Altruism is not a hedonism

Everyone who has been in a city and paid attention to their surroundings knows the pain of witnessing poverty. On any main street of Seattle, for instance, you will inevitably come across loiterers with poor hygiene, inadequate clothing, and apparent mental unclarity, all problems that stem from being too poor to afford the products of life. When you see people living in these conditions, you feel bad because your impulse to help them is arrested by your pragmatism and physical limits—in theory, you could alleviate some of their suffering by giving them clothes or money, offering them your couch to stay on, or even just chatting for a moment, but eventually the sheer amount of poverty in cities overwhelms individual efforts and you reach your limit in time or money. So, at one point or another, we must carry on with our days while also carrying the burden of knowing that others are suffering as we do so.

Now, imagine there was some way to eliminate this compassion-induced pain from our lives while preserving all the benefits of being generally compassionate. Plausibly, this could be done by reframing how we view the people we see on the street. If you convinced yourself that poor people are individually responsible for their poverty or otherwise couldn’t be helped, then you might feel better about the fact that you can’t help them. Maybe you could rationalize their plight as the product of personal weakness—either some condition like drug addiction or mental illness, or just laziness/inability to work. You could also convince yourself that the problems they face are so big and structural that they can never be addressed and thus fall outside the umbra of your direct concern—maybe poor people are bound to suffer until Capitalism is abolished, or until global productive capacity rises high enough to lift everyone above the poverty line. Whatever the mechanism, consider that it is a choice to feel the pain of compassion.

The question is: Do you then choose to stop feeling the pain caused by compassion? For people who feel compassion, the answer is certainly “No,” because being compassionate (i.e. a person who feels compassion) entails seeing compassion as good in itself. So, a compassionate person would never give up compassion, even in an extremely narrow case where all it does is bring them pain.

This parable reveals the answer to a problem that my friend Krithik posed me last year. He posited a hedonistic view of altruism, that altruistic people help others only for their own pleasure. His justification was that people often say that helping others makes them “feel good”, which implies that they are motivated by personal pleasure and not concern for others. And so, he proclaimed that “Altruism is selfish.” We might restate his argument as the following:

1. Premise: Selfishness is when one is chiefly concerned with their own pleasure and pain.
2. Premise: People act altruistically to satisfy some desire (i.e. alleviate some pain) or feel some pleasure.
3. Conclusion: Altruism is selfish.

I, on the other hand, believe that the pleasure of altruism might only be an effect of helping others and not its primary motivation. Consider that people only “feel good” after helping others because they are altruistically motivated—if they only cared about themselves, then they would only feel the pain of labor when they help others and would actually feel bad when they do so. In this case, altruism is not driven by one own’s pleasure and is thus unselfish. We might state this as the following argument against selfish altruism:

1. Premise: Selfishness is when one is chiefly concerned with their own pleasure and pain.
2. Premise: People act altruistically for some reason besides their own pleasure or pain, such as concern for others.
3. Conclusion: Altruism is not selfish.

Before evaluating these arguments, we should justify their shared first premise: the definition of selfishness. I consider selfishness from a hedonistic point of view since that is close to what Krithik meant when he said, “Altruism is selfish.” While in this case, I argue against Krithik’s perspective by disagreeing with his idea of how altruism works, Aristotle approached similar ideas by arguing that selfishness was not hedonistic in nature, but better defined as wanting what’s best for oneself, and thus that virtue is selfish but only because it is best. However, I accept the hedonistic definition of selfishness because if I am right that altruism is not selfish under this condition, it would show that non-hedonistic activity exists.

We can now properly judge the question, “Is altruism selfish?” by comparing the second premises. While Krithik thinks that people act altruistically for thier own pleasure, I think that people act altruistically for some other reason. This disagreement can be stated as the question, “Is hedonism prior to concern for others (or some other non-hedonistic reason) as motivation for altruism?”

The story of compassion over pain helps us here. For many people, compassion is a proximate motivator for altruistic deeds; they first feel compassion, then they choose to help another person. If Krithik was right, then compassion would be some kind of pain or promise of future pleasure that a good deed would eliminate or satisfy. One way this could work is that the sorrowful pain induced by compassion towards a homeless man could motivate us to help him because it would get rid of our sorrow’s source. But in cases where helping isn’t possible, such as when there are simply too many homeless people for us to help, we would be motivated to stop feeling compassion in some other way, since all it does is bring us pain.

But that’s not what happens. Instead, we would rather feel pain than eliminate even the narrowest compassion from our lives. This tells us that compassion, a reason we might be altruistic, is distinct from the hedonistic drive to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Even more, we consider it a more important reason for our actions than hedonism. Thus, this parable shows that altruism is, in fact, not selfish.

One counterargument is that there is some pleasure to be had in feeling compassionate pain that makes it worth feeling in a selfish/hedonistic way despite that it is painful. However, this is obviously false because compassion is just the sympathetic concern one feels for others and would not be compassion in any meaningful sense if it contained any pleasure at all. Such a perverse pleasure would indeed be called “sadism”, not compassion (and I have no qualms calling sadistic people “selfish").

Another counterargument is that the options I gave for stopping compassion wouldn’t work in the real world, and our sense of pragmatism is the real reason we say no to these options rather than an overriding compassionate feeling. I disagree on the basis that I’ve met callous people who give these justifications for their lack of compassion towards homeless people, but even if that weren’t the case, the fact that I’m not really searching for a way to feel less compassionate (and you aren’t either) is enough to show that hedonism isn’t the motivator here.

There is one more counterargument that I want to address, which makes its force felt only if the argument I present is not phenomenologically compelling (i.e. you yourself are not compassionate). This is the claim that compassion as I describe it does not exist and all actually existing altruistic people are selfish in the hedonistic sense. If you find this counterargument persuasive, then there is very little I can do to convince you otherwise, because it would be like explaining color to a blind person, and I cannot induce compassion in you to make you see that it is real. Nevertheless, I give my best shot by leaving you with this excerpt from Philippa Foot’s Rationality and Goodness:

“I give as an example one very brief letter printed in Dying We Live, which was from a young man identified only as ‘A Farm Boy from the Sudetenland.’ On Feb 3, 1944, he wrote as follows:

‘Dear parents: I must give you bad news—I have been condemned to death. I and Gustave G. We did not sign up for the SS, and so they condemned us to death… Both of us would rather die than stain our consciences with such deeds of horror. I know what the SS have to do.’

The farm boy from the Sudetenland chose to be hanged rather than become a member of the SS, though joining would no doubt have gained him many rewards, and at the very least would have saved his life. Was this, I ask, a rational choice? How can we defend such a proposition? On what theory of practical rationality—of the rationality of choices—can this be made out?”

If the farm boys’ choice to face execution rather than join the SS is rational, in the sense that they are seriously considering their reasons for making this choice, and to which I assent, then non-selfish altruism surely exists.