There’s the alternative “gambit” of ascribing altruism to the emotional response it invokes in the altruistic individual.
Careful, there are some tricky conceptual waters here. Strictly, anything I want to do can be ascribed to my emotional response to it, because that’s how nature made us pursue goals. “They did it because of the emotional response it invoked” is roughly analogous to “They did it because their brain made them do it.”
The cynical claim would be that if people could get the emotional high without the altruistic act (say, by taking a pill that made them think they did it), they’d just do that. I don’t think most altruists would, though. There are cynical explanations for that fact, too (“signalling to yourself leads to better signalling to others”) but they begin to lose their air of streetwise wisdom and sound like epicycles.
Are you suggesting emotions are necessary to goal-oriented behavior?
There should be some evidence for that claim; we have people with diminished emotional capacity in wide range of forms. Do individuals with alexithymia demonstrate impaired goal-oriented behaviors?
I think there’s more to emotion as a motive system than the brain as a motive force. People can certainly choose to stop taking certain drugs which induce emotional highs. 10% of people who start taking heroin are able to keep their consumption levels “moderate” or lower, as compared to 90% for something like tobacco, according to one random and hardly authoritative internet site—the precise numbers aren’t terribly important. Perhaps such altruists, like most people, deliberately avoid drugs like heroin for this reason?
Careful, there are some tricky conceptual waters here. Strictly, anything I want to do can be ascribed to my emotional response to it, because that’s how nature made us pursue goals. “They did it because of the emotional response it invoked” is roughly analogous to “They did it because their brain made them do it.”
The cynical claim would be that if people could get the emotional high without the altruistic act (say, by taking a pill that made them think they did it), they’d just do that. I don’t think most altruists would, though. There are cynical explanations for that fact, too (“signalling to yourself leads to better signalling to others”) but they begin to lose their air of streetwise wisdom and sound like epicycles.
Are you suggesting emotions are necessary to goal-oriented behavior?
There should be some evidence for that claim; we have people with diminished emotional capacity in wide range of forms. Do individuals with alexithymia demonstrate impaired goal-oriented behaviors?
I think there’s more to emotion as a motive system than the brain as a motive force. People can certainly choose to stop taking certain drugs which induce emotional highs. 10% of people who start taking heroin are able to keep their consumption levels “moderate” or lower, as compared to 90% for something like tobacco, according to one random and hardly authoritative internet site—the precise numbers aren’t terribly important. Perhaps such altruists, like most people, deliberately avoid drugs like heroin for this reason?