I am speaking from a biologist’s perspective. According to standard biological nomenclature, animal behaviour exists mostly for the sake of propagating heritable information. Since most contributions had ignored the conventional explanations for altruistic behaviour in terms of signaling to others and reciprocal altruism, my comment was intended to provide some perspective.
If you seek to modify the moral behaviour of others, it helps to first understand why people behave as they do.
It looks more like a self-referential ending to me.
Spending time writing an essay promoting ‘doing your good deed for the day’ could quite plausibly be interpreted as being Yvain’s ‘good deed for the day’ - exactly as he claimed.
I am speaking from a biologist’s perspective. According to standard biological nomenclature, animal behaviour exists mostly for the sake of propagating heritable information. Since most contributions had ignored the conventional explanations for altruistic behaviour in terms of signaling to others and reciprocal altruism, my comment was intended to provide some perspective.
If you seek to modify the moral behaviour of others, it helps to first understand why people behave as they do.
We’re not seeking to modify the behavior of others. We’re seeking to modify our own behavior.
The original article was pretty clear about putting the onus to act on the readers:
“And by, “we”, I mean “you”. I’ve done my part just by writing this essay.”
I thought that was pretty clearly a joke.
It looks more like a self-referential ending to me.
Spending time writing an essay promoting ‘doing your good deed for the day’ could quite plausibly be interpreted as being Yvain’s ‘good deed for the day’ - exactly as he claimed.
Right. That’s the joke.