| Sumario: | Economists, spellbound by the idea that economic man is inherently self-maximizing, have an almost comic aversion to the idea of altruism. While there are cases in which acts of apparent selflessness can be plausibly written off to enlightened self-interest, the casuist argument that a governess who reentered a burning house unobserved in a futile mission of rescue sacrificed herself solely to obtain the good feeling from doing it is not just wrong, but uninteresting, irrelevant, and, in the technical sense of logical positivism, meaningless. Darwin understood that the natural mother who dies to save a child is exercising altruism of a sort that has survival value in competition between different genotypes within a species. There is a lack of parallelism between group and individual genetic fitness: a hierarchy of levels of competition and cooperation, with no a priori presumption that what is conducive to survival at one level is also conducive at another.
|
|---|