Neither entirely convinced nor entirely against the idea of defining ‘root cause’ essentially with respect to ‘where is intervention plausible’. Either way, to me that way of defining it would not have to exclude “altruism” as a candidate: (i) there could be scope to re-engineer ourselves to become more altruistic, and (ii) without doing that, gosh how infinitely difficult does it feel to improve the world truly systematically (as you rightly point out).
Neither entirely convinced nor entirely against the idea of defining ‘root cause’ essentially with respect to ‘where is intervention plausible’. Either way, to me that way of defining it would not have to exclude “altruism” as a candidate: (i) there could be scope to re-engineer ourselves to become more altruistic, and (ii) without doing that, gosh how infinitely difficult does it feel to improve the world truly systematically (as you rightly point out).
That is strongly related to Unfit for the Future—The Need for Moral Enhancement (whose core story is spot on imho, even though I find quite some of the details in the book substandard)