ICE BREAKER:

SINGING BEE

It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me

At tea time, everybody agrees
I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror
It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero
Sometimes I feel like everybody is a sexy baby
And I'm a monster on the hill
Too big to hang out, slowly lurching toward your favorite city
Pierced through the heart, but never killed
Did you hear my covert narcissism I disguise as _____________
Like some kind of congressman? (Tale as old as time)
I wake up screaming from dreaming
One day I'll watch as you're leaving
And life will lose all its meaning
(For the last time)

ANSWER: ATRUISM

EVOLUTION AND ALTRUISM

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If sheer unadulterated ethical egoism is an inadequate moral theory, does that mean we ought
to aim at complete altruism, total selflessness for the sake of others? An interesting place to start
answering this question is with the new field of sociobiology, which theorizes that social structures and
behavioral patterns, including morality, have a biological base explained by evolutionary theory.

In the past, linking ethics to evolution meant justifying exploitation. Nineteenth-century social
Darwinism applied the notion of “survival of the fittest” to virtually all aspects of social life, often leading
to the position that “might makes right”: The most powerful force in society is the one that dominates
and makes all the rules. This in turn justified imperialistic rule of preindustrial societies around the globe.
This philosophy lent itself to a promotion of ruthless egoism:

This is nature’s law, “nature red in tooth and claw.” In more recent times, though, animal
scientists have argued for a more gentle view of the animal kingdom in which animals often survive by
cooperating with other members of their species—a social behavior that is at least as important as
competition. The goal for these animals is not so much survival for them individually but survival of their
genes. Indeed, in his book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins argues that behavior is determined
evolutionarily by strategies set to replicate our genes. This is not done consciously, of course, but by the
invisible hand that drives consciousness. We are essentially gene-perpetuating machines.

BENEDICK

12 Morality—that is, successful morality—can be seen as an evolutionary strategy for gene

replication. That is, groups who adopted morality increased their chances of surviving, and those that
didn’t eventually died out. Here’s a good example from the animal world. Birds are afflicted with life-
endangering parasites. Because they lack limbs to enable them to pick the parasites off their heads, they
—like much of the animal kingdom—depend on the ritual of mutual grooming. It turns out that nature
has evolved two basic types of birds in this regard: those who are disposed to groom anyone and those
who refuse to groom anyone but others who present themselves for grooming. The former type of bird
Dawkins calls “Suckers” and the latter “Cheaters.” In a geographical area containing harmful parasites
and where there are only Suckers or Cheaters, Suckers will do fairly well, but Cheaters will not survive for
lack of cooperation. However, in a Sucker population in which a mutant Cheater arises, the Cheater will
prosper, and the Cheater-gene type will multiply. As the Suckers are exploited, they will gradually die out.
But, if and when they become too few to groom the Cheaters, the Cheaters will start to die off too and
eventually become extinct. Why don’t birds all die off, then? Well, somehow nature has come up with a
third type, call them “Grudgers.” Grudgers groom only those who reciprocate in grooming them. They
groom one another and Suckers, but not Cheaters. In fact, once caught, a Cheater is marked forever.
There is no forgiveness. It turns out then that unless there are a lot of Suckers around, Cheaters have a
hard time of it—harder even than Suckers. However, it is the Grudgers that prosper. Unlike Suckers, they
don’t waste time messing with unappreciative Cheaters, so they are not exploited and have ample
energy to gather food and build better nests for their loved ones. The point of the bird example is this:
Showing reciprocal altruism to others (you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours) is a good strategy for
survival. Pure altruism is a failure, as is pure egoism. Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson illustrate this
point about reciprocal altruism through the system of distributing socially beneficial rewards and
punishments. They take the case of the hunter who spends an enormous amount of time hunting at
great risk to himself but distributes food to the entire group, hunters and nonhunters alike. This
seemingly altruistic, group-enhancing behavior, it turns out, is rewarded by the group: It turns out that
women think that good hunters are sexy and have more children with them, both in and out of marriage.
Good hunters also enjoy a high status among men, which leads to additional benefits. Finally, individuals
do not share meat the way Mr. Rogers and Barney and Dinosaur would, out of the goodness of their
heart. Refusing to share is a serious breach of etiquette that provokes punishment. In this way sharing
merges with taking. These new discoveries make you feel better, because the apparently altruistic
behavior of sharing meat that would have been difficult to explain now seems to fit comfortably within
the framework of individual selection theory.

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13 So, although hunting might at first sight appear an example of pure altruism, the rule of
reciprocity comes into play, rewarding the hunter for his sacrifice and contribution to the group. Sober
and Wilson call activities like hunting, which increase the relative fitness of the hunter, primary behavior,
and the rewards and punishment that others confer on the hunters, secondary behavior. “By itself, the
primary behavior increases the fitness of the group and decreases the relative fitness of the hunters
within the group. But the secondary behaviors offset the hunters’ sacrifice and promote altruistic
behavior, so that they may be called the amplification of altruism.”

14 This primitive notion of reciprocity seems to be necessary in a world like ours. One good deed
deserves another, and similarly, one bad deed deserves another. Reciprocity is the basis of desert—good
deeds should be rewarded and bad deeds punished. We are grateful for favors rendered and thereby
have an impulse to return the favor; we resent harmful deeds and seek to pay the culprit back in kind
(“an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life”). What lessons can we learn from sociobiology’s
account of morality? There is indeed a difference between pure altruism and reciprocal altruism, but, to
a degree, we have duties to both of these kinds of altruism. On the one hand, we seem to have a special
duty of pure altruism toward those in the close circle of our concern—namely, our family and friends.
Our behavior toward them should be as selfless as possible. On the other hand, we have duties to
cooperate and reciprocate but no duty to serve those who manipulate us, nor any obvious duty to
sacrifice ourselves for people outside our domain of special responsibility. The larger lesson to be drawn
is that we should provide moral training so that children grow up to be spontaneously altruistic in a
society that rewards such socially useful behavior. In this way, what is legitimate about egoism can be
merged with altruism in a manner that produces deep individual flourishing. Through our efforts to instill
altruistic behavior in our children, we increasingly expand the circle of our moral concerns, wider and
wider, eventually reaching all humanity, and, possibly, the animal kingdom.
 CONCLUSION Martin Luther, the Protestant reformer, once said that humanity is like a man who,
when mounting a horse, always falls off on the opposite side, especially when he tries to
overcompensate for his previous exaggerations. So it is with ethical egoism. Trying to compensate for an
irrational, guilt-ridden, Sucker altruism of the morality of self-effacement, it falls off the horse on the
other side, embracing a Cheater’s preoccupation with self-exaltation that robs the self of the deepest
joys in life. Only the person who mounts properly, avoiding both extremes, is likely to ride the horse of
happiness to its goal