Altruism as a problem involving group versus individual selection in economics and biology.
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 wh...
| Publicado en: | American Economic Review Vol. 83; pp. 143 - 149 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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American Economic Association
May 1993
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=512224066&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 512224066 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00028282 AER jtl: American Economic Review issn: 00028282 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: May 1993 vid: 83 pid: 22 pub: American Economic Association artinfo: ui: 512224066 ppf: 143 ppct: 6 formats: tig: atl: Altruism as a problem involving group versus individual selection in economics and biology. aug: au: Samuelson, Paul Anthony su: Natural selection Altruism Biology Economics sug: subj: Natural selection Altruism Biology Economics keyword: Biological concepts in economics ab: 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. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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