The Egoism-Altruism Debate A Psychological Perspective

Daniel Batson

Dan Batson, an experimental social psychologist, is a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas and the author of Altruism in Humans. His research focuses on the existence of altruistic motivation, the behavioral consequences of religion, and the nature of moral emotions.

Dan's presentation explored the egoism-altruism debate. He shed doubt on the common Western presumption that humans are always motivated by self-interest by providing experimental evidence that altruism does exist, and that it arises from feelings of empathic concern. In the ensuing discussion, the panelists compared Dan's research to Buddhist conceptions of how people can cultivate altruism, and the circumstances in which altruism may be extended to strangers and members of out-groups.

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Your Holiness, I know that you are deeply convinced that altruism and compassion play a crucial role in human life, and that for many years you have cultivated these qualities through your spiritual practice; so it may come as a bit of a surprise to hear that in Western thought, particularly in psychology and economics, there is much doubt and debate about whether altruism and compassion even exist. There is a conviction that all human action, no matter how noble and seemingly selfless, is motivated by self-interest or egoism. The question is always, what's in it for me? As research psychologists, my colleagues and I have been trying to address this issue and see whether the Western view is correct.

I would like to begin by talking about the egoism-altruism debate. Let me explain what those terms mean. In this debate, egoism is a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing one's own welfare. That is contrasted with altruism, a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing another's welfare. What I mean by "ultimate goal" here is not a first and final cause, but what the person is truly after in the situation. That's different from an instrumental goal, which is something one pursues as a means to some other end. The reason this is an important distinction is that egoism and altruism can both motivate helping behavior and cooperation, even very costly helping. But egoism claims that all acts of kindness toward others have the ultimate goal of increasing one's own welfare. For example, one could be seeking to feel good about oneself, to feel a warm glow, or to avoid guilt.

The question then becomes, are humans actually capable of altruism? In Western thought, the dominant view is universal egoism. Here's a nice description of it from the Duke de La Rochefoucauld: "The most disinterested love is, after all, a kind of bargain in which the dear love of our own selves always proposes to be the gainer some way or other." We're not just talking about material gains and punishments here; you could gain by avoiding social or self-punishment in the form of censure and guilt. The gains could also be social or self-rewards, such as getting praise from others or feeling good about yourself.

Another important possibility is that you help in order to reduce your own distress caused by witnessing another's suffering. That would still be an egoistic motive, because the goal is to benefit oneself. On that point the Dutch-born English philosopher and economist Bernard Mandeville made a rather extreme statement. He said, "There's no merit in saving an innocent babe ready to drop into the fire: The action is neither good nor bad, and what benefit soever the infant received, we only obliged ourselves; for to have seen it fall and not strove to hinder it, would have caused a pain, which self-preservation compelled us to prevent."

Is this dominant egoistic view correct? That brings us to the empathy-altruism hypothesis. The hypothesis is that empathic concern produces altruistic motivation. This hypothesis is not original to me by any stretch; Charles Darwin, for example, proposed a version of it. A number of other people have also proposed this idea throughout history, but it's always been a minority view in Western thought. In this hypothesis, "empathic concern" refers to an other-oriented emotion evoked by seeing a person in need—a feeling for the person in need. It's not feeling as the person feels. Empathic concern includes feelings of sympathy, compassion, and tenderness for the other person. It's distinct from the feeling of personal distress I mentioned earlier—our pain at seeing the baby ready to fall—which is a self-oriented emotion.

Evidence has shown that empathic concern is associated with increased helpfulness. But this evidence, by itself, simply says empathy produces some motive; it doesn't say what the nature of the motive is. Is it an egoistic motive or an altruistic motive? When we help another person, we benefit the other, but we also receive self-benefits. The egoistic account is that the benefit to the other is simply instrumental; it's the means to the ultimate goal of benefiting ourselves. For example, an advocate of egoism might argue that when we feel empathic concern for someone who is suffering, we suffer too, and we are motivated to reduce our own suffering. It's just like personal distress in the sense that the motivation is to benefit ourselves, even if that motivation arises from empathic concern. That's an egoistic account.

The altruistic account is that benefitting the other is our ultimate goal. Our concern is for the other person's welfare. Yes, we benefit. We feel better about ourselves, perhaps we're happy that they feel better, and we avoid feeling guilt—but those are unintended consequences. They happen, but that's not why we act. We act because we want to help the other, not help ourselves. The research puzzle is how do we determine what a person's ultimate goal is in a given situation? You are acting to benefit...