A wildly common—and dangerous—charge against altruism is that people only commit altruistic acts in order to feel good. You might believe this yourself; after all, it has significant intuitive appeal. People love to talk about how good it feels to volunteer or donate to charity, and when we help others ourselves, it does indeed feel good. Since the desire for pleasure often drives us to do certain things, it is easy to conclude that the good feeling we get from altruism also motivates it. If this was true, however, altruism wouldn’t be any more praiseworthy than drug use or street racing—it’s just another flavor of selfish hedonism. From this perspective, the choice between helping others and doing drugs is simply a matter of preference: some people feel better while helping, others feel better when they get high. The consequences of altruism, like ameliorated suffering or saved lives, are mere side effects and not really something altruistic people care about—they are in it for the pleasure alone. It is for this reason that this claim is frequently made by selfish people. By equivocating altruism and whatever vice they pursue, they conveniently excuse their selfish behavior.
I don’t entirely reject the “selfish altruism” argument. I have no issue reserving praise from people who act altruistically for selfish reasons, and it’s not hard to imagine someone acting from such twisted motives. Nevertheless, I doubt that all—or even most—altruistic people are motivated this way. It makes more sense to me that altruistic people are driven by genuine concern for others, and that any pleasure they experience comes from fulfilling their desire to help, not the other way around. The stage is now set for the disagreement I’d like to tackle. On the one hand, we have the argument that altruistic people are actually hedonistically motivated and that any benefits they provide others are mere side effects of intrinsically selfish actions. On the other, we have have the argument that altruistic people really do care about helping others and that pleasure is the real side effect.
To clarify the nature of this disagreement, it will help to break the two arguments down into their logical steps. The argument that altruisim is selfish looks something like this:
- Premise: Selfishness is when one is chiefly concerned with their own pleasure and pain.
- Premise: People act altruistically to satisfy some desire (i.e. alleviate some pain) or feel some pleasure.
- Conclusion: Altruism is selfish.
And the argument that altruism is genuine looks something like this:
- Premise: Selfishness is when one is chiefly concerned with their own pleasure and pain.
- Premise: People act altruistically for some reason besides their own pleasure or pain, such as concern for others.
- Conclusion: Altruism is not selfish.
In either case, we agree that a person acts selfishly if she is primarily motivated by her own feelings of pleasure or pain. Any actions motivated under these conditions deserve the same blame and lack of praise that we award all selfish acts. The source of the disagreement is the second premise, the claim that altruistic actions fall under this category. Proponent of the selfish altruism theory believe that altruists are trying to increase their own pleasure, while proponents of the genuine altruism theory believe that altruists are motivated by something else. Both claims seem intuitive on their surface, making it hard to settle the debate through reasoning alone. One way we can decide is by forcing an altruist to choose between helping others and feeling good. This will not be easy—for most altruists, the pleasure that comes from helping others is intimately connected with the act itself in a way that appears inseparable. However, I believe that the following thought experiment I’ve devised, the case of altruism deferred, successfully cleaves the pleasure of altruism from altruism itself:
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.
The case of altruism deferred shows that the motivation behind altruism is separate from and prior to the motivation behind hedonism. If altruism really was motivated by a desire for pleasure or a release from pain, then it wouldn’t matter if that happened through good deeds or something else. After all, the only thing the altruist would care about is satisfying her hedonistic desires—the way she does it doesn’t matter. In cases where it isn’t possible for the altruist to satisfy her desires through the normal means of helping others, she would simply resort to those alternative means, if they exist. This is the situation in altruism deferred, where the altruist cannot relieve the pain of compassion by helping the needy, but has the alternative of relieving that pain by feeling less compassionate for those people.
The fact that the altruist faces a genuine choice proves that her altruistic motives are separate from her hedonistic motives. The altruistic ones pull her towards compassion while her hedonistic ones pull her towards reframing the narrative. Meanwhile, her choice to remain compassionate and suffer the consequences demonstrates that the pull of compassion comes first. Even if altruism is partially driven by hedonism, it is still care for others that sits in the driver’s seat. So, not only are there at least two motives at play in the altruist, hedonism and genuine altruism, but it is genuine altruism that dominates in her. Through this though experiment, I believe that I have done what I set out to do—separate altruism from its pleasures—and in the process, I have shown that altruists act for the sake of others and not for themselves.
Objections
I will wrap up this discussion by addressing a few objections. One that leaps out is the possibiltiy that there is some pleasure to be had in feeling compassionate pain that makes compassion worth feeling despite that it is painful. In other words, there may be a hedonistic motive for feeling compassion itself, if the pleasure of feeling compassion is greater than the pain. However, this is obviously false because compassion is exclusively the sympathetic concern one feels for others, and it would not be compassion in any meaningful sense if it were pleasureable in any way. 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. if 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 change your mind; 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, which, in my eyes, describes a situation that perfectly proves the existence of altruism:
“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?”
I hold that if the farm boys’ choice to die over joining 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. ■
