Some altruistic acts are motivated simply by a recognition of the great need of those who benefit from them, and the benefactor and beneficiary may be strangers to each other.
That an act is altruistically motivated does not entail that it is justified or praiseworthy. As noted above, altruistic acts are guided by assumptions made by the agent about the well-being of some other individual or group. What well-being consists in is a disputed matter, but it is uncontroversial that a distinction must be drawn between i what constitutes well-being and ii what is a necessary means towards or a pre-condition of well-being. This kind of distinction is familiar, and is applicable in all sorts of cases.
For example, we distinguish between what a breakfast consists in cereal, juice, coffee and the things one needs in order to eat breakfast spoons, glasses, mugs. There is no such thing as eating breakfast but not eating anything that breakfast consists in.
In the same way, well-being must be sought and fostered by seeking and fostering the good or goods in which well-being consists. Rival theories of well-being are competing ways of answering the question: what are its constituents?
After we have answered that question, we need to address the further question of how best to obtain those constituents. Contemporary discussions of well-being can be found in Badhwar ; Feldman , ; Fletcher ; Griffin ; Kraut ; Sumner Tiberius Well-being admits of degrees: the more one has of the good or goods in which it consists, the better off one is.
The constituents of well-being can also be spoken of as benefits or advantages—but when one uses these terms to refer to well-being, one must recognize that these benefits or advantages are constituents of well-being, and not merely of instrumental value. A distinction must be drawn between being good at something and having what is good for oneself.
That is because when one tries to be good at something, one hopes to move closer to the ideal of perfection. Even though perfectionist and prudential value must be distinguished, it should not be inferred that that being good at something is not a constituent of well-being. To return to the example used in the preceding paragraph: if someone has great talent as an actor and enjoys acting and every aspect of theatrical life, it is plausible to say that his well-being consists, at least to some extent, in his enjoyment of these activities.
There are two different facts in play here: i he is an excellent actor, and ii being an excellent actor is good for him not as a mere means, but as a component of his well-being.
The value referred to in i is perfectionist value, and in ii prudential value. It would be prudent of him, in other words, to continue to excel as an actor. These points about well-being and excellence are pertinent to a study of altruism because they help guard against a too narrow conception of the sorts of goods that an altruist might promote in others. Altruists do not aim only at the relief of suffering or the avoidance of harm—they also try to provide positive benefits to others for their sake.
What counts as a benefit depends on what the correct theory of well-being is, but it is widely and plausibly assumed that certain kinds of excellence are components of a good life. For example, someone who founds a school that trains children to excel in the arts and sciences, or in sports, simply so that they will enjoy exercising such skills, would be regarded as a great public benefactor and philanthropist. Similarly, teachers and parents who foster in their students and children a love of literature and the skills needed to appreciate it would be viewed as altruists, if they are motivated by the thought that by themselves these activities are benefits to those students and children.
However, it is possible for someone to be dedicated to excellence and at the same time to be utterly indifferent to human well-being—and when this happens, we have no inclination to say that such a person is motivated by altruism.
Someone might be devoted to a subject—mathematics, or philosophy, or literature—rather than to the well-being of those who study and master that subject. He does not want that novel merely to gather dust on library shelves—it deserves readers who love and understand it, and so the skills needed to appreciate it must be kept alive from one generation to another.
This kind of devotion to perfectionist value is not a form of altruism. For an act to be altruistically motivated is for the benefactor —not the beneficiary—to have a certain attitude towards it. A child who acquires from a tennis instructor the skills of a good athlete and a love of the game may simply think of tennis as great fun—not as something that benefits him or as a constituent of his life going well. The child does not need to practice his skills because he believes that doing so is good for him: that is not a necessary condition of his being the beneficiary of an altruistic act.
Similarly, someone might deny that physical suffering counts as something that is bad for him. He should deny this, according to the Stoics. To take another example, consider someone who develops a love of philosophy and immerses herself in the subject.
When she asks herself whether she is doing this for her own good, she may reply that her reasons are quite different. If we suggested to her that her philosophical struggles are a component of her well-being, she might regard that as a strange way of looking at things.
But her view is not authoritative—whether she is right depends on what the best theory of well-being is. Others who care about her could plausibly believe that her love of philosophy is a component of her well-being, because it constitutes an enrichment and deepening of her mind, which is of value to her in itself, whether or not it leads to some further result.
If they help her pursue her philosophical interests simply for her sake, their motives would be altruistic, even if she herself does not care about philosophy because she thinks it is good for her.
The psychological egoist can agree with the idea, endorsed by common sense, that we often seek to benefit others besides ourselves; but he says that when we do so, that is because we regard helping others as a mere means to our own good. According to the psychological egoist, we do not care about others for their sake. Altruism, in other words, does not exist. Recall that an act is altruistic in the weak sense if it is motivated, at least in part, by the fact that it benefits someone else or the fact that it will not injure anyone else.
Psychological egoism, as defined in the preceding paragraph, denies that altruism in this sense exists. That is the strongest form of this doctrine; it is usually what philosophers have in mind when they discuss psychological egoism. But we can imagine weaker versions. One of them would deny that altruism is ever pure; it would say, in other words, that whenever we act, one of our motives is a desire for our own good. Another weaker form of psychological egoism would hold that we never voluntarily do what we foresee will sacrifice our well-being to some extent.
This third form of psychological egoism would admit that sometimes one of our reasons for acting is the good we do for others for their sake; but it claims that we never act for the good of others when we think that doing so would make us worse off.
Someone might arrive at one or another of these forms of psychological egoism because she takes herself to be a keen observer of the human scene, and her acquaintance with other people has convinced her that this is how they are motivated. But that way of justifying psychological egoism has a serious weakness. Others can say to this psychological egoist:. Perhaps the people you know are like this.
But my experience of the world is rather different from yours. I know many people who try to benefit others for their sake. I myself act altruistically. So, at most, your theory applies only to the people in your social world.
The psychological egoist can respond to this criticism in either of two ways. First, she might claim that his doctrine is supported by experimental evidence. That is, she might believe that i the subjects studied by psychologists in carefully conducted experiments have been shown to be not purely altruistic, or more strongly that these subjects ultimately care only about their own good; and ii that we can infer from these experiments that all human beings are motivated in the same way.
This is a disputed matter. There is experimental evidence that casts doubt on psychological egoism in its strong and in weaker forms, but the controversy continues see Batson ; Stich et al. A second response on the part of the psychological egoist would consist in an a priori philosophical argument for one or another version of that doctrine.
How might such an argument go? To elaborate on the idea behind ii : When we are hungry, our hunger has an object: food or perhaps some particular kind of food. But we do not want to ingest the food for its own sake; what we are really after is the feeling of satisfaction that we expect to get as a result of eating.
Ingesting this or that piece of food is something we want, but only as a means of achieving a sense of satisfaction or satiation. If all desire is understood in the same way, and all motivation takes the form of desire, then we can infer that psychological egoism in its strong form is true and therefore its weaker versions are also true. Consider an action that seems, on the surface, to be altruistically motivated: I give you a gift simply because I think you will like it.
Now, since I want to give you this gift, and all desire should be understood as a kind of hunger, I am hungering after your feeling pleased, as I hunger after a piece of food. But just as no one wants to ingest a piece of food for its own sake, I do not want you to feel pleased for your sake; rather, what I am seeking is the feeling of satisfaction I will get when you are pleased, and your being pleased is simply the means by which I achieve satisfaction.
We can recognize that this doctrine is correct simply by thinking about the nature of motivation and desire. But the assumption that all desires are like hunger in the relevant respect is open to question. Hunger is not satisfied if one still feels hungry after one has eaten. It seeks a certain kind of consciousness in oneself. But many kinds of desires are not like that. Suppose, for example, that I want my young children to be prosperous as adults long after I have died, and I take steps that increase to some small degree their chances of achieving that distant goal.
What my desire is for is their prosperity far into the future, not my current or future feeling of satisfaction. Since, by hypothesis I can only hope, and do not feel confident, that the provisions I make for them will actually produce the good results I seek for them, I get little current satisfaction from my act. It would make no sense, therefore, to suggest that I do not want them to be prosperous for their sake, but only as a means to the achievement of some goal of my own.
My goal is their well-being, not my own. In fact, if I allocate to them resources that I myself need, in the hope that doing so will make their lives better, I am doing something that one form of psychological egoism says is impossible: sacrificing my own good, to some degree, for the sake of others. If the psychological egoist claims that such self-sacrifice is impossible because all desire is like hunger, the reply should be that this model does not fit all cases of desire.
Recall the two premises used by the armchair psychological egoist: i What motivates us to act is always a desire; ii all desires are to be understood on the model of hunger. The second premise is implausible, as we have just seen; and, since both premises must be true for the argument to reach its conclusion, the argument can be rejected.
This thesis that what motivates us to act is always a desire should be accepted only if we have a good understanding of what a desire is. That is the sort of remark we often make when we take ourselves to have an unpleasant duty or obligation, or when we face a challenge that we expect to be difficult and stressful. In these sorts of situation, we do not hunger after the goal we move towards.
Now, the psychological egoist who seeks an a priori defense of this doctrine might say:. My usage is much broader. Among desires, in this broad sense, I include the belief that one ought to do something. In fact, it includes any internal state that causes someone to act. The common sense terms we often use to explain why we help others do not need to refer to our own desires.
You are in a public space and come across someone off-putting in appearance but who seems to need your help. He appears to be in pain, or confused, or needy in some way. Recognizing this, you take yourself to have a good reason to offer him your assistance. You think that you ought to ask him whether you can help—even though that will delay you and may cause you some trouble and discomfort.
But what does the explanatory work, in these cases, is your recognition of his need and your judgment that therefore you ought to offer your help. After you have given him your help, it is true, you might think back on this encounter, and be pleased that you had done the right thing. But you might not—you might be worried that what you did actually made him worse off, despite your good intentions.
And in any case, if you do look back with pleasure at your good deed, it does not follow that feeling good was your goal all along, and that you merely used him as a means to that end. That would follow only if desire by its very nature is a form of hunger.
Of the three forms of psychological egoism distinguished above, the one that is least open to objection is the weak form that holds that altruism is never pure. It claims that whenever we act, one of our motives is a desire for our own good. There is no good a priori argument for this thesis—or, at any rate, the a priori argument we have been considering for the strongest form of psychological egoism does not support it, because the two premises used in that argument are so implausible.
But it might nonetheless be suggested that as a matter of fact we always do find some self-interested motivation that accompanies altruistically motivated behavior. It is difficult to refute that proposal. We should not pretend that we know all of the considerations and causes that underlie our behavior. Some of our motives are hidden, and there is too much going on in our minds for us to be aware of the whole of our psychology.
So, for all we know, we might never be pure altruists. But what of the other weak form of psychological egoism? It says, in other words, that we never voluntarily do what we foresee will sacrifice our well-being to some extent. The first point to be made about this form of psychological egoism is that, once again, there is no a priori argument to support it. The two premises we have been examining—that all action is motivated by desire and all desire is like hunger—are implausible, and so they do not support the thesis that we never sacrifice our well-being to any degree.
It would have to say: when our motives are carefully scrutinized, it may indeed be found that although we do good to others for the sake of those others, we never do so when we think it would detract even slightly from our own well-being. In other words, we count the good of others as something that by itself gives us a reason, but it is always a weak reason, in that it is never as strong as reasons that derive from our self-interest. We have no reason to suppose that human behavior is so uniform in its motivation.
A far more plausible hypothesis about human motives is that they vary a great deal from one person to another. Some people are never altruistic; others are just as this weak form of psychological egoism says: they are altruistic, but only when they think this will not detract from their own well-being; and then there is a third and large category filled with people who, to some degree or other, are willing to sacrifice their well-being for others.
Within this category there is wide range—some are willing to make only small sacrifices, others larger sacrifices, and some extraordinarily large sacrifices. This way of thinking has the great advantage of allowing our experience of each individual to provide us with the evidence by means of which we characterize him. One further point should be made about our reasons for supposing that there is such a thing as altruism. On what grounds are we entitled to reject that possibility?
Once again, the egoist might reply that it is an a priori truth that all of our actions are ultimately motivated only by self-interest, but we have seen the weakness of the premises that support that argument. We must find actual cases of someone promoting his own good only for his own sake.
It is no easier to be confident about such matters than it is easy to be confident that someone has acted out of purely altruistic motives. We realize that much of what we do for ourselves has consequences for other people as well, and we care to some degree about those other people.
Perhaps our ultimate motivation always includes an other-regarding component. It is more difficult to find evidence against that suggestion than one might have thought. To take matters to an extreme, it might be suggested that our ultimate motivation is always entirely other-regarding. According to this far-fetched hypothesis, whenever we act for our own good, we do so not at all for our own sake, but always entirely for the sake of someone else.
The important point here is that the denial that altruism exists should be regarded with as much suspicion as this contrary denial, according to which people never act ultimately for their own good. Both are dubious universal generalizations. Both have far less plausibility than the common sense assumption that people sometimes act in purely egoistic ways, sometimes in purely altruistic ways, and often in ways that mix, in varying degrees, the good of oneself and the good of others.
An assumption that many people make about egoistic and altruistic motives is that it is more difficult to justify the latter than the former, or that the former do not require justification whereas the latter do. Self-interest, it might be said, can be given no justification and needs none. By contrast, since other people are other , it seems as though some reason needs to be given for building a bridge from oneself to those others.
In other words, we apparently have to find something in others that justifies our taking an interest in their well-being, whereas one need not seek something in oneself that would justify self-regard. Perhaps what we find in others that justifies altruism is that they are just like oneself in important respects. It is worth asking whether this apparent asymmetry between justifying self-interest and justifying altruism is real or only apparent. One response to this question is that the asymmetry is illusory because the very distinction between oneself and others is artificial and an obstacle to clear thinking.
The mind of a newborn, a child, an adolescent, a young adult, a middle aged person, and an old person approaching death—these can have at least as many differences as do those who are conventionally counted as two distinct individuals.
If a young man of twenty years sets aside money to provide for his retirement in old age, he is saving for someone who will be quite different from himself. Why should that not be called altruism rather than self-interest? Why does it matter whether it is called acting for his own good or for the good of another? See Parfit Introspection can tell us something about sensations, feelings, and thoughts—but we do not have any experience of some entity that is the one who has these sensations, feelings, and thoughts.
That point might be regarded as a reason to reject the common sense view that when you refer to yourself, and distinguish yourself from someone else, there is something real that you are talking about, or some valid distinction between yourself and others. It might be thought, in other words, that the ordinary distinction between altruistic and egoistic motives is misguided because there are no such things as selves. A third metaphysical possibility is this: human beings cannot be understood one by one, as though each were a self-sufficient and fully real individual.
That way of thinking about ourselves fails to recognize the profound way in which we are by our nature social beings. You and I and others are by our nature mere parts of some larger social unit. As an analogy, one might think of the human body and such parts of the body as fingers, hands, arms, legs, toes, torso, and so on. They cannot exist, much less function properly, in isolation. Similarly, it might be said that individual human beings are mere fragments of a larger social whole.
The remainder of this essay will set aside these unorthodox alternatives to the common sense metaphysical framework that we normally presuppose when we think about self-interested and altruistic motives. It would take us too far afield to examine them. Some believe that it is in human nature to be egoistic.
For example, Thomas Hobbes who was a philosopher stated that human are naturally selfish. According to his thought, men are engaged in a war against each other due to their selfish nature. However, one cannot claim that all individual are egoistic. This can be understood through the concept of altruism. Altruism can simply be defined as unselfishness.
It is when a person puts the needs of others even before himself. This is why it can be considered as the opposite of egoism. Such an individual is so concerned about others that he completely ignores himself. For example, take a soldier who sacrifices himself to save the others of his battalion, or else a parent that risks herself or himself to save the child.
These are instances where an individual completely forgets his own self. Then it is considered as a sacrifice. There is a strong moral obligation and also emotional attachment that makes the individual be altruistic. Three approaches are examined: self-interested, reason-based and self-referential justifications. Self-interested justification for altruistic morality is found partly credible; reason-based Kantian justification is firmly refuted; and self-referential justification is argued for.
It is a mistake to downplay the nobility of altruism simply because an altruist has a self and acts out of her self. We must reject the misguided wish for a selfless agent and selfless morality; the moral model we advocate is an autonomous and un selfish self. This essay argues that the best explanation of altruistic behaviors and the best non-self-interested justification of altruism lie in the notion of extended-self-love.
Since progress in other disciplines facilitates the philosophical study of altruism, this essay makes use of abundant studies on altruism in social sciences such as psychology, sociology, etc. Jing, Li, "Self-love and morality: Beyond egoism and altruism"
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