Do you believe in true altruism? If so, how do you think it arose in the human population?
Evolution and natural selection suggests that even if you think your desires are purely altruistic, at some deeper level there's always a selfish reason behind them, because otherwise the allegedly-altruistic trait wouldn't have been able to evolve and thrive.
That sounds a lot like the neoclassical economist's argument that everything everybody does is actually all in their own self-interest, which then goes on to increasingly tortured lengths to explain things like altruistic punishment that are pretty well-demonstrated in the lab, but don't pop up in neoclassical models until they are confronted with uncomfortable facts. If your definition of "altruism" is such that you can explain away any possible example of it, then the issue is not that altruism doesn't exist, but rather that your definition of it is so odd as to not match the common meaning of the word.
Alternatively, it can also indicate that going to great lengths to litigate the difference between "true altruism" and "signalled altruism" is unproductive. Under this paradigm, the final effect is more important than navel gazing about secret intentions.
Altruism helps the group and others. And helping the group and others means they help you when you need it. It also helps the species as a whole. So it seems an altruism trait would be conserved for that reason. But that doesn’t make the trait selfish. The trait may have expected nothing in return when it developed, it just so happened it worked out that way. When a person feels the feelings of wanting to do good for another, that feeling itself is not selfish.
No the feeling may have been evolutionarily conserved because it had that benefit. But that doesn’t mean that the feeling is driven by some kind of idea of a trade. The feeling can be pure, the future benefits a side effect, that side effect being what causes it to be retained evolutionary.
This may include say a dog that considers me part of it's group but not a wold looking to eat me. Large groups are so recent in evolutionary terms as to be irrelevant. Nations and companies etc may be exploiting traits benifitial in much smaller group sizes.
Remember cost benifit is non linear, which is why trade for example happens. I might spend more resources than I receive while benefiting more than it costs me.
PS: The article is talking about different degrees of publicity, not nessisarily true anonymity.
Once a species starts to cooperate for mutual benefit, there does not need to be even a subconscious motive. One survives by taking care of oneself. Your genes survive by taking care of your offspring, which may mean helping your family, tribe, town, country, whatever group you are a part of that provides mutual protection or other benefit.
Bees cooperate in the hive due to instinct. I doubt many people would attribute their behavior to secret narcissistic desires seeking approval from other bees.
Altruism can exist and even be selected for without psychological motives. That said, there are plenty of people who do such things to send signals deliberately.
There's also the covert contract, which is essentially the belief that by being a "good" person the world will repay you in some way (or overlook your flaws). You can actually satisfy this psychological need by making truly anonymous gestures that are never revealed to anyone.
Beware of people who are always looking for hidden motives, they may just be projecting. ;-) And so might I.
> Do you believe in true altruism? If so, how do you think it arose in the human population?
I was going to constuct an argument of how altruism propels societies forward, even benefiting the "weakened" altruistic individuals among it.
But the more important point is that evolution not always finding a global maximum. Some traits that are beneficial, such as empathy, might have weird side effects that nature didn't yet bother to eliminate.
Evolution endowed us with faculties. We have a lot of flexibility in how we deploy them. Go read Yudkowsky’s Adaptation Executors Not Fitness Maximizers for a somewhat related thesis.
Some of the terms to explore include "group selection" and "multilevel selection" if you are interested in models where altruism could create an evolutionary advantage.
Here's a toy model: self-replicating automatons with no consequence for murder, some automatons murder a percentage of their neighbors' offspring each turn, others do not murder, otherwise they all have the same fertility. Randomly partition the population into two separated groups for a hundred turns, where the two groups have a different incidences of the murdering gene. After the hundred turns, re-combine the two populations, then randomly partition then again.
The murderers will have more surviving offspring within the group, but the group with fewer murderers will grow faster and contribute more genes to the re-combined population. Outcomes are going to depend on specific numbers, and you could make extinction of murderers or extinction of non-murderers more statistically likely.
IIRC, altruism doesn't advantage individual survival, but it does advantage group survival. Recent studies suggest altruism can allow genes to proliferate by preserving the ability of relatives to thrive and propagate, even if you, yourself, don't.
Evolution and natural selection suggests that even if you think your desires are purely altruistic, at some deeper level there's always a selfish reason behind them, because otherwise the allegedly-altruistic trait wouldn't have been able to evolve and thrive.