Question Do you only do a good deed (or just about anything), because you're gaining something from it yourself? I have thought this with my friend and she thinks people are naturally "good". I just think that as we are animals, we are naturally finding ways to survive. Of course sometimes people make bad decisions, but they are still thinking that the choice is best for them. -Heikki

Accepted:
December 17, 2010

Comments

Looks to me as if you and your friend are having a debate in which the only options on the table are not the only ones available for consideration.

Part of what it means to be a human animal is to live with others. This means that just at the level of fitness, we will do better if we have the resources (whether natural or socialized, as I suspect a good deal of both) to deal with others in positive ways. Precisely because there are many others around us who really matter to us, the distinction between "best for me" and "best for others" becomes both artificial and also distorting. What is "best for me" is often for me to sacrifice at least some degree of narrow self-interest in order to help others to flourish. This is the kind of thing that parents and friends do for each other all the time. But it is not limited simply to those close to us. Studies have shown that people who are given money and told to spend it on others report greater happiness thanm those who are given money and told to spend it on themselves. That begins to look something like "naturally good" to me--but since there is a "payoff" in happiness, it is also a case of doing what is best for the agent.

Let me recycle the line of response that I gave to a slightly different earlier question, with a few tweaks (and not disagreeing with my co-panelist, but with different emphases).

It is a truism that, when I fully act, it is as a result of my desires, my intentions, my goals. After all, if my arm moves independently of my desires, e.g. because you want it to move and push it, or as an automatic reflex, then we'd hardly say that the movement was my action (it was something that happened to my body, perhaps despite my wishes).

But note that even if everything I genuinely do (as opposed to undergo) is as a result of my desires etc., it doesn't follow that everything I do has an egoistic motive in the sense of being motivated by the thought that what I do has a payoff for me or that "the choice is best for [me]". The fact that a desire is my desire doesn't entail that the desire is about me or is about some payoff for me, or something like that. And it is just false that all my desires are like that. I can want to bring about states of affairs in which I just don't feature at all, and want such states of affairs irrespective of any payoff for me.

For example: I can want my grandchildren to have a tolerable world long after I am gone, and I can want to do what I can about climate change for their sakes. That is, to repeat the truism, a desire of mine: but it isn't a desire for something for me (I won't be around long enough for things to get bad). It is a desire for something for them (and for their contemporaries too) that gets me to act. In no sense is that an egoistical desire that I get something. It doesn't have the right sort of content.

"Ah hah," says the cynic, "you don't get it, do you? When people think they are doing something for their grandchildren, that isn't really why they are doing it. They are actually doing it for some selfish reason -- they are doing it in order to feel good (or for some similar pay off in happiness for themselves)."

But there isn't the foggiest reason to suppose that that is true. Of course, since I want something badly for my grandchildren, I will be pleased with what tiny successes I might be involved in which might do something towards the fulfillment of my desires. And the occasional pleasurable feedback will no doubt help sustain my desire to fight the good fight. But what I actually want is the better world for my grandchildren, not the pleasurable feedback. If an angel were to offer me the choice, modest real successes that I never knew about [so no feedback] vs. no real successes but occasional pleasurable illusions of success -- with my choice to be followed by instantly forgetting the angel's bargain -- I'd of course still choose the first. For it is the successes that I care about.

Of course that leaves us with a puzzle, perhaps the puzzle that ultimately underlies your question. If we are as you say animals, engineered by evolution which blindly promotes organisms that tend to win out in the battle for survival, then how come that I actually have such desires (e.g. for my grandchildren's well-being) that seem to have nothing to do with my own survival?

But evolutionary biologists have stories to tell about how altruistic desires can indeed have evolved. Do note, however, that the fact that these other-directed desires have evolved as part of our animal nature does not imply that they aren't "really" altruistic: that doesn't follow at all. For to say that a desire is altruistic (in the everyday sense) is just to say something about the kind of content the desire has, what it is a desire for. We can have desires -- as with my desires that a grandchild flourish (e.g. after my death when I'm not around to be affected) -- that are not self-directed, and there are indeed good naturalistic stories on the market about why this should be so. These are explored e.g. in this nice philosophical encyclopedia article on altruism and evolution.