X-Message-Number: 15123
Date: Sun, 17 Dec 2000 08:36:27 -0800
From: Lee Corbin <>
Subject: The Origins of Altruism

John de Rivaz wrote
>> Just saying I don't need it as an incentive to act ethically.
>
>Maybe, or maybe no one can really analyse precisely what the
>incentive is that makes them act "ethically." [I put it in
>quotes because I am not really sure what the word means, it
>is elusive like discussion about "The Bible"] It is a bit like
>the discussion as to the true nature of "selfishness" or
>"selflessness", which also crops up in cryonics circles from
>time to time.

I'm not exactly sure how I would, before 1995, have answered the
question "what accounts for the altruistic behavior of humans?".
Matt Ridley's excellent book "The Origins of Virtue" as well as
a number of other books in evolutionary psychology (i.e.
sociobiology) make it pretty clear that we are altruistic
(when we are altruistic) because of our genes.

I think that the predispostion to act in accordance with ethical
rules also is built-in.  That is, the main difference between some
people who regularly act ethically and those people who rarely do
so does not arise from religious indoctination nor from their early
upbringing.  I submit that instead, the emotional rewards and
punishments that follow your acting either honestly or dishonestly,
kindly or unkindly, and so on, are for the most part wired into your
genome, and were in clear evidence by the time you were five or six
years old.

This isn't to say that belief and ideology necessarily have little
effect on behavior, as witness extreme cases such as nuns working
their whole lives under fairly awful conditions in order to help the
poor, or others making enormous sacrifices for the sake of their
ideologies.  Even cryonics itself can have quite a moral uplifting
influence that translates into behavior, I have reason to think.

Lee Corbin

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