Meeting of 27 June Robyn Murray ‘Altruism’
Like the May meeting on ‘Compassion’ the June meeting was in some ways a continuation of the 2010 Conference on Secular Ethics. The popular stimulus for discussions on these topics is the charge frequently made by conservative Christians that only Christian beliefs can lead to right thought and action. They assert that a ‘godless society’ will necessarily be totally immoral or at least amoral. Altruism they claim can only be explained as a good arising from a belief in and fear of God. Furthermore this argument is used to undermine support for evolution by natural selection because on the face of it altruism appears not to advantage the altruistic being.
It was clear that those present at the meeting rejected these arguments. The meeting addressed the issues in two stages: first by exploring the nature and incidence of altruistic behaviour on the basis of our personal understanding and lived experience; second by considering some of the recent counter theories put forward by a range of scientists and philosophers.
We discussed at some length whether or not we truly expected no reward when committing ‘selfless’ acts. When we were merely ‘doing our duty’ did we not have some expectation of a benefit in the form of a reciprocal action or at least a feeling of satisfaction? We discussed whether or not there were degrees of altruism and what the relationship might be between bravery and altruism when people put their lives in danger to save another. We talked about a number of famous supposedly altruistic figures such as Mother Theresa and the passengers on United Flight 93. We talked about the so-called ‘bystander effect’ – the antithesis of altruism where people apparently stand by and fail to take action even where it was plainly essential for the good of another human being. We widened this out to look at some of the factors that seemed to determine whether or not we personally felt impelled to act such as the qualities of the needy persons and the extent of our affiliation with them.
In the second part of the evening Robyn summarised the views of a number of social scientists. She drew particularly on the work of Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield in their recently published book SuperCooperators: Altruism Evolution and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed Free Press 2011. The authors claim that co-operation is a ‘defining trait’ of all animal species including human beings; it is also ‘the chief architect of evolution’. In this view altruistic action is not an exception difficult to explain in the context of natural selection but the means by which we learned to survive and thrive in families and communities – even before we came down from the trees.