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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15123