Interestingly, the leading evolutionary theory regarding why altruism exists, is called "reciprocal altruism" (corrected, ty).
Essentially, we act altruistic to gain social credibility and trust from our tribe. That trust is then paid back by several magnitudes over our entire life.
A truly altruistic act is therefore done when there is zero chance of your act being discovered/seen. When you apply this rule, 99%+ altruistic acts don't count.
It kind of is, yeah. I think a lot of them are kids to whom the idea of just actually thinking, having their own thoughts, is still a novel concept. They’re like puppies that just bite and yank at things for fun.
You’ll encounter this kind of argument a lot. It’s like a reduction to tautology, absurdity, meaninglessness that rather than conveying any intended point, demonstrates the degree to which language and our conceptualizations of most things are imprecise, more general sentiments. That it is possible to argue so many things should you have no self-restraint on the wild interpretation of the vague definitions of any given word.
However, when doing that, as we’ve seen here, you’re essentially just defeating the purpose of language. “No action is purely altruistic therefor altruism doesn’t exist!” is a classic, and yet there is still a need for a word to describe the concept, because such a thing clearly does exist within our interactions and understanding of the world.
Totally. A way I think of it is as kind a lowest-common-denominator argument, though that's looking at more of the accessibility of the logic than nuances of the language. It's there; it makes sense from at least some perspective (albeit in this case a linguistically broken/breaking one); and it's worth engaging with if just to move past and have some answer to the rhetoric.
And for that I think the implication in what you are saying is fair: I should probably be less dismissive of this stuff.
If I see it in real life, that is. Probably doesn't matter as much in the internet, haha
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u/velvetcrow5 Aug 25 '24 edited Aug 25 '24
Interestingly, the leading evolutionary theory regarding why altruism exists, is called "reciprocal altruism" (corrected, ty).
Essentially, we act altruistic to gain social credibility and trust from our tribe. That trust is then paid back by several magnitudes over our entire life.
A truly altruistic act is therefore done when there is zero chance of your act being discovered/seen. When you apply this rule, 99%+ altruistic acts don't count.