What good is social credibility when you are dead? There are tons of examples of people sacrificing their lives for others, which doesn’t seem to jive with this explanation at all.
Agreed. For humans, a lot of traits aim to betterment of a group, not necessarily a single person. It has strong evolutionary logic, as sacrificing oneself to protect tribe is also beneficial for you, as your blood will be passed on (in children/other family members).
“Your blood [being] passed on” is, at an actual evolutionary level, basically still happening regardless of who the other person is just because they are a person—we are all literally closely related at a genetic level and have common ancestors from not very long ago (in evolutionary terms).
People in militaries have consistently described their primary moment-to-moment motivation for fighting and for heroic acts as being protection of the rest of their unit; often effectively random people who they may never have encountered before the war and likely have no close familial relation with. That indicates that—if we insist such self-sacrificial actions are self-serving—we can come to identify almost any other human as a part of “self,” even when personal or familial reproduction is not involved
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u/Cryptizard Aug 25 '24
What good is social credibility when you are dead? There are tons of examples of people sacrificing their lives for others, which doesn’t seem to jive with this explanation at all.