular—namely herself. She is given room to make decisions about her own life but is not given the same kind and degree of authority over the lives of others.
If she would like to devote herself to others, she cannot simply do so without receiving their permission, or without taking other steps that make her entry into their lives permissible. Consequentialism, by contrast, regards all adult human beings as equally responsible for the well-being of all. According to the weaker interpretation of impartiality described above, moral rules reflect this division of labor. Consider, for example, the duty we normally have to help others, even when they are strangers.
If someone is in need, and asks for your assistance, that gives you a reason to help him, and you should do so, provided that compliance with such appeals is not overly burdensome. Notice the escape clause: it builds into the duty to aid others a recognition of the importance of each person having a significant degree of control over his own life.
Common sense morality assumes that what we owe to others might call for some sacrifice of our own good, but also that in the ordinary business of life the degree of sacrifice should fall within certain limits, so that we can make good use of the responsibility we have been given as adults to seek our own good.
The balance struck by moral rules between the claims of self-interest and the claims of others is what makes it possible for those rules to be recognized and accepted as appropriate. These rules leave us free to volunteer to make greater sacrifices; but such greater sacrifices are not required of us except in extraordinary circumstances wars, disasters, emergencies.
Eudaimonism replies that those who act for the sake of others are benefited by having an altruistic disposition. There is, in other words, no reason why a benefit should go to you rather than someone else just because you are the one who would be receiving it.
If we adopt a weaker interpretation of impartiality, we see the justification of altruism simply by seeing that we have a duty to aid other people in certain circumstances. The moral rule that requires us to help others is a rule that calls upon us to help them not as a means to our own good, but simply in virtue of their need.
And we see the rule as justified by recognizing that it strikes a proper balance between our self-concern and the appropriate claims of others. The weak impartialist attempts to occupy a middle ground. Yet another conception of impartiality—and a novel argument for the rationality of altruism—can be found in the work of Thomas Nagel.
In The Possibility of Altruism , he seeks to undermine both psychological egoism, in its strong form, as defined in section 2. But absent these contingent relations to others, one has, according to the ethical egoist, no reason to care about their well-being. Nagel doubts that anyone actually is a psychological egoist 84—85 , 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. As he puts it,. 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. 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.
From this perspective, one need not be a utilitarian or consequentialist—one need not maximize the good, but can abide by the constraints of principles of the right.
But certain principles are ruled 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. 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. The critique of egoism in The Possibility of Altruism rests on the thesis that all genuine reasons are agent neutral.
Our common sense point of view, moving from our inner life looking outward, lulls us into a massive kind of insularity—a 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.
Nagel is faced with the problem of how to explain why self-interest is not regularly swamped by agent-neutral reasons. 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. The first demands no altruism of us, the second too much. Some philosophers would say that the approaches to altruism discussed thus far are missing an important—perhaps the most important—ingredient in moral motivation.
These approaches, one might say, make altruism a matter of the head, but it is much more a matter of the heart. The eudaimonist can say that we should have a certain amount of fellow feeling, but justifies that emotional response by giving a self-interested reason for being so motivated.
The consequentialist seems to leave no legitimate room in our moral thinking for the friendly feelings and love we have for particular individuals, for these sentiments are often at odds with the project of increasing the total amount of good in the world. The weak impartialist says that in certain situations we are to be moved by the good of others, but that is only because there is a moral rule, striking a reasonable balance between oneself and others, that requires one to do so.
All three approaches—so the objection goes—are too cold and calculating. They call upon us to treat others in accordance with a formula or rule or general policy.
What is most important in human relationships cannot be captured by an approach that begins with a general rule about how to treat others, and justifies a certain way of treating each particular individual simply by applying that general rule. It would miss the point of this critique if one said, in response, that having an emotional response to the good of others is an effective means of getting oneself to give them the aid they need.
For example, the consequentialist can say that this doctrine does call upon us to act on the basis of friendly feelings and love towards particular individuals, because over the long run relationships solidified by such sentiments are likely to result in a greater balance of good over bad than would colder relationships. When we feel compassion for the suffering of a particular individual, that reaction is already justified; the suffering of another ought to elicit such a response simply because that is the appropriate reaction.
In the same way, it could be said that altruistic feelings are the appropriate response to the good and ill of others, quite apart from whether those feelings lead to results. That does not imply that it does not matter whether one does anything for the good of others.
That would be no better than trying to justify grief by way of impartiality or well-being. The sentimentalist simply asks us to recognize that the situation of this or that human being or animal rightly calls forth a certain emotional response, and the help we give is the proper expression of that sentiment. He notes that. But not the highest praise or the strongest encouragement. Kant means that these people are not following a rule when they help others—a rule, rationally acceptable to all, according to which all those who are in such and such circumstances ought to be helped because it is morally right to do so.
These compassionate people act instead on an emotional basis: they are pained by the misfortunes of others, and they know that if they offer their help, they will give themselves pleasure. What should we make of this?
Alleviating his pain was not your ultimate end —it was just a way to quiet him down, so that you could enjoy some peace. Press, NY, Schwartz, J. Meisenhelder, Y. Ma, G.
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Darwin, On the Origin of Species Edwards, C. Cooper, Social Science and Medicine 27, Fredrickson, American Scientist 91, McCullough, C. Neurobiologists have found that altruism makes us feel good. Rather, it embodies something psychological. One common theory surrounding the topic of altruism is kin selection. Kin selection suggests that we are more likely to help those related to us by blood because of a biological need to ensure the continuation of shared genes.
According to studies, the closer two people are related, the more likely they are to provide each other help. According to various studies, women find altruistic men to be attractive.
It exhibits the good things that a potential mate might find desirable. For example, a woman might lend a hand to a mother struggling to carry both her toddler and the grocery bags if she has had children herself. This hypothesis is supported by various research studies. One study found that children begin to develop altruistic habits at the same time they begin to develop their sense of empathy. Consider the bee. When a human or an animal attacks a bee hive, a bee takes it upon itself to sting the attacker.
Though the act of stinging soon brings about death, the bee willingly sacrifices itself in order to protect the hive.
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