‘When you help others, what you want is that you help others. So you are never truly altruistic.’
The above statement contains in it an assumption and a conclusion.
Assumption(A): When we help others, what we want specifically is that we help others, as opposed to, say, wanting merely that others be helped. This might seem like a trivial difference, but it is a crucial one, and demarcates the all important boundary between altruism and egoism.
Conclusion(C): It follows from (A) that we are never altruistic in the truest sense of the term. To assess this claim, we first need to define what being altruistic really means, and then evaluate whether our definition stands in contradiction to (A).
The assumption is not incontestable, but stands wobbling on somewhat shaky grounds. Morever, even if we were to accept the assumption as given, I argue that it doesn’t necessarily entail the conclusion.
First, I will assume that as rational beings, all our actions stem from a desire. One might argue that actions stemming from a zombie-like adherence to duty or religion are without a desire. But even such cases encode an implicit desire of following duty or religion. The ‘God told me to do it’ defense does not stand in a court of law, neither did Eichmann’s ‘only following orders’ help him in Nuremberg.
So when we help others, what is our desire? Are we motivated by a genuine unadulterated concern for others or a state of their being? Or is it a notion of ‘what we are supposed to be’ that propels us? To answer this question, Bernard Williams’ distinction between an ‘I-desire’ and a ‘non-I desire’ would be useful.
An ‘I-desire’ is one which has a notion of ‘I’ or related expressions explicit in its propositional content. These desires are generally of the form ‘I want that I…’ or ‘I want that my..’. On the other hand, desires which are not of this form, i.e., that are without an ‘I’, are called non-I desires. Examples include statements of the kind ‘I want S’, where S is a state which does not specify you, such as ‘I want Helena to be happy’ or ‘I . Further, there might be non-I desires which depend on I-desires, and visa versa. The non-I desire ‘I want that the office declare a day off’, for example might depend on an I-desire to sit at home. It would be worthwhile to refine the definitions further by referring to a basically non-I desire (basically I desire) as a non-I desire (I desire) which doesn’t depend on an I-desire (non-I desire).*
Consider the following motivations for helping others:
We help because we exist in a society and society would fail if we don’t. We help because what goes around comes around. We help because those who do go to heaven. We help because those who don’t go to hell. We help because we feel good about it. We help because this we what I ought to do. We help because we want to be the person that does. We help because we don’t want to be the person who doesn’t. We help because this is who we are.
All of these, though it might not seem apparent at first glance, are manifestations of I-desires. Even in helping others as a form of duty, we can safely say that, as a statement of the form ‘I did X because this is what I ought to do’, it is irrevocably tied to our idea of what we are supposed to be, and our self image, and hence is an I-desire.
We can now tackle our assumption. What (A) essentially states is that that our desire to help others is always an I-desire, and never a non-I desire. When we help someone, what we really want is that we help someone, and our motivation is always similar to those outlined in the above examples. This assumption is intellectually tempting but ultimately too extreme, and even though they are hard to discern, there are good reasons to believe that non-I desires to help others do exist.
‘Because’ is the important operating word in the above examples. We might feel good about helping others, and it might serve a socially useful purpose, and it might gain us respect and praise, and it might gel well with out self-image, yet all of these might not be the real causal reasons for us helping others. The real causal reason might just be something as simple as ‘I help others because others need help’ or alternatively, ‘When I help, what I really want is that others be helped’. The underlying feature of this reason is that the motivation is not anything about the person who’s helping or his desires, neither of which even occurs in his specification, but rather something about others. The thoughts that govern the actions is simply a concern about others, and which in turn arise because the person possess certain dispositions. In this sense, we do help because this is what we are, but such a statement is, again, true in a tautological sense, not in a causal-operation sense. The motivation lies in the thought ‘Others need help’, and not ‘Others need help and I am me’, or ‘Others need help and I have an altruistic disposition’.
Consider the case of construction worker Wesley Autrey, who, in 2007, was standing on a subway platform in New York, when a young man nearby had an epileptic seizure and rolled on to the track. Hearing the approach of a train, Wesley Autrey impulsively jumped down to try to save the young man, only to realise that the train was approaching too fast. Instead, he jumped on top of the young man’s body and pushed him down into a drainage ditch between the tracks. The train operator saw them, but it was too late to stop: five cars of the train passed over their bodies. Miraculously, both of them were uninjured. Asked later by The New York Times why he had done it, Autrey said: ‘I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right.”
The debate about whether non-I desires to help others actually exist is difficult to settle because it is almost impossible to delineate the actual motivations of an action. But Wesley Autrey’s instinctive action on the platform offers a rare glimpse of a non-I desire to help the person in operation. This is because an I-desire, as it is applies to altruistic actions, requires an additional structure of thought, one which places the self between the agent and the action, and thus would not have been part of Autrey’s instinctive reaction. His reply is illustrative: notice that the difference between ‘ I just saw someone who needed help. I did what I felt was right’ and ‘I saw I could help someone. I did because it felt right’.
One might take on a deterministic position and argue that even in the seemingly pure cases of helping others like these, we only help is because the impulse is ingrained in us by our parents or society, or even evolutionary hardwired. Fair enough. But it misses the point, the point that we do have desires when we help others and these desires operate differently in different people at different points of time and are hence not predetermined. We are not looking at rational reasons for our desires, but the desires themselves as reasons for our particular actions.
But let us for now forgo the debate about the assumption and look at the conclusion, (C). For that we need to define what altruism is, and for that I believe Bernard Williams definition of altruism as ‘ a general disposition to regard the interest of others, merely as such, as making some claim on one, and, in particular, as implying the possibility of limiting one’s own projects’ would suffice. It fairly consistent with other views of altruism and thus wide in its scope and applicability.
Altruism, thus defined, is a virtue in the Aristotle-an sense; it has no prescriptions about how we might conduct our business in our moral lives as long as we keep the welfare of others in high regard. In the particular case of helping others, it affords us a considerable range of desires to operate from, all within the ‘disposition to help others’ constraint. Thus, if our desires to help others are motivated by our self image, which in itself incorporates the interest of others, we are still in altruistic territory.
But does (A) not imply that we are psychological egoists? No, not in the strictest sense. If helping others arises from our want (self-interest) to help others, then it doesn’t commit us to say that we will drop our disposition to help others when it impinges on our self interest. The distinction between psychological egoism and altruism is laid bare in cases where our disposition to satisfy our self interest runs contrary to our disposition to help others. In the case under the consideration, helping others might run against our self interest in some cases, and in these if we still want that we help others, then we will be being altruistic.
Where does all this leave us? In many ways this is a chicken-and-egg problem - whether our dispositions give rise to our feelings, or are dispositions defined by them. Given the assumption, the question is somewhat easier to answer depending on the definition of altruism you adopt. I have argued, convincingly I hope, that the assumption does not hold true always, and even if it did, it leaves enough space for us to be altruistic.
*(I will ignore derivative desires of the type, “ I desire the satisfaction of my own desire”. These desires are an accompanied derivative of any desire and their existence is true in a tautological sense. Such constructions in their self referential circularity only invite paradoxes, and are better avoided, for they are not quite relevant to our discussion.)
03 November 2014