Many philosophers, along with some biologists and social scientists,have maintained that altruism is a crucial component of morality, andthat people often do behave altruistically. Other philosophers, alongwith some biologists and social scientists, have claimed that factsabout human psychology, or about the evolutionary processes that haveshaped human psychology, indicate that no human behavior is genuinelyaltruistic. Part of this disagreement can be traced to the fact thatboth philosophers and scientists use the term “altruism”with many quite different meanings. In order to clarify thisconceptual variety, Sections 2 and 3 canvas competing philosophicalaccounts of altruism. Sections 4 and 5 review some of the mostimportant empirical work aimed at determining whether humans canindeed behave altruistically — according to the“standard” philosophical account of how altruism isunderstood. Section 6 explores the possibility thatbothegoism and altruism might be mistaken. Section 7 takes a brief look athow recent work in developmental and comparative psychology mightprovide support for the existence of altruism. Section 1 begins thediscussion by describing some purported ethical implications ofdifferent positions in the egoism-altruism debate.

• 1. Some Philosophical Background
• 2. Defining “Egoism” and “Altruism”—The Standard Account
• 3. Altruism and Evolution
• 4. Altruism in the Social Sciences
• 5. The Egoism vs. Altruism Debate in Psychology
  • 5.1 The Social Punishment Hypothesis
  • 5.2 The Aversive-Arousal Reduction Hypothesis
  • 5.3 The Challenge Posed by “Self-Other Merging”
  • 5.4 Have Batson’s Studies Made a Convincing Case for the Existence of Altruism in Humans?
• 6. Beyond Egoism vs. Altruism
• 7. Developmental and Comparative Psychology
• 8. The Bottom Line
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Some Philosophical Background

People often behave in ways that benefit others, and they sometimes dothis knowing that it will be costly, unpleasant or dangerous. But atleast since Plato’s classic discussion in the second Book of theRepublic, debate has raged overwhy people behave inthis way. Are their motives really altruistic, or is their behaviorultimately motivated by self-interest? Famously, Hobbes gave thisanswer:

No man giveth but with intention of good to himself, because gift isvoluntary; and of all voluntary acts, the object is to every man hisown good; of which, if men see they shall be frustrated, there will beno beginning of benevolence or trust, nor consequently of mutual help.(1651 [1981]: Ch. 15)

Views like Hobbes’ have come to be calledegoism,^[1] and this rather depressing conception of human motivation hasapparently been favored, in one form or another, by a number ofeminent philosophical advocates, including Bentham, J.S. Mill andNietzsche. Egoism was also arguably the dominant view about humanmotivation in the social sciences for much of the twentieth century(Piliavin & Charng 1990: 28; Grant 1997). Dissenting voices,though perhaps fewer in number, have been no less eminent. Butler,Hume, Rousseau, and Adam Smith have all argued that, sometimes atleast, human motivation is genuinely altruistic.^[2]

Though the issue dividing egoistic and altruistic accounts of humanmotivation is largely empirical, it is easy to see why philosophershave thought that the competing answers will have importantconsequences for moral theory. For example, Kant famously argued thata person should act “not from inclination but from duty, and bythis would his conduct first acquire true moral worth” (1785[1949]: Sec. 1, parag. 12). But egoism maintains that all humanmotivation is ultimately self-interested, and thus people can’tact “from duty” in the way that Kant
urged. Thus if egoism is true, Kant’s account would entail thatno conduct has “true moral worth”. Additionally, if egoismis true, it would appear to impose a strong constraint on how a moraltheory can answer the venerable question “Why should I bemoral?” since, as Hobbes clearly saw, the answer will have toground the motivation to be moral in the agent’sself-interest.

There are related implications for political philosophy. If theegoists are right, then the only way to motivate prosocial behavior isto give people a selfish reason for engaging in such behavior, andthis constrains the design of political institutions intended toencourage civic-minded behavior. For example, John Stuart Mill, whowas both a utilitarian and an egoist, advocated a variety ofmanipulative social interventions to engender conformity withutilitarian moral standards from egoistic moral agents.^[3]

It is easy to find philosophers suggesting that altruism is requiredfor morality or that egoism is incompatible with morality—andeasier still to find philosophers who claim that other philosophersthink this. Here are a few examples culled from a standard referencework that happened to be close at hand:

Moral behavior is, at the most general level, altruistic behavior,motivated by the desire to promote not only our own welfare but thewelfare of others. (Rachels 2000: 81)

[O]ne central assumption motivating ethical theory in the Analytictradition is that the function of ethics is to combat the inherentegoism or selfishness of individuals. Indeed, many thinkers define thebasic goal of morality as “selflessness” or“altruism”. (W. Schroeder 2000: 396)

Philosophers since Socrates worried that humans might be capable ofacting only to promote their own self-interest. But if that is all wecan do, then it seems morality is impossible. (LaFollette 2000a: 5)^[4]

While the egoism/altruism debate has historically been of greatphilosophical interest, the issue centrally concerns psychologicalquestions about the nature of human motivation, so it’s nosurprise that psychologists have done a great deal of empiricalresearch aimed at determining which view is correct. The psychologicalliterature will be center-stage in section 5, the longest section inthis entry, and in section 7. But before considering that literature,it is important to be clear on what the debate is about.

2. Defining “Egoism” and “Altruism”—The Standard Account

Providing definitions for “egoism” and“altruism” is a contentious matter, since these terms havebeen understood in radically different ways both in philosophy and inthe biological and social sciences. In this entry the focus will be onthe most widespread philosophical interpretation of“egoism” and “altruism”, where both areunderstood as descriptive claims about human psychology (as opposed tonormative or prescriptive claims about what human beings ought to door be). We’ll call it “the standard account”,versions of which have been offered by numerous authors, includingBroad (1950), Feinberg (1965 [1999]), Sober and Wilson (1998: Chs. 6& 7), Rachels (2003: Ch. 6), Joyce (2006: Ch. 1), Kitcher (2010,2011: Ch. 1), May (2011a), and many others. Not surprisingly, thereare minor differences among the accounts provided by these authors,and those differences occasionally provoke disagreement in theliterature. But all of them bear a strong family resemblance to theone we’re about to sketch.^[5]

At the end of this section, a different philosophical account ofaltruism is briefly discussed. Biological accounts of altruism will beconsidered in section 3. Accounts proposed by social scientists willbe discussed in section 4. But our present focus is the standardphilosophical account.

As already intimated, while advocates of altruism and of egoism agreethat people often help others, they disagree about why people do this.On the standard account, defenders of altruism insist that, sometimesat least, people are motivated by an ultimate desire for thewell-being of another person, while defenders of egoism maintain thatall ultimate desires are self-interested. This formulation invitesquestions about (1) what it is for a behavior to be motivated by anultimate desire, and (2) the distinction between desires that areself-interested and desires for the well-being of others.

The first question, regarding ultimate desires, can be usefullyexplicated with the help of a familiar account of practical reasoning.^[6] On this account, practical reasoning is a causal process via which adesire and a belief give rise to or sustain another desire. Forexample, a desire to drink an espresso and a belief that the bestplace to get an espresso is at the espresso bar on Main Street maycause a desire to go to the espresso bar on Main Street. This desirecan then join forces with another belief to generate a third desire,and so on. Sometimes this process
will lead to a desire to perform a relatively simple or“basic” action, and that desire, in turn, will cause theagent to perform the basic action without the intervention of anyfurther desires. Desires produced or sustained by this process ofpractical reasoning are instrumental desires—the agent has thembecause she thinks that satisfying them will lead to something elsethat she desires. But not all desires can be instrumental desires. Ifwe are to avoid circularity or an infinite regress there must be somedesires that are not produced because the agent thinks
that satisfying them will facilitate satisfying some other desire.These desires that are not produced or sustained by practicalreasoning are the agent’s ultimate desires, and the objects ofultimate desires—the states of affairs desired—are oftensaid to be desired “for their own sake”. A behavior ismotivated by a specific ultimate desire when that desire is part ofthe practical reasoning process that leads to the behavior.

Although the second question, about the distinction betweenself-interested desires and desires for the well-being of others,would require an extended discussion in any comprehensive treatment ofthe debate between egoists and altruists, some rough and readyexamples of the distinction will suffice here.^[7] The desires that another person’s life be saved, that anotherperson’s suffering be alleviated, or that another person behappy are paradigm cases of desires for the well-being of others,while desires to experience pleasure, get rich, and become famous
are typical examples of self-interested desires. The self-interesteddesires to experience pleasure and to avoid pain have played anespecially prominent role in the debate, since one version of egoism,often called hedonism, maintains that these are our only ultimatedesires. Stich et al. (2010) maintain that some desires, like thedesire that I myself be the one to alleviate my friend’ssuffering, are hard to classify, and conclude that both egoism andaltruism are best viewed as somewhat vague.^[8]

Whether or not this is correct, it is clear that there are manydesires that are neither self-interested nor desires for thewell-being of others. One of the earliest examples was provided byBishop Joseph Butler (1726 [1887]) who noted that revenge oftenengenders malevolent desires, like the desire that another person beharmed, which are obviously not desires for the well-being of the thatperson, and are not self-interested either.^[9]

Other examples include the desire that great works of art be preservedand the desire that space exploration be pursued. More interesting
for moral theory are the desire to do one’s moral duty, and thedesire to obey God’s commandments. If people have ultimatedesires like these, then egoism is false. But, of course, theexistence of ultimate desires like these would not show that altruismis true, since such desires are not readily understood as desires forthe well-being of others. The take-away from such cases is that on thestandard account, egoism and altruism might both be mistaken.

Though interpretations of “altruism” that approximate thestandard account predominate in the philosophical literature, somephilosophers use the term in a very different way. A paper by ThomasSchramme (2017) provides a clear example.

[A]ltruism need not be reduced to its opposition to egoism. In thischapter, altruism is discussed as a psychological basis for moralconduct more generally, not just in terms of motivations to benefitothers. Here altruism stands for the capacity to take the moral pointof view and be disposed to act accordingly…. Seen in this way,altruism is a short word for the psychological phenomenon of theinternalized pull of morality… (2017: 203–204).

Altruism is then basically identical with taking the moral point ofview, i.e., an individual appreciation of the normative force ofmorality. (2017: 209).^[10]

Schramme is, of course, aware that many authors reject “such aclose connection of general moral motivation and altruisticmotivation” but he maintains that this account of altruism“can certainly be found in the philosophical debate”(2017: 209). Much the same claim is made by Badhwar (1993: 90):

In the moral philosophy of the last two centuries, altruism of onekind or another has typically been regarded as identical with moralconcern.

Schramme is surely right that

[t]he fact that we can understand altruism both as referring to moralbehavior quite generally and as restricted to a more specific set ofhelping behaviors may lead to confusion. (2017: 204)

Though some philosophers may believe there is a substantive disputeabout which account of altruism is correct, others may think that theissue is purely terminological.

3. Altruism and Evolution

Readers familiar with some of the popular literature on the evolutionof morality that has appeared in the last few decades might suspectthat recent work in evolutionary biology has resolved the debatebetween egoists and altruists. For some readers—and somewriters—seem to interpret evolutionary theory as showing thataltruism is biologically impossible. If altruistic organisms weresomehow to emerge, this literature sometimes suggests, they would losethe competition for survival and reproduction to their selfishconspecifics, and they would quickly become extinct. On this view, anyappearance of altruism is simply an illusion. In the memorable wordsof biologist Michael Ghiselin (1974: 247) “Scratch an‘altruist’ and watch a ‘hypocrite’bleed”.

But as Sober and Wilson (1998) have argued with great clarity, thereis no simple connection between evolutionary theory and thephilosophical debate between egoism and altruism. This is because theconcept of altruism that is important in evolutionary theory is quitedifferent from the standard concept of altruism invoked in thephilosophical debate. For biologists, an organism behavesaltruistically if and only if the behavior in question reduces its ownfitness while increasing the fitness of one or more other organisms.Roughly speaking, an organism’s fitness is a measure of how manydescendants it will have.^[11] As Sober and Wilson note, on this evolutionary account of altruism,an organism can be altruistic even if it does not have a mind capableof having beliefs and desires, which of course entails that it cannothave the ultimate desires for the well-being of others that arecharacteristic of altruism on the standard philosophical account. Thusthere can be no easy inference from biological altruism topsychological altruism. Nor does the inference go in the oppositedirection. To make the point, Sober and Wilson (Ch. 10) note thatnatural selection might well equip humans or other psychologicallysophisticated organisms with ultimate desires to foster the welfare oftheir offspring under certain circumstances. Organisms with theseultimate desires would be psychological altruists, though the behaviorthat the desires gave rise to would typically not be evolutionarilyaltruistic, since by helping their offspring organisms typically areincreasing their own fitness. So, contrary to the presumption thatevolutionary biology has resolved the debate between egoists andaltruists in favor of egoism, it appears that evolutionary theoryleaves key questions open.^[12]

That said, some authors have recently argued that there are importantconnections between the biological accounts of altruism and thetraditional accounts sketched in the previous section.

In particular, Piccinini and Schulz (2019) argue that the standardaccount of altruism sketched in Section 2 should be expanded byconsidering how desires are produced. Several differentdesire-production mechanisms can be distinguished, including innatedispositions, learning, and instrumental reasoning; drawing on abiological account of altruism like that sketched in this section,Piccinini and Schulz argue that some of these mechanisms deserve to becalled egoistic,even if they lead to ultimate desires forthe well-being of others.^[13]

Piccinini and Schulz seeegoistically produced desires asthose that are produced by evolutionarily selfishmechanisms—i.e. by mechanisms that were selected for increasingtheir bearer’s own fitness only, as opposed to that of otherorganisms. They further argue that a key example of these egoisticallyproduced desires are ones that an organism haslearnedthrough some kind of reward-based learning process. Such reward-basedlearning processes are evolutionarily ancient and phylogeneticallyextremely widespread—e.g., they can be found in sea slugs(Kandel 2001). Importantly, reward-based learning processes can targetmany different things beyond behaviors, and can also lead to theacquisition ofdesires. Piccinini and Schulz seealtruistically produced desires as those produced bymechanisms that are evolutionarily altruistic. Key among these areinnate desires to increase the well-being of unrelated others (such asingroup members). (These other organisms need not even beconspecifics: I might be motivated to increase the well-being of astray cat I find at the side of the road.) Finally, they characterizeneutrally produced desires as those desires that are notproduced by either egoistic or altruistic processes. Key among theseare unselected desires, such as those that are accidentallyproduced.

Distinguishing these different ways of producing desires can becombined with the prior distinction among desires with differentcontents to yield a two-dimensional framework of altruisms: there is a“classical” form of altruism, which concerns desires forthe well-being of others that have been produced by evolutionaryaltruistic (or at least neutral) mechanisms. Similarly, there is a“non-classical” form of altruism, which concerns desiresfor the well-being of others that have been produced by evolutionaryselfish mechanisms.

Note that what this framework terms “classicalaltruism” is not the same as the standard account laid outin section 2. This is due to the fact that the standard account doesnot consider thesource of the ultimate desires to increaseothers’ well-being, and thus cannot make the distinctions laidout in table 1. Still, Piccinini and Schulz think that“classical altruism” also captures the spirit of theclassical discussions of altruism in the philosophical andpsychological literature (hence the name), much like the standardaccount does. On both accounts, altruism is seen as a motivationalstructure untainted by egoism. Whether a desire to increase someoneelse’s well-being has been selected for in an evolutionaryaltruistic manner (i.e. despite not increasing its bearer’sdirect fitness) or whether it arose accidentally (as an unselectedby-product of other motivational structures, say), it is free from an“egoistic taint” and deserves to be called altruistic.This conforms to the standard account’s observation thataltruism is not just about having desires for increasinganother’s well-being—it is about having desires forincreasing another’s well-being that are not somehow“based on” selfish desires.

This framework makes clear that there is a form of altruism thatconcerns desires that are still altruistic in content—i.e. theyare for increasing another’s well-being—but which arestill derived from mechanisms that are evolutionarily selfish. Forexample, the derivation of a desire to increase another’swell-being from a desire to increase one’s own well-being, isplausibly thought to be a basic part of adaptive decision-making ingeneral (see also Schulz, 2018), and thus is likely to be selectedjust for increasing an organism’s own direct fitness. Piccininiand Schulz’s approach counts such instrumental, derived desiresfor increasing another’s well-being to count asaltruistic—albeit only non-classically so. This doesnot exhaust the kinds of desires that are seen as non-classicallyaltruistic; indeed, even some of the desires that the standard accountwould consider to be properly altruistic will end up turning out to beonly non-classically so in the framework of table 1. In particular,even ultimate desires for increasing another’s well-being willbe classified as only non-classically altruistic, if these desires arethe product of a reward-learning mechanism. If an organism has beenrewarded for having ultimate desires for increasing another’swell-being, then that is not a desire that is “untainted byegoism” since the organism only has that desire becauseititself benefited from it.

If Piccinini and Schulz’s framework is accepted, the fact thatmany of our other-regarding (ultimate) desires may have a selfishsource—for example, because we have been rewarded forhaving them—does not make the associatedbehaviornon-altruistic. It is true that there is a “taint” ofegoism in altruistic behaviors with such etiologies; however,Piccinini and Schulz argue that this should still be consideredaltruistic overall (though “non-classically” so).

It’s at least arguable that this latter, less stringent,standard for altruism connects with much of what has been at issue inthe egoism-altruism debate—indeed, see below in section 6 forsome empirical work that matches their framework well. At any rate,whether or not Piccinini and Schulz’s framework is right aboutthis, it is at least clear that evolutionary biology may have more tooffer to the debate surrounding psychological altruism than it may atfirst appear. This is likely to continue to be an important questionfor further investigation.

4. Altruism in the Social Sciences

In recent decades there has been an enormous amount of discussion ofaltruism in psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology, andprimatology. Much of the work in psychology, including much of thework recounted in section 5, has adopted the “standardaccount” of altruism. But some psychologists, and manyresearchers in other disciplines, have something very different inmind. In a useful literature review, Clavien and Chapuisat lamentthat

[t]he notion of altruism has become so plastic that it is often hardto understand what is really meant by the authors using the term, andeven harder to evaluate the degree to which results from one researchfield—e.g., experimental economics—may facilitate theresolution of debates in another research field—e.g.,evolutionary biology or philosophy. (2013: 134)

One of the notions that Clavien and Chapuisat find playing a role inevolutionary anthropology, evolutionary game theory and experimentaleconomics is what they call “preference altruism”.“An action is altruistic”, in this sense, “if itresults from preferences for improving others’ interests andwelfare at some cost to oneself” (2013: 131). Though theagent’s psychology is relevant, on this account of altruism,there is no mention of the agent’s ultimate desires. Thus anaction can be preference altruistic even if the agent’spreference for improving someone else’s welfare is aninstrumental preference engendered by the belief that improving therecipient’s welfare will contribute to the agent’s ownpleasure or treasure.

A second, quite different, concept of altruism invoked in the socialsciences is what Clavien and Chapuisat call “behavioralaltruism”. On this interpretation of altruism, an agent’spsychology plays no role in determining whether her action isaltruistic.

A behavior is altruistic if it brings any kind of benefit to otherindividuals at some cost for the agent, and if there is no foreseeableway for the agent to reap compensatory benefits from her behavior.(2013: 131)

Ramsey (2016) makes a plausible case that some eminent primatologistsand psychologists (including de Waal (2008) and Warneken and Tomasello(2008)) invoke an even less demanding account of altruism, one thatrequires that the recipient benefit but drops the requirement thataltruistic behavior must involve some cost to the agent. Ramsey labelsthis notion “helping altruism”.

In reviewing the many different ways in which the term“altruism” has been used in the empirical andphilosophical literature, it is hard to resist allusions to thebiblical Tower of Babel, where different researchers are speakingdifferent, mutually unintelligible, languages. But for the remainderof this entry, these interpretations of “altruism” will beleft behind. From here on, the primary focus will be on altruism as itis understood in the standard account.

5. The Egoism vs. Altruism Debate in Psychology

The psychological literature relevant to the egoism vs. altruismdebate is vast;^[14] in the interests of a tolerable brevity, this entry will largelyfocus on the social psychological work of Daniel Batson and hisassociates, who have done some of the most influential andphilosophically sophisticated work in this area. (In Section 7, wewill briefly consider some recent work in developmental andcomparative psychology.)

Batson, along with many other researchers, begins by borrowing an ideathat has deep roots in philosophical discussions of altruism. Thoughthe details and the terminology differ significantly from author toauthor, the core idea is that altruism is often the product of anemotional response to the distress of another person. Aquinas (1270[1917]: II–II, 30, 3), for example, maintains that

mercy is the heartfelt sympathy for another’s distress,impelling us to succour him if we can.

Adam Smith (1759 [1853]: I, I, 1. 1) tells us that

pity or compassion [is] the emotion we feel for the misery of others,when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very livelymanner

and these emotions

interest [man] in the fortunes of others, and render their happinessnecessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except thepleasure of seeing it.

Batson (1991: 58) labels this response “empathy” which hecharacterizes as “an other-oriented emotional reaction to seeingsomeone suffer”, and calls the traditional idea that empathyleads to altruism the empathy-altruism hypothesis. On Batson’saccount (1991: 86), empathy

includes feeling sympathetic, compassionate, warm, softhearted,tender, and the like, and according to the empathy-altruismhypothesis, it evokes altruistic motivation.

Batson (1991: 117) contrasts empathy with a cluster of affectiveresponses he calls “personal distress” which is“made up of more self-oriented feelings such as upset, alarm,anxiety, and distress”.^[15]

If the philosophical tradition that suggests the empathy-altruismhypothesis is on the right track, and Batson believes it is, one wouldpredict that when people feel empathy they will desire to help thosewho evoke the emotion, and thus be more inclined to engage in helpingbehavior than people who do not feel empathy. This does not mean thatpeople will always engage in helping behavior when they feel empathy,since people may often have conflicting desires, and not all conflictsare resolved in favor of empathy. Nor does it mean that when peoplefeel little or no empathy they will not engage in helping behavior,since the desire to help can also be produced by a variety ofprocesses in which empathy plays no role. But we should expect thattypically people feeling empathy will be more likely to help thanpeople who aren’t feeling empathy, and the stronger theirfeelings of empathy the more likely it is that they will engage inhelping behavior.

In order to put this claim to empirical test, it is important to haveways of inducing empathy in the laboratory, and there is a substantialbody of literature suggesting how this can be done. For example,Stotland (1969) showed that subjects who were instructed to imaginehow a specified person (often called “the target”) feltwhen undergoing what subjects believed to be a painful medicalprocedure reported stronger feelings of empathy and showed greaterphysiological arousal than subjects who were instructed to watch thetarget person’s movements.^[16]

Relatedly, Krebs (1975) demonstrated that subjects who observe someonesimilar to themselves undergo painful experiences show morephysiological arousal, report identifying with the target morestrongly, and report feeling worse while waiting for the painfulstimulus to begin than do subjects who observe the same painfulexperiences administered to someone who is not similar to themselves.Krebs also showed that subjects are more willing to help at somepersonal cost when the sufferer is similar to themselves. Batson(1991: 82–87) interprets these findings as indicating thatpeople are more inclined to feel empathy for those they believe to besimilar to themselves, and thus that empathy can often be induced byproviding a person with evidence that she and a target person aresimilar.

To make the case that empathy leads to helping behavior, Batson reliesin part on work by others, including the just-cited Krebs (1975) studyand a study by Dovidio et al. (1990). In that latter study,Stotland’s technique for manipulating empathy by instructingsubjects to take the perspective of the person in distress was used toinduce empathy for a young woman “target.” Subjectsfocused on one of two quite different problems that the young womanfaced. When given an opportunity to help the young woman, subjects inwhom empathy had been evoked were more likely to help than subjects ina low empathy condition, and the increase in helping was specific tothe problem that had evoked the empathy.

Many of Batson’s own experiments, some of which are describedbelow, also support the contention that both spontaneously evokedempathy and experimental manipulations engendering empathy increasethe likelihood of helping behavior. Another important source ofsupport for the link between empathy and helping behavior is ameta-analysis of a large body of experimental literature by Eisenbergand Miller (1987) which found positive correlations between empathyand prosocial behavior in studies using a variety of techniques toassess empathy. On the basis of these and other findings, Batson(1991: 95) argues that

there is indeed an empathy-helping relationship; feeling empathy for aperson in need increases the likelihood of helping to relieve thatneed.

It might be thought that establishing a causal link between empathyand helping behavior would be bad news for egoism. But, as Batsonmakes clear, the fact that empathy leads to helping behavior does notresolve the dispute between egoism and altruism, since it does notaddress the nature of the motivation for the helping behavior thatempathy evokes. One possibility is that empathy does indeed cause agenuinely altruistic desire to help—an ultimate desire for thewell-being of the sufferer. But there are also a variety of egoisticroutes by which empathy might lead to helping behavior. Perhaps themost obvious of these is that empathy might simply be (or cause) anunpleasant experience, and that people are motivated to help becausethey believe this is the best way to stop the unpleasant experiencethat is caused by someone else’s distress.

Quite a different family of egoistic possibilities focus on therewards to be expected for helping and/or the punishments to beexpected for withholding assistance. If people believe (1) that otherswill reward or sanction them for helping or failing to help in certaincircumstances, and (2) that the feeling of empathy marks those casesin which social sanctions or rewards are most likely, then we wouldexpect people to be more helpful when they feel empathy, even if theirultimate motivation is purely egoistic. A variation on this themefocuses on rewards or punishments that are self-administered. Ifpeople believe that helping may make them feel good, or that failingto help may make them feel bad, and that these feelings will be mostlikely to occur in cases where they feel empathy, then once again wewould expect people who empathize to be more helpful, though theirmotives may be not at all altruistic.

During the last four decades, Batson and his collaborators havesystematically explored these egoistic hypotheses and many others.Their strategy is to design experiments in which the altruisticexplanation of the link between empathy and helping can be compared toone or another specific egoistic explanation. Reviewing all of theseexperiments would require a far longer entry.^[17] In lieu of that, the focus here will be on two clusters ofexperiments that illustrate the potential philosophical rewards ofdesigning and interpreting experiments in this area, as well as somedifficulties with the project.

5.1 The Social Punishment Hypothesis

One of the more popular egoist alternatives to the empathy-altruismhypothesis is the idea that people engage in helping behavior becausethey fear that other people will punish them if they do not. If Idon’t help, the actor is supposed to worry, people will be angryor they will think badly of me, and this may have negative effects onhow they treat me in the future. As it stands, this egoist hypothesiscan’t explain the fact that empathy increases the likelihood ofhelping, but a more sophisticated version is easy to construct byadding the assumption that people think social sanctions for nothelping are more likely when the target engenders empathy.

To test this hypothesis—which Batson calls the sociallyadministered empathy-specific punishment hypothesis—against theempathy-altruism hypothesis, Batson and his associates (Fultz et al.1986) designed an experiment in which they manipulated both the levelof empathy that subjects felt for the target and the perceivedlikelihood that anyone would know whether or not the subject had optedto help a person in need. Others can form a negative evaluation ofyour decision not to help only if they know the choice you are facingand the decision you have made; if your decision is secret, you needhave no fear of social sanctions. Thus the socially administeredempathy-specific punishment hypothesis predicts that subjects whoexhibit high empathy on a given occasion will be more likely to helpwhen they believe others will know if they fail to do so. On theempathy-altruism hypothesis, by contrast, high empathy subjects aremotivated by an ultimate desire to help, and thus their helping levelsshould be high whether or not others would know if they decided not tohelp. In the low empathy condition, both hypotheses predict thatlevels of helping will be low. These predictions are summarized inTables 1 and 2.

Subjects in the experiment were told that they were participating inan impression formation study, and that they had been randomlyassigned to the role of “listener” in which they wouldread confidential notes from another student participant, the“communicator”. They were given two notes from JanetArnold, an out-of-state freshman who reveals that she is very lonelyand hoping to find a friend. After completing a form on which subjectsindicated their impressions of Janet and their emotional responses toher note, they were presented with an unexpected opportunity tobefriend Janet by volunteering to take part in a study of long-termrelationships involving an initial meeting with Janet and periodicphone interviews about the development of their friendship.Participants who were willing to help were asked how much time theywere willing to spend with Janet during the next month.

To manipulate empathy, Batson and his associates used the Stotlandtechnique. Subjects assigned to the low-empathy condition wereinstructed to

Read the information in the communicator’s notes carefully,trying to be as objective as possible. Try to focus on the techniquesused to get the communicator’s message across.

Subjects assigned to the high-empathy condition were instructed to

Read the information in the communicator’s notes carefully,trying to take the perspective of the individual writing the notes.Try to imagine how this individual feels about what he or she writes.(1991: 132)

Four steps were taken to manipulate the perceived potential fornegative social evaluation. In the low-potential condition (1991:132):

1. Subjects were told that they would be the only person ever to readthe communicator’s notes, and the notes were delivered in asealed envelope.
2. Subjects were assured that the questionnaires reporting theirreactions to Janet’s note would be anonymous.
3. Subjects’ responses to the invitation to participate in thelong-term relationship study were returned to the professor in asealed envelope, so no one would know if they did not want to helpJanet. (Since they believed the professor had not read Janet’snote, they could be expected to surmise that he would not know thatJanet needed a friend.)
4. In the letter inviting them to participate in the relationshipstudy, subjects were told that Janet would be contacted “only ifyou want a meeting; if you do not, then we will not contact thecommunicator and he or she will not know that you were ever askedabout actually meeting”.

In the high-potential condition (1991: 133):

1. Subjects were told that the experimenter would read thecommunicator’s notes, collect the questionnaire when the subjectcompleted it, and compare the content of the notes with theimpressions the subject formed.
2. No envelope was provided for their response to the invitation toparticipate in the long-term relationship study, so subjects couldinfer that the experimenter would know about Janet’s need for afriend, about their emotional reaction to Janet, and would also knowwhether or not they had agreed to help Janet.
3. Subjects were told that Janet would know if they decided not tohelp.

As Batson notes, procedures in the high-potential condition

were designed to highlight the possibility of negative socialevaluation if the participant decided not to volunteer to spend timewith Janet.

The results, given in Table 3, indicate that the socially administeredempathy-specific punishment hypothesis did not fare well. On the basisof this experiment and a similar experiment in which empathy for Janetwas not manipulated but was measured by self-report, Batson concludesthat the socially administered empathy-specific punishment hypothesisis not consistent with the experimental facts.

Contrary to what the social-evaluation version of the empathy-specificpunishment hypothesis predicted, eliminating anticipated negativesocial evaluation in these two studies did not eliminate theempathy-helping relationship. Rather than high empathy leading to morehelp only under high social evaluation, it led to more helping underboth low and high social evaluation. This pattern of results is notconsistent with what would be expected if empathically arousedindividuals are egoistically motivated to avoid looking bad in theeyes of others; it is quite consistent with what would be expected ifempathy evokes altruistic motivation to reduce the victim’s need(Batson 1991: 134).

Though two experiments hardly make a conclusive case, these studiesmake the socially administered empathy-specific punishment hypothesislook significantly less plausible than the empathy-altruismhypothesis. So one popular egoist hypothesis has been dealt a seriousblow: high empathy subjects were more likely to help whether or notthey could expect their behavior to be socially scrutinized. At leastin some circumstances, empathy appears to facilitate helpingindependently of the threat of social sanction.

5.2 The Aversive-Arousal Reduction Hypothesis

Another popular egoistic strategy for explaining the link betweenempathy and helping behavior is the aversive-arousal reductionhypothesis, which maintains that witnessing someone in need, and theempathy it evokes, is an unpleasant or aversive experience, and thathelping is motivated by the desire to diminish that aversive experience.^[18] If this is right, Batson maintains, people in a high empathycondition will sometimes have two quite different ways of reducing theaversive experience—they can help the person in need or they cansimply leave. Which strategy a person adopts will depend, in part, onhow difficult or costly it is to depart the scene. If escape is easy,people will be more likely to take that option, while if leaving ismore difficult, people will be
more likely to help, since that is a less costly way of ending theaversive experience. If, on the other hand, the empathy-altruismhypothesis is correct and empathy leads to genuinely altruisticmotivation, one would expect people in a high empathy condition tohelp whether escape is easy or hard, since only helping will satisfyan altruistic desire.

Altruism and egoism both allow that even in the absence of empathy, anemotionally disturbing situation involving a person in need willproduce feelings of personal distress, thus they would both predictthat people in a low empathy condition will be more inclined to helpwhen escape is difficult, and less inclined when escape is easy.Batson summarizes these predictions in Tables 4 and 5 (Batson 1991:111).

To test these predictions, Batson and his associates conducted a totalof six experiments. In one of these (experiment 1 in Batson, Duncan,et al. 1981), student subjects were required to watch, via what theybelieved to be closed circuit TV transmission—actually ascripted video recording—as another student subject,Elaine—actually a confederate—attempted to perform a taskwhile receiving electric shocks at random intervals. Observer subjectswere told that their task would be to form and report an impression ofhow Elaine performs under aversive conditions. On the tape, Elaine isclearly finding the shocks very uncomfortable, and after her secondtrial at doing the task, she explains to Martha, the assistantadministering the shocks, that she is unusually sensitive to mildelectric shocks because of a childhood trauma. Martha then suggeststhat perhaps the observer subject might be willing to help Elaine bytaking her place, and the experimenter asks whether the subject iswilling to do that. To manipulate ease of escape, some subjects weretold that if they decide not to take Elaine’s place, they willbe required to watch eight additional trials, while other subjectswere told that if they decide not to take Elaine’s place theyare free to go. To manipulate the level of empathy that subjects feelfor Elaine, subjects were given a copy of a personal values andinterests questionnaire, allegedly filled out by Elaine, in order tohelp them form an impression of her performance. In the high empathycondition, Elaine’s values and interests were very similar tothe subject’s (which had been determined in a screening sessionseveral weeks before), while in the low empathy condition, they werevery different.

The results, given in Table 6, clearly exhibit the pattern predictedby the empathy-altruism hypothesis, not the pattern predicted by theaversive-arousal reduction hypothesis.

In additional experiments, Batson and his associates used twotechniques for manipulating ease of escape, and two different needsituations (Batson, Duncan, et al. 1981; Toi and Batson 1982; Batson,O’Quin et al. 1983). The results in all of these experimentsexhibited the same pattern: when empathizing with the target, subjectswere willing to engage in costly helping behavior even if there wereeasy “escapes” from doing so. Intriguingly, in anotherexperiment (Batson, O’Quin et al. 1983; Study 3), Batson andcolleagues attempted to break the pattern by telling the subjects thatthe shock level they would have to endure was the highest of fouroptions, “clearly painful but not harmful”. They reasonedthat, under these circumstances, even if high empathy subjects had anultimate desire to help, this desire might well be overridden by thedesire to avoid a series of very painful shocks. As expected, thepattern of results in this experiment fit the pattern in Table 4: whenthe cost of helping was made relatively high, an egoistic pattern ofhelping was displayed even by subjects reporting significant amountsof empathy for the target.

These are impressive findings. Over and over again, in well designedand carefully conducted experiments, Batson and his associates haveproduced results which are clearly compatible with the predictions ofthe empathy-altruism hypothesis, as set out in Table 5, and clearlyincompatible with the predictions of the aversive-arousal reductionhypothesis, as set out in Table 4. Even the “clearly painfulshock” study, which produced “an egoistic pattern ofhelping”, is comfortably compatible with the empathy-altruismhypothesis; as noted earlier, the empathy-altruism hypothesis allowsthat high empathy subjects may have desires that are stronger thantheir ultimate desire to help the target, and the desire to avoid apainful electric shock is a very plausible candidate.

There is, however, a problem to be overcome before one concludes thatthe aversive-arousal reduction hypothesis cannot explain the findingsthat Batson and his associates have reported. In arguing that Table 4reflects the predictions made by the aversive-arousal reductionhypothesis, Batson must assume that escape will alleviate the aversiveaffect in both low & high empathy situations, and that subjectsbelieve this (although the belief may not be readily available tointrospection). One might call this the out of sight, out of mindassumption. Elaborating on an idea suggested by Hoffman (1991) andHornstein (1991), an advocate of egoism might propose that althoughsubjects do believe this when they have little empathy for the target,they do not believe it when they have high empathy for the target.Perhaps high empathy subjects believe that if they escape they willcontinue to be troubled by the thought or memory of the distressedtarget and thus that physical escape will not lead to psychologicalescape. Indeed, in cases where empathy is strong and is evoked byattachment, this is just what common sense would lead us to expect. Doyou really believe that if your mother was in grave distress and youleft without helping her you would not continue to be troubled by theknowledge that she was still in distress? We’re guessing thatyou don’t. But if the high-empathy subjects in Batson’sexperiments believe that they will continue to be plagued bydistressing thoughts about the target even after they depart, then theegoistic aversive-arousal reduction hypothesis predicts that thesesubjects will be inclined to help in both the easy physical escape andthe difficult physical escape conditions, since helping is the onlystrategy they believe will be effective for reducing the aversivearousal. So neither the results reported in Table 6 nor the results ofany of Batson’s other experiments would give us a reason toprefer the empathy-altruism hypothesis over the aversive-arousalreduction hypothesis, because both hypotheses make the sameprediction.

Is it the case that high empathy subjects in experiments likeBatson’s believe that unless they help they will continue tothink about the target and thus continue to feel distress, and thatthis belief leads to helping because it generates an egoisticinstrumental desire to help? This is, of course, an empiricalquestion, and a cleverly designed experiment by Stocks and hisassociates (Stocks et al. 2009) suggests that, in situations likethose used in Batson’s experiments, a belief that they willcontinue to think about the target does not play a significant role incausing the helping behavior in high empathy subjects. Theymanipulated the “perceived ease of psychological escape,”and found that empathy was associated with helping even whenpsychological escape was believed to be comparatively easy.

Batson’s work on the aversive-arousal reduction hypothesis,buttressed by the Stocks et al. finding, is a major advance in theegoism vs. altruism debate. The aversive-arousal reduction hypothesishas been one of the most popular egoistic strategies for explaininghelping behavior. But the experimental findings strongly suggest thatin situations like those that Batson and his associates have studied,the empathy-altruism hypothesis offers a better explanation of thesubjects’ behavior than the aversive-arousal reductionhypothesis.

As noted earlier, Batson and his colleagues have also designedexperiments pitting the empathy-altruism hypothesis against asubstantial list of other egoistic explanations for the link betweenempathy and helping behavior. In each case, the evidence appears tochallenge the egoistic alternative, though as is almost always thecase in empirical work of this sort, some researchers remain unconvinced.^[19] There is also an influential critique of Batson’s work thatchallenges all of his experimental work on the empathy-altruismhypothesis. It argues that empathy and its precursors alterpeople’s self-concept in a way that undermines the claim thattheir helping behavior is genuinely altruistic.

5.3 The Challenge Posed by “Self-Other Merging”

During the last three decades, psychologists have devoted a great dealof effort to exploring how people think of the self. One major themein this literature is that people’s conception of themselvesvaries across cultures, and that in many non-western culturesone’s social roles and one’s relation to other people playa much more central role in people’s self-concepts than they doin the individualistic West (Markus & Kitayama 1991; Baumeister1998). One very simple way of studying these differences is to askpeople to respond to the question “Who am I?” fifteentimes. Non-westerners will typically mention social groups, grouproles and relationships: “I am Maasai”, “I am aperson who brings fruit to the temple”, “I am myfather’s youngest son”. Westerners, by contrast, willtypically mention personal attributes, aspirations and achievements:“I am intelligent”, “I am a pre-med student”,“I am the fastest swimmer in my school” (Ma &Schoeneman 1997). Another theme is that people’s conception ofthemselves is situationally malleable—it changes depending onwho we are with, where we are and what we are doing (Kihlstrom &Cantor 1984; Markus & Wurf 1987).

While this sort of situational malleability may not be surprising, anumber of psychologists have suggested a much more radical situationalmalleability. Under certain circumstances, notably when we have aclose personal relationship with another person, when we are trying totake the perspective of another person, or when we feel empathy foranother person, the conceptual boundary between the self and the otherperson disappears; the self and the other merge. According to ArthurAron and colleagues,

Much of our cognition about the other in a close relationship iscognition in which the other is treated as self or confused withself—the underlying reason being a self-other merging. (Aron etal. 1980: 242)

If this is true, then it poses a fundamental challenge to the claimthat helping behavior directed at someone for whom we feel empathy isreally altruistic. For, as Melvin Lerner memorably observed:

It seems that we respond sympathetically, with compassion and a senseof concern, when we feel a sense of identity with the victim. Ineffect, we are reacting to the thought of ourselves in that situation.And, of course, we are filled with the “milk of humankindness” for our own sweet, innocent selves. (Lerner 1980:77)

A bit less colorfully, Batson notes that for “the contrastbetween altruism and egoism to be meaningful”, an individualproviding help “must perceive self and other to be distinctindividuals” (2011: 145–146). And

if the distinction between self and other vanishes then so does thedistinction between altruism and egoism, at least as these terms areused in the empathy-altruism hypothesis. (2011: 148)

Psychologists who have debated the rather astonishing claim thatpeople who provide help to others often lose track of the distinctionbetween themselves and the person being helped have proposed severaldifferent ways of determining whether this sort of “self-othermerging” has occurred. Before considering these, however, weshould remind ourselves of an important philosophical distinction thatwill be crucial in assessing tests for self-other merging.^[20] The distinction is often made using the labels “qualitativeidentity” and “numerical identity”. What makes thisdistinction important for present purposes is that the sort ofidentity that is relevant to the debate between egoists and altruistsis numerical identity, not qualitative identity. If Sophia, at age 30,sets aside a large sum of money that will be paid to Sophia at age 70,young Sophia is not being altruistic. If her ultimate goal is toensure that old Sophia has the means to live a comfortable life, thenyoung Sophia’s action is straightforwardly egoistic. Thetake-home message here is that if a test used to determine whetherperson A takes herself to be identical to person B is to be relevantto the egoism versus altruism debate, the test must provide evidencethat person A takes herself to benumerically identical toperson B, not that she takes herself to bequalitativelyidentical to person B.^[21]

Now let’s consider how psychologists have attempted to assesswhether experimental participants feel a sense of identity withsomeone they might be called on to help. In one of the mostinfluential studies claiming to show that helping is often the productof a feeling of oneness, Cialdini et al. (1997) used a pair oftests.

[P]articipants rated the extent of oneness they felt with the [personthey might help] by responding to two items that were combined in allanalyses to form a oneness index. The first item incorporated theInclusion of Other in Self (IOS) Scale used by Aron et al. (1992) tomeasure self-other boundary overlap. It consisted of a set of sevenpairs of increasingly overlapping circles. Participants selected thepair of circles that they believed best characterized theirrelationship with the [person they might help]. The second item askedparticipants to indicate on a 7-point scale the extent to which theywould use the termwe to describe their relationship with the[person they might help]. (1997: 484)

In a critique of the Cialdini et al. paper, Batson, Sager, et al.(1997) used three measures of self-other merging. One was the IOSScale used by Cialdini et al. The second was a “perceivedsimilarity” task in which “[p]articipants were asked,‘How similar to you do you think the person …is?’(1 = somewhat, 9 = extremely)” (1997: 500). In the third,participants rated both themselves and the target on a series ofpersonal attributes. The “measure of merging was the meanabsolute difference between ratings of self and other” (1997:498).

It does not seem that any of these four tests of self-other mergingprovide a reason to believe that the participant views herself asnumerically identical with another person. Indeed, both the perceivedsimilarity test and the personal attribute rating test seem to beassessing qualitative identity rather than numerical identity. And itis far from clear what the other two tests are measuring. So it seemsthat this literature does not provide evidence at all that people inclose relationships lose track of the distinction between themselvesand another person. Indeed, as May notes, if someone really didbelieve that he exists in two obviously distinct bodies, the mostnatural conclusion to draw would be that he is delusional (May 2011b:32).

While the literature on self-other merging provides little reason tobelieve that normal people take themselves to be numerically identicalwith another person, it does provide a different kind of challenge tothe empathy-altruism hypothesis defended by Batson and his colleagues.That hypothesis, it will be recalled, is that empathy often causes anultimate desire to help another person. But in the Cialdini et al.(1977) paper cited earlier, they report three studies indicating thatempathy, though it does occur, is not playing any causal role in theprocess that leads to helping. Rather, they maintain, it is“merging”—which is used here as a label for whateverthe IOS scale and the use-of-we test measure—that isactually leading participants to help. Though the Cialdini et al.paper is quite sophisticated, Batson et al. (1997) pointed out anumber of methodological problems. When they conducted a pair ofexperiments that avoided these methodological problems, the role ofempathy in producing helping behavior was clearly evident.

Most experiments exploring the link between empathy and helpingbehavior, including this one, use a relatively small number ofparticipants. And psychology’s “replication crisis”that that emerged in recent years has led many to worry about therobustness of the effects reported in experiments like these (Chambers2017; Doris, 2015: 44–49; Machery & Doris, forthcoming). Ahigh powered, pre-registered study by McAuliffe et al. (2018) isreassuring in this respect to: with 680 on-line participants, theirfindings were “unambiguously supportive” (2018: 504) ofthe link between empathy and helping behavior.

5.4 Have Batson’s Studies Made a Convincing Case for the Existence of Altruism in Humans?

Batson’s answer to this question is clear.

Having reviewed the evidence from research designed to test theempathy-altruism hypothesis against the six egoistic alternatives…, it is time to come to a conclusion—albeittentative—about the status of this hypothesis. The idea thatempathy produces altruistic motivation may seem improbable given thedominance of Western thought by the doctrine of universal egoism. Yet,in the words of Sherlock Holmes, “When you have eliminated theimpossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be thetruth”. It seems impossible for any known egoistic explanationof the empathy-helping relationship—or any combination ofthem—to account for the research evidence we have reviewed. Sowhat remains? The empathy-altruism hypothesis. Pending new evidence ora plausible new egoistic explanation of the existing evidence, we seemforced to accept this improbable hypothesis as true. (Batson 2011: 160)^[22]

Batson’s research program is compelling, and he certainly hasshown that the empathy-altruism hypothesis is “in thehunt”, but his findings are not conclusive. There are a numberof reasonable challenges to the methodology and the conclusions insome of Batson’s studies. Setting these out in detail is asubstantial project (see Stich, Doris, & Roedder 2010). But thereis also a plausible egoistic hypothesis that has not beensystematically explored.

In recent years, a number of authors have made an impressive case forthe hypothesis that belief in a “Big God”—asupernatural being who is omniscient, morally concerned, and acts as apolicing agent in human affairs—played a crucial role in thetransition from face-to-face “band level” human groupsmade up of at most a few hundred individuals to much larger tribalgroups, and ultimately to chiefdoms and nation states (Norenzayan etal. 2016). These are provocative and controversial ideas. Much lesscontroversial is the claim that many people believe that even when noother human can observe them, a supernatural being of some sort isaware of what they are doing and thinking, and that this being maypunish thoughts and behavior it disapproves of and reward thoughts andbehavior it approves of, with the punishments and rewards deliveredeither during the agent’s lifetime or after she dies.^[23] In the experiments, described in section 5.1, which were designed totest the empathy-altruism hypothesis against the social punishmenthypothesis, Batson and his colleagues went to great lengths to insurethat participants in the “low potential for negative socialevaluation” condition would think that no one knew of theirdecisions, and thus that no one would think badly of them or sanctionthem if they decided not to help. But, of course, none of the stepstaken to ensure secrecy would be effective in keeping an omniscientGod from knowing what these participants had decided. So if we assumethat many people believe an omniscient God wants them to help othersin need, and that they believe Divine sanctions for not helping aremore likely when the target engenders empathy,^[24] the experiments do nothing to rule out a variation of the socialpunishment hypothesis which maintains that participants are motivatedby a desire to avoid punishments administered by God.

The egoistic alternative just sketched, which might be called“the divine punishment hypothesis”, also leads to thepattern of predictions derived from the empathy-altruism hypothesissketched in Table 5, and the results reported in Table 6. The bottomline is that using the Sherlock Holmes standard that Batson favors,there is still a lot of work to do. There is a family of egoistichypotheses invoking beliefs in supernatural punishments—orsupernatural rewards—that still needs to be ruled out before weaccept the “improbable hypothesis” as true.^[25]

7. Beyond Egoism vs. Altruism

In the colorful passage quoted at the beginning of section 5.4, Batsonseems to suggest that in the debate between egoists and altruiststhere are only two possible outcomes. If all human behavior isultimately motivated by self-interested desires, then the egoist wins;if some human behavior is motivated by ultimate desires for thewell-being of other people, then the altruist wins. However, as notedin section 2, the dialectical landscape is more complex, for there aremany desires that are neither self-interested nor desires for thewell-being of other people. If any of these are ultimate desires thatlead to behavior, then the egoist is mistaken. But, as Batson clearlyrecognizes, this would not vindicate altruism; both egoism andaltruism might be mistaken.

Batson has used the term principlism for one family of ultimatedesires that would support neither egoism nor altruism.

Principlism is motivation with the ultimate goal of upholding somemoral principle—for example, a principle of fairness or justice,or the utilitarian principle of greatest good for the greatest number.(Batson 2011: 220)

Under some circumstances, one or another of these principles mightrequire helping behavior, though that helping behavior would not bealtruistic, since the ultimate desire motivating the behavior is touphold the principle. On Batson’s view, we really don’tknow much about principlism.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no clear empirical evidence thatupholding justice (or any other moral principle) functions as anultimate goal.^[26] Nor is there clear empirical evidence that rules this possibilityout. (Batson 2011: 224)

But if that’s right, then Batson’s conclusion that theempathy-altruism hypothesis is true and that people are sometimesaltruistic is premature. For even if it were conceded that all theplausible egoistic alternatives to empathy-altruism have beenexcluded, the job of testing empathy-altruism against principalistalternatives has hardly begun. Moreover, the scope of that project maybe much larger than Batson imagines.

One way to see this is to ask which action guiding principles aremoral principles.^[27] There is ongoing debate about this question in both philosophy andpsychology (Stich 2018). Though Batson does not address that debate,the examples he offers (“fairness or justice or the utilitarianprinciple”) suggest that when he talks about moral principles hehas a rather limited set of principles in mind. But if principlism islimited to a relatively small set of moral principles familiar fromthe philosophical literature, then principlism hardly exhausts thenon-egoistic alternatives that defenders of psychological altruismmust rule out. In recent years, there has been a growing body of workon the role of norms in human life, where norms are understood asaction guiding rules that can govern just about any human activity.Researchers from a variety of disciplines have argued that norms, anda robust innate psychology for acquiring, storing and acting on norms,have played a fundamental role in shaping human culture and makinghumans the most successful large animal on the planet (Henrich 2015;Boyd 2018; Kelly & Davis 2018). Others have proposed accounts ofnorm psychology on which people have ultimate desires to comply withculturally acquired norms (Sripada & Stich 2006) and accounts ofhow a psychological system generating such ultimate desires might befavored by natural selection (Sripada 2008). The sorts of behavioralrules that count as norms in this literature might well include thesorts of moral principles that Batson had in mind when hecharacterized principlism. But these are only a small subset of thenorms that these researchers have in mind. What makes all of thisrelevant to our current topic is that any culturally acquired normmight generate an ultimate desire to comply, and most of thoseultimate desires are neither egoistic nor altruistic. Thus to make aplausible case that an episode of helping behavior is altruistic, itis not enough to rule out egoistic explanations and explanations thatappeal to principlism. The defender of psychological altruism mustalso rule out explanations that trace the helping behavior to anultimate desire to comply with any of the vast collection of normsthat prevail in human cultures. And that’s a job that defendersof altruism have not even begun.

Another possibility is that some helping behavior might not bemotivated by ultimate desires at all. Gęsiarz and Crockett (2015)argue that, in addition to the goal-directed system, behavior,including helping behavior, is sometimes produced by what they callthe habitual and Pavlovian systems. The habitual system leads toactions that have the highest expected value based on previous lifeexperiences rather than possible consequences indicated by features ofthe current situation. As a result, helping behavior may be repeatedin the future and in circumstances in which motivating factors likethe promise of rewards are absent if the behavior has been rewarded inthe past. Like the habitual system, the Pavlovian system producesbehavior with the highest expected value based on the past. Unlike thehabitual system, however, the Pavlovian system produces behavior thathas been successful in the evolutionary past, rather than in anindividual’s past. This means that behavioral dispositions thathave led to reproductive success in an individual’s evolutionarypast may have become innate or “hard-wired” throughnatural selection. If it is indeed the case that some helping behavioris produced by the habitual or Pavlovian systems, then egoism isfalse. And if some helping behavior is egoistically motivated and therest is produced by the habitual and Pavlovian systems, then altruismis also false. Interestingly, Gęsiarz and Crockett’s ideashere combine Clavien and Chapuisat’s “behavioralaltruism” with some of the reasoning behind Piccinini &Schulz “non-classical altruism:” helping may be a deeplyembedded behavioral disposition, even if it is learned or the innateproduct of an evolutionary selfish mechanism. However, Gęsiarzand Crockett focus on the behavior, rather than on the (ultimate)desires that produce the behavior. While social psychological researchon altruism has yielded important advances, it is clear that bothconceptual and empirical work remains to be done.

7. Developmental and Comparative Psychology

The findings on helping behavior from social psychology have recentlybeen expanded by work in developmental and comparative psychology. Inparticular, Felix Warneken and his collaborators have shown that evenvery young children (such as 18-months-olds) spontaneously help othersin need (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006, 2007). For example, childrenvoluntarily and without prompt cross a room to pick up a clothespinthe experimenter has dropped. They do this even if (a) it involvessome cost to them (such as needing to stop playing with a new toy orhaving to overcome physical obstacles on the way), (b) caregivers arenot present (Warneken & Tomasello, 2013), and (c) the behavior isnot externally rewarded. (Indeed, there is some evidence that externalrewarding of the helping behaviors “crowds out” theintrinsic motivation to help—Warneken & Tomasello, 2008).These studies, in combination with a variety of other related findings(see e.g. Hamlin, 2013; Woo & Spelke, 2022; Geraci & Surian,2023), are taken to suggest that humans have an innate desire to helpat least certain others—i.e. that we are at least sometimes“classical altruists,” in the terminology of Piccinini andSchulz (2019). Several things are important to note about thesestudies, though.

It is clear that these studies do not go nearly as far as the work ofBatson et al. in controlling for possible egoistic confounds. It isentirely possible that the children have been rewarded to show helpingbehavior in the past, making them at best what Piccinini and Schulzcall “non-classical altruists”. In fact, it is possiblethat the children only help so as to get social approbation makingthem egoists. Still, the fact that the children are young provides atleast some reason to think that these are genuinely altruistic desiresin content. After all, sophisticated social reputation managementseems to occur only later in life (Banerjee, 2002). Moreover, there issome evidence of (limited) spontaneous helping in chimpanzees, too,suggesting that these desires are phylogenetically ancient (Warnekenet al., 2007). Still, it should be clear that these studies are, atbest, a step towards the conclusion that human children havealtruistic desires; more work of the kind discussed in Sections 4 and5 is needed to really shore up this conclusion.

Overall, though, the point to note here is that the developmental andcomparative psychological investigation of altruism has the potentialto greatly expand our understanding in this area. The work can beconjoined with the social psychological, social scientific,biological, and philosophical work on this topic to yield a deeperaccount of whether, when and why humans are altruisticallymotivated.

8. The Bottom Line

The egoism-altruism debate involves many conceptual questions of asort that are “in the wheelhouse” of traditionalphilosophy. But the debate also centrally involves empirical questionsof the sort characteristically investigated in psychological science.In particular, Batson’s empathy-altruism hypothesis can beempirically tested against competing egoist hypotheses, and Batson andhis colleagues have designed experiments making a strong case thatmany of those egoist hypotheses are false. But to show that altruismis true, it is not enough to show that specific egoist hypothesescan’t explain specific episodes of helping behavior. Nor wouldit be enough to show that all plausible versions of egoism are false.It must also be shown that episodes of helping behavior thatcan’t be explained egoistically can’t be explained byanother process, such as principalistic ultimate motivation orultimate motivation by a non-moral norm. In addition, the defender ofaltruism must show that non-egoistic episodes of helping behavior arenot the product of the habitual or Pavlovian systems. None ofBatson’s experiments were designed to rule out thesenon-egoistic options or others that might be suggested. So there isstill much work to be done.

On a more positive note, it seems that Batson and his associates haveshown quite conclusively that the methods of experimental psychologycan move the debate forward. Indeed, one might argue that Batson hasmade more progress in this area during the last four decades thanphilosophers using the traditional philosophical methodology of apriori arguments buttressed by anecdote and intuition have made in theprevious two millennia. Their work powerfully demonstrates the utilityof empirical methods in moral psychology; philosophical moralpsychologists debating the altruism-egoism question have always madeempirical claims, and it is now evident that the human sciencespossess resources to help us empirically assess those empiricalclaims.

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Acknowledgments

This entry expands and updates the “Egoism and Altruism”section in Doris, Stich, Phillips and Walmsley,“Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches”,The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition). Some material in this entry is borrowed from Stich, Doris and Roedder(2010).

For helpful suggestions, we are grateful to Mark Alfano, C. DanielBatson, William J. FitzPatrick, Adam Lerner, Joshua May, Samir Okasha,Gualtiero Piccinini, Alejandro Rosas, Thomas Schramme, Elliott Sober,Kim Sterelny, Valerie Tiberius and David Sloan Wilson. Our thanks toZhao Wang who helped assemble and check the references.