The unbearable slightness of altruism: Why we need the virtues

Most of us are familiar with the idea that thought creates “models” of reality. So it’s easy to slip into thinking that our task is to make our models better and better — which is to say, more accurate representations of reality. But this ignores what Mary Midgley calls “philosophical plumbing,” which involves continuing careful thought about how well those ideas are doing their job.

That’s why I like Midgley’s alternative metaphor: that of “reality” as the body of water in a public aquarium with fish swimming through it, and of our “thought” as the various windows through which we can view that space.

The metaphor in terms of which thinking builds “models” of reality often leads to a kind of reductionism. Living in the physical world, we all acquire the intuition that smaller objects are the building blocks of larger ones and, in that sense, are more fundamental. The sandcastle is built of grains of sand and not vice versa. Those grains of sand are built from chemicals, and those chemicals are built from atoms, and so on.

Similarly, it has been proposed that physics investigates the most fundamental things about our universe, then chemistry, then biology, and then the social sciences. But Midgley’s “windows on an aquarium” conception of thought suggests otherwise:

There is, for example, the way a furniture maker studies tables (as solid things on which one can rest a cup) and the way sub-atomic physicists study tables (as collections of atoms that consist mostly of empty space). One is not more “real” than the other.

The easy intellectual pluralism of Midgley’s aquarium metaphor prompts us to ask how good the view is from each of the windows available to us. Any window might be large or small, clear or foggy. Its location might obscure important perspectives or enhance them.

Which brings me to my subject. Over the last two centuries, our ethical world has become impoverished. The ethical life used to have numerous windows, which we called the “virtues” — virtues such as courage, honesty, prudence, and justice. Adam Smith takes a peek through all these windows and more in his Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Today, however, the virtues seem old-fashioned; they are alien to much modern ethical thinking. Instead, we talk about “altruism.” But altruism is a new-fangled fiction, like “the ether” in nineteenth-century physics and cosmology — it’s a “filler” concept which enters our mind because it seems to be implied by the way we’re thinking. Its presence in our lives is experienced, if at all, only dimly. My argument is that we rely far too much on this particular window into our ethical life.

Metaphysical fictions

Most of us are familiar with the way the world of nineteenth-century physics posited the metaphysical entity of “the ether.” If we were to imagine that light travelled in “waves” like sound, that presupposed a medium in which they travelled. And this gave rise to the necessity of the ether, on which we also rested our terrestrial intuitions that the “space” within which the universe rested was just like the space of our everyday lives — an invariant three-dimensional place which we can divide up with coordinates up and down, left and right, in and out. All perfectly good science, it seems. Except it didn’t align with the discovery that the speed of light seemed to be invariant in spring and autumn, when the earth is hurtling in opposite directions around the sun.

I think altruism is a bit like the ether — although, of course, the analogy isn’t perfect — for like the ether, “altruism” isn’t something we discovered in nature. Rather, it is a name we applied to certain phenomena which were thrown up by a successful reductionist paradigm.

As I’ve been making myself more acquainted with evolutionary reasoning, it’s struck me how similar it is to neoclassical economics. In both fields, the debate proceeds according to tight protocols with respect to what is and is not acceptable in an explanation. In both fields, self-interest is the major driver of the way the world unfolds. (That the fields are so similar is not surprising. Darwin’s early inklings of natural selection came as he pondered political economist Thomas Malthus’s story of the human population’s struggle with the constraints of survival.)

In both fields, competition is the central engine of progress. In biology there’s endless debate about whether the unit of competition is genes, sub-organisms, individuals of a species, groups in a species or the species — or rather, what mix of these in different circumstances. In economics it is simpler: individuals (and sometimes organisations) compete.

In both paradigms, then, cooperation needs special explanation. “Altruism” emerges as a filler concept. It is nothing more than a word, a shortcut, to identify a particular phenomenon. In biology, of course, “altruism” is generally used without any kind of psychological baggage — and so biologists ask why ants fight “altruistically” for their whole communities. In this sense, altruism is a metaphysical notion. But metaphysical ideas like this have a habit of taking on a life of their own. Economists know all about that.

Anyone familiar with debates about economics as a discipline will be aware of the metaphysical fiction of “economic man” or homo economicus. In an age when people were keen to mark out the various disciplines’ intellectual territories, and to systematise their methods, economics came to define itself as seeking to understand the behaviour of people in the ordinary business of providing for their material needs. And the preeminent context for such conduct was within markets. And the essence of market behaviour is mutual self-seeking. So, when you shop at a local market, you and the vendor understand that you are both seeking to serve your own interest.

To capture this essence, a fictitious character was invented. Non-economists often don’t get that no one who uses homo economicus thinks that the character is real. The rub is that economists so often miss this detail as well. They understand that it is an abstraction — but one that runs away with them and comes to loom large — too large — in their thinking. It’s well known, for instance, that economists tend to overestimate the extent of people’s selfishness. Likewise, they have mostly ignored aspects of people’s make-up, some of which have been imported into behavioural economics from psychology.

Ethics without God?

“Altruism,” I contend, is a similar fiction. It may be surprising to learn that the term was coined by the French social philosopher August Comte in 1830. He derived it from the Latin alteri, meaning “other people.” By then, homo economicus was already in the — ahem — ether. John Stuart Mill published an essay “On the Definition of Political Economy” in 1836 which sketched out the concept, even if it took another fifty years for it to achieve its canonical, Latin form. So how did we get here? How did a concept so lacking in any sense of the psychology of our nature end up at the centre of our understanding of ethics?

As John Gray keeps reminding us, in apocalyptic terms, the imagery and basic categories of religious thinking continue to dominate the worldview of the West — not least among those who imagine themselves to have heroically thrown off religion’s shackles.

Mary Midgley’s friend, the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, was one of the first to bell the cat on this contradiction. In 1958, she warned that modern approaches to ethics transitioned from Christianity to a world in which God was optional, but retained Christianity’s structure, presuming that morality came down to us from a singular giver of commands: “Let there be light.”

The virtues

The ethics of the classical world weren’t just pre-Christian. They were pre-monotheistic. Thus, for instance, not imagining it as part of some grand, unified set of commands from on high, Aristotle built his ethics, not from the top down (deduced from commands or strict protocols of thought) but from the bottom up (from life as it was experienced). Aristotle, of course, named eleven virtues — courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, patience, truthfulness, wittiness, friendliness, shame, and justice — each of which sits somewhere between two qualities of mind that define it but are not as good. So courage is the mid-point between cowardice and recklessness: someone with courage is aware of danger, perhaps feels fear, but overcomes it to act as they should.

Unlike altruism, these virtues describe qualities that are already part of our lives and which most of us want to foster. They also provide the means by which humans might pursue happiness and fulfilment in the broadest, wisest sense. The point of classical ethical treatises — from Aristotle to the Stoics — was to show readers how, and indeed to entice them, to embody these virtues in their own daily lives. This is why the ethical treatises in this tradition so often resemble what we would call “self-help books.” Certainly Russ Roberts has shown how true this was of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.

So the virtues had psychological content. As Aristotle put it, virtue is excellence at being human, and one learns it one’s whole life. By contrast, when I think about altruism, and the thinness of its appeal to us, I cannot help but recall the day I saw a priest with nothing better to offer his captive audience of Catholic school girls than to urge them to “try to be more like Jesus” — the girls remained appropriately zoned out throughout his talk. Did Jesus of Nazareth say anything as inane and contentless as that?

Windows onto the soul

In so far as “altruism” exists as a factor in our psychology, it resembles what Adam Smith called the virtue of “beneficence”: “the ornament which embellishes, not the foundation which supports the building.” We can measure the significance of “altruism” in the national accounts by asking how much we give to others. It’s usually around 1 per cent and always less than 2 per cent of GDP.

Now a score of Altruism - 1 and Self-interest - 99, doesn’t look too good. However, as I’ve argued elsewhere, I think the notion of shared intentionality is useful at this point. It helps us shed some scientific light on the contrast between the virtues and altruism. Here are two researchers explaining shared intentionality:

It has been hypothesized that the evolution of modern human cognition was catalyzed by the development of jointly intentional modes of behaviour. From an early age (1-2 years), human infants outperform apes at tasks that involve collaborative activity. Specifically, human infants excel at joint action motivated by reasoning of the form “we will do X” (shared intentions), as opposed to reasoning of the form “I will do X [because he is doing X]” (individual intentions).

This gets us much closer to understanding ethical life, I believe. Like the sacrifices made from workplaces to families, from the football oval to the battlefield, most sacrifice isn’t experienced as sacrifice but as the acts we do as part of a “we.” In fact, as a community, those in the developed world collectively choose a position where self-interest gives up around 40 per cent of its earnings to government. In this reckoning the scoreboard looks more like: Altruism - 1; Shared intentionality - 40; and Self-interest - 59.

It is in this context of our lives being shot through with so many “I’s” within different “We’s” that the virtues make so much more sense — and have so much more power to move us toward that goal of personal and collective excellence that Aristotle talks about.

Where altruism dichotomises the ethical life — identifying two forces, selfishness and selflessness, and two parties, ourselves and others — the virtues mediate our social and ethical relations in all their subtlety and difference. To use Mary Midgley’s metaphor, they provide us with windows onto the reality of own souls and those of others, as well as onto the reality of our own agency in shaping those souls and their destiny.

Nicholas Gruen is CEO of Lateral Economics and Visiting Professor in the Policy Institute at King’s College London.