Many seemingly altruistic behaviors do not truly stem from altruistic motivations. One can benefit others with the expectation of reward, with the desire to be praised or to avoid blame, or else to relieve the feeling of discomfort felt when witnessing others’ suffering. “Self-interested altruism” is a mixture of altruism and selfishness. It is not a hypocritical façade, since it aims sincerely to contribute to the good of others, but it remains conditional and is practiced only when it contributes to our own self-interest.
Human beings are ready to help each other and, while watching out for their own self-interest, use these favors as a bargaining chip. Fair trade, rituals of exchange in traditional societies, gift and counter-gift, are examples of this. This practice is compatible with feeling respect for others, insofar as one acts in a fair way and takes care not to harm anyone. Self-interested altruism is not necessarily deceitful, then. Nevertheless if an action that is profitable for an individual performing it is carried out with the intention of benefiting from it, one cannot qualify it as true altruism. What’s more, when it is not animated by a benevolent attitude, the mere practice of exchange often ends up in mistrust, dissimulation, manipulation, even hostility.
Self-interested altruism can also stem from selfishness, pure and simple. As La Rochefoucauld observed, “We often persuade ourselves to love people who are more powerful than we are, yet interest alone produces our friendship; we do not give our hearts away for the good we wish to do, but for that we expect to receive.”1 Mightn’t the altruist be only a “reasonable egoist,” in the words of Remy de Gourmont? Are we incapable of doing any better?
Some think that a quest for self-interested, rational, equitable altruism is a more realistic objective than the emergence in our societies of a selfless altruism. The French writer and political analyst Jacques Attali evokes the interdependence of human behavior as the foundational principle of this self-interested altruism:
Self-interested altruism is the transition between liberty and fraternity. I think our civilization will survive only if it can make it possible for each person to find happiness in the happiness of others.2 … Our self-interest lies in the happiness of others; peace at home depends on the reduction of poverty elsewhere.3
For the French economist and former Harvard and Stanford professor Serge-Christophe Kolm, the way to achieve this transition between liberty and fraternity is “general reciprocity”:
The voluntary, unconstrained altruism of reciprocity… founds on individual liberties those positive actions toward others that are the fabric of communal feeling: it is the reconciliation of liberty with fraternity.4
A harmonious society would be one that discovers a fair balance between the interests of each individual and those of the community, and one that favors an atmosphere of reciprocal benevolence. This benevolence is born from understanding that only when one respects such an equitable balance can the good of each person have a real chance of being accomplished. Philosopher André Comte-Sponville expresses it this way: “I think that the whole art of politics is to make selfish individuals more intelligent, which I call ‘solidarity’ and which Jacques Attali calls ‘self-interested altruism.’ It is a question of making people understand that it is in their own self-interest to take into account the interests of others.”5
A reciprocity that turns out to be equitable over the long term is an essential component of every human society and of a large number of animal societies. Cooperation is in fact essential to the survival of social animals. According to Darwin, “social instincts lead an animal to take pleasure in the society of its fellows, to feel a certain amount of sympathy with them, and to perform various services for them.… Social animals aid one another in many important ways… and warn one another of danger.”6
An often cited example of reciprocity among animals involves a particular species of bat, the vampire bat of Latin America. These vampires live in groups of about twenty, mainly females and their offspring. At night, they hunt farm animals, whose blood they drink. But many of them come back empty in the early morning, on an average of one night out of three. If, by misfortune, a vampire bat can’t find anything to feed on for two nights in a row, which is frequent among the young, she will probably not survive until the third night because of her high metabolic requirements. The starved bat will then approach one of her fellows to ask for food. The other bat almost always agrees to regurgitate some of the blood collected during the night.
The ethologist Gerald Wilkinson, who has studied bats for a long time, has shown that these regurgitations are not only offered among related females (mother-daughter or close relative), but also non-related females who have established alliances that can last as long as a dozen years. These females often remain together and engage in more mutual grooming than the others. If a female refuses several times to regurgitate blood for others, she will be shunned by the group, or even be expelled from the community roost. Because of this, she will risk dying of starvation when she in turns needs blood.7
In human societies, reciprocity constitutes the texture of a balanced community within which everyone is ready to help everyone else and shows gratitude when helped in turn. In a community where people know each other well, everyone takes it for granted that others will behave in a beneficial way toward them when the need arises. If a member of the community doesn’t play the game, such as by benefiting from a service performed by another without repaying it, he will quickly be ostracized by his peers.
In the high valleys of Zanskar, in the extreme northwest of India, community life is regulated by such a lasting reciprocity. In the villages, every year, a neighborhood of a dozen homes is chosen to take charge of the preparations for the New Year festivities. Each family must take turns offering a banquet to the neighborhood, during which a rich and abundant meal is prepared. Here it is out of tacit understanding that everyone feels obliged to respect. Associations are also formed in Zanskar of people not linked by blood, but by an oath taken during a religious ritual. At every important family event, like births, marriages, or deaths, the members of this fraternity help each other. At a death, for instance, they take charge of the expenses and organize the funeral. Over the course of recent years, a number of young people have emigrated to cities in the Indian plains, so these conventions of reciprocity have become harder to carry out for those who have remained in the village.8
This system of reciprocity is very different from an agreement or a commercial transaction. No one is bound by a contract and no one can force anyone to repay his debt. No external authority is involved. It would be inconceivable, even laughable, to go find the chief of the village to complain that Family X hasn’t sponsored the festivities in a long time. Talk and reputation is enough. Either one remains within the circle of reciprocity, or one leaves it, with the consequence that withdrawal would have: isolation.
Tribes in the Andes who lived before and during the Inca Empire, were structured in social units that resembled large families. Members of the community helped each other in working the fields, building houses, and the like. A very precise account was kept of the tasks carried out, and reciprocity implied equivalent hours of service: they were well aware of having helped to plow five furrows or having given a piece of cloth that had required a certain number of hours to weave, and a return was expected in service that was in proportion to its value or to the number of hours of work. Here too, reciprocity had a great value in enriching and preserving the social cohesion.9
Quantified reciprocity can lead to extreme situations, as it has for the Ik people in Africa, where a person might, against the owner’s will, plow his field or repair his roof while his back is turned, in the aim of imposing a debt of gratitude on him that will unfailingly be demanded when needed. “At one time I have seen so many men thatching a roof that the whole roof was in serious danger of collapsing, and the protests of the owner were of no avail,”10 reports Colin Turnbull, an anthropologist who studied the rituals of gift exchange among the Ik. One individual in particular “always made himself unpopular by accepting such help and by paying for it on the spot with food (which the cunning old fox knew they could not resist), which immediately negated the debt.” As an old Scandinavian adage says, “The greedy are always afraid of gifts.”11
But, in general, as Paul Ekman notes, “In small communities and villages, the more people cooperated, the more they became prosperous and their children had a better chance to survive. Among the people in New Guinea, where I worked fifty years ago, from cooking to childbirth to dealing with predators, they needed to work together. As for people who are only squabbling with others, no one wants to work with them. In a village, you can’t get away with exploiting others for long and you can’t run away from bad reputation either. So over time, the gene pool should be biased towards cooperation.”12
Reciprocity may also include a solidarity that goes beyond reciprocal giving. Among Tibetan nomads, for example, the birth rate, but also unfortunately the mortality rate among both mothers and infants, remains high. When a mother dies in labor, the orphans are almost automatically taken charge of by a related family living in a neighboring tent, and the two households merge into one, until the children are big enough or the widowed father remarries.
Everyone who practices this kind of community cooperation, from the Ik men who keep the trails clear in the African bush to the Papuans of New Guinea, testify to the joy they feel in uniting their efforts to achieve a common aim; they assert that these moments of shared labor and cooperation are among the most valued in daily life.
Still, in a much vaster community, like a metropolis, it is impossible to know all the other members of the community. That facilitates the emergence of those champions of “everyone for himself,” and profiteers who can thus evade the tacit commitment of reciprocity.
Cooperatives represent a form of voluntary, quasi-anonymous reciprocity (according to the size and function of these organizations). At the state level, institutions like Social Security and aid for the elderly, the impoverished, orphans, and the unemployed represent a form of generalized reciprocity.
The economist Serge-Christophe Kolm contends that the two economic systems that divided the world in the twentieth century—the capitalist, individualistic, market economy and the totalitarian, entirely state controlled economy—“are both based on selfishness, the pure and simple instrumentalization of the individual.”13 This economist defends the alternative model of a general reciprocity, “based on the best qualities in humans, on the best social relationships, which reinforce them.” He clarifies this notion of reciprocity: each person gives to society and receives from the totality of the others. As a general rule, the origin of the gift is not known. There is no specific donor. It’s “all for one, one for all.”14
We see, then, in light of this chapter, that self-interested altruism and reciprocal altruism are different from narrow-minded selfishness in that they allow constructive relationships to be woven between members of society. They can also be a springboard for selfless altruism. In fact, as people become aware of the virtues of benevolence, they may become more inclined to abandon the need to receive something in return, deciding instead that altruism deserves to be practiced with the sole aim of doing others good, without any egocentric consideration interfering with it.