The Pathological Altruist

[Cin]

Originally Posted by dreadgeek

No insult was intended. I read you as saying that you thought the article was stating that altruism is pathological. My error.

As far as the definition of altruism. How are you using the word? I would define it in the sense of any action that causes you to spend energy on behalf of someone else that may cost you beyond the mere energy expended. In other words, if I pay you to mow my lawn on a hot day you are not being altruistic. If you know I can't mow my lawn and you volunteer to do it even though it's a hot day then it is considered altruistic.

At this point you might say "but wait! Nurses are paid so anything they do cannot be altruistic" but that's not quite what I'm driving at. Nurses are paid to provide care. Good nurses go above and beyond the mere provision of care. They advocate in the interest of their patients as well as providing care. That energy expended could be used elsewhere--with other patients, on themselves, with their family--but they choose to give it to this patient. If it costs them--say the behavior is staying late while a particular patient is on the floor--then the action is altruistic.

I think that the Darwinian model of altruism--namely that altruism is any action entity A takes on behalf of entity B where the risk to entity A is non-zero and there is no immediate reciprocal benefit to be had by A--is certainly useful and has explanatory power. What part do you think is flawed?

Cheers
Aj

This is going to be hard to explain and I don't feel that confident in my ability to communicate this effectively. Let me just say that I have a problem with altruism as it is defined. I don't think that people make a decision to expend energy that could be used elsewhere completely altruistically. I might decide to offer to mow your lawn for free on a hot day because i know you can't do it and I might believe I'm doing it because i'm a heck of a nice person. I just think there are always other factors at play. Maybe I get off on thinking about what a heck of a nice person I am. So it's worth the energy I might expend elsewhere just to have that. My problem is that when there are so many things involved in people's motivations it seems unlikely that their pathological behavior is actually caused exclusively by a need to expend enormous amounts of energy on the needs of others. I hope this makes sense.