A little after 09:00 on 11 September 2001, minutes after the lethal impact of United Airlines Flight 175, a small group of terrified survivors huddled in the wrecked sky lobby on the 78th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower. Some had suffered terrible burns; all were traumatized by the appalling chaos and carnage surrounding them: they were praying for help but in fact – unwittingly, in the doomed tower – were merely awaiting death. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a young man appeared, stripped to his T-shirt and wearing a red bandana to shield his nose and mouth. Quickly taking charge, he guided the dazed survivors to an open stairwell, which was shrouded in smoke and debris. Fifteen floors below, he left those whose lives he had saved (including a young black woman he had carried on his back) and headed back up to repeat his heroics in the inferno above.
Six months later the body of 24-year-old equities trader and volunteer firefighter Welles Crowther was recovered in the main lobby of the South Tower. Within a few weeks he had been identified by two women who owed their lives to him as the ‘man in the red bandana’. He had apparently been setting off on yet another rescue mission at the moment he was crushed by the collapsing tower. When the extent of his courage became clear, his mother spoke of her pride in his ‘sense of duty to help others’, while his father expressed a hope of the legacy his son might leave: ‘If Welles’s story helps people to think of others, then God bless them, God bless him.’
It is noteworthy that both of Crowther’s parents singled out their son’s selfless regard for others. Alongside his great courage, he gave an extraordinary display of altruism: a willingness to set the interests and welfare of others above his own – to the ultimate degree of sacrificing his own life. It would be offensive to our ordinary sense of morality to suggest that the young man’s behaviour was motivated in any way by self-interest, as the excellence of his actions would thereby be diminished. Yet the notion of pure altruism has been philosophically perplexing since antiquity. Several of the sophists – philosophers for hire – who locked horns with Plato’s Socrates glibly assumed that benevolence to others was apparent only and that the true motive, if you scratched beneath the surface, was always self-interest. Many more recent thinkers have argued either that people are, as a matter of fact, motivated by concern for their own interests (psychological egoism); or that their behaviour should be guided by such concerns (ethical egoism). Thus Thomas Hobbes, for instance, takes it for granted that people in the ‘state of nature’ will be in constant conflict with others to further their own ends; while Friedrich Nietzsche condemns charity and altruistic behaviour as manifestations of the slave morality by which the weak have subdued the strong. And particularly over the last century and a half, since the revolutionary work of Charles Darwin, these many philosophical doubts have been reinforced by biological ones.
‘Of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself.’
Thomas Hobbes, 1651
‘Men often act knowingly against their interest.’
David Hume, 1740
Do the good die young? Humans are by no means the only animals to exhibit altruistic (or apparently altruistic) behaviour. Certain kinds of monkeys and deer, for instance, give alarm calls or signs as a warning to other members of their group that a predator is nearby, even though by doing so they risk danger to themselves. In social insects such as bees and ants, certain castes do not (and cannot) breed, devoting themselves entirely to the well-being of the colony. It doesn’t matter that such behaviour is typically instinctive rather than deliberate; the important point is that it has the effect of promoting others’ interests at the expense of the agent.
The difficulty of accommodating such behaviour within the framework of Darwin’s theory of evolution is clear enough. The principal mechanism by which Darwinian evolution proceeds is natural selection – the ‘survival of the fittest’: animals that are endowed with qualities that allow them to survive longer and produce more offspring (on average) are ‘selected’ by nature; and hence those beneficial qualities (to the extent that they are inheritable) tend to survive and become more common in the population. In such circumstances we expect animals to behave in ways that enhance their own life prospects, not those of others. No forms of behaviour could be less likely than altruism and self-sacrifice to enhance an agent’s survival prospects, so we might predict that animals disposed to act altruistically would be at a great selective disadvantage and would rapidly be eliminated from the population by their more selfish fellows. Darwin himself, well aware of the problem, summed it up in his Descent of Man (1871):
‘It is extremely doubtful whether the offspring of the more sympathetic and benevolent parents … would be reared in greater number than the children of selfish and treacherous parents … He who was ready to sacrifice his own life, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.’
‘The weak and illconstituted shall perish: first principle of our philanthropy.’
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1888
Looking after one’s own An explanation of this puzzle begins to emerge when we recognize that it does not necessarily have to be the ‘offspring of the benevolent parents’ that carry altruistic tendencies into the next generation: it may be sufficient for cousins and other relatives to do so. In other words, it is not the survival of an altruistic individual that matters, provided that the genetic material that contributed to its altruistic disposition survives, and this can be achieved through relatives that share some of the same genes. For natural selection to operate in this way, through so-called ‘kin selection’, we would expect altruistic individuals to favour relatives as beneficiaries of their altruistic behaviour, and this has indeed been confirmed by research.
Nobody who believes in Darwinian evolution (and that includes virtually every biologist on the planet) would deny that humans are the products of evolutionary processes, so mechanisms such as kin selection offer explanations of how altruistic behaviour may have evolved in humans. The problem, of course, is that biological altruism of this kind is not ‘pure’ or ‘real’ altruism at all: it is a way of explaining behaviour that benefits others in terms of the agent’s (ultimate) self-interest – or at least in terms of its genes’ interest. And if this is the only way of explaining altruistic behaviour, it is obvious that ‘real’ altruism – behaviour that benefits others irrespective of, or in opposition to, the agent’s interests – cannot exist in a Darwinian world.
Deep-rooted intuitions, not to mention cases like the story of Welles Crowther, may lead us to balk at such a conclusion. Like David Hume, we are likely to protest that ‘The voice of nature and experience seems plainly to oppose the selfish theory’ – the idea that human benevolence can be reduced ultimately to self-interest. Large areas of human behaviour are hard to explain in purely evolutionary terms, and to pretend otherwise is to ignore the subtle role played by cultural and other influences. Nevertheless, the lessons of biology may leave us with an uncomfortable sense of the degree to which self-interest underlies what we ordinarily think of as benevolent and altruistic behaviour.
the condensed idea
Selfless or selfish?