Contra Egoism

I have been thinking a lot about altruism over the last few years: its nature, evolutionary origins, and relationship to classical virtue in particular.  I turn here to consider the null hypothesis regarding altruism.  Egoism holds that there is no such thing as genuine altruism.  It strikes me that there are three obvious versions of egoism (there may be more) and that all of them are interesting and wrong. 

The most naïve of the three we may call impulse egoism.  According to this version of egoism, human beings are only moved to act by sensations and emotions, either pleasant or painful.  When we feel pleasure, we are moved to act in order to keep the pleasure coming and when we feel pain we act to eliminate the pain.  So I keep eating as long as I enjoy eating and drop a hot object when it burns my hand.  Likewise, if I act altruistically, say to rescue a child from some danger or pain, it is only because the sight of the child in distress causes me pain.  This view is hardly absurd.  We often do act under such impulses, even in cases where we act altruistically. 

It is naïve and wrong because I am just as obviously capable choosing courses of action which cause myself more pain or cost me more pleasure in the short run than were otherwise available at the moment.  If I sit quietly while the dentist pushes a needle into my gums, I am feeling pain right then in order to avoid pain that I am not and do not wish to experience in the future.  The naïve egoist might plead that I am acting out of an impulse of fear over future pain, but that clearly won’t do.  I am much more likely to be more afraid of what is just about to happen to me than what might happen later.  I get up to attend to my infant daughter even though all I am feeling right then is the agony of interrupted sleep and perhaps no small measure of irritation. 

The second version of egoism we may call motive egoism.  It acknowledges that we often act contrary to the impulses of pain and pleasure but insists that we always do so from selfish motives.  If I go to the dentist now it is to avoid pain that I might experience in the future.  If I act altruistically by tending to the hungry infant, it is not for the infant’s sake but to avoid the emotional pain that I anticipate I will feel if and when something bad happens to the infant.  The problem with this view is that it gets Descartes before de horse.  I tend to the infant or help out a friend because I genuinely care about the one and the other.  The pleasure that I will feel when my loved ones flourish is a consequence not the cause of my acting according to altruistic motives. 

It may be that the pleasures I feel when I benefit others are part of the process whereby altruistic motives are strengthened in my psychology.  Evolved inclinations toward altruism are responsive to experience because that makes them more flexible and adaptive.  Just as the absence of love may damage an infant’s psychology in more or less permanent ways, so our natural inclination toward altruism can be unlearned.  Nonetheless, in a health person altruistic motives are quite genuine.  It were simpler for evolution to design a creature that acts out of such motives and then is rewarded for it by emotional satisfaction than to design a creature that must calculate its own selfish interests in advance of every altruistic act. 

The third version of egoism we might call rational egoism.  This is the view that we should act selfishly.  The only rational motive for my actions is my benefit.  If I act to benefit others, even at my own short term expense, it can only be a rational action if it benefits me in some long range bottom line way.  Once again, I think that this gets it backwards.  I like fine wine and a properly cooked leg of lamb because these things please my palate.  There are all sorts of evolutionary explanations for these appetites, but the pleasure follows from the objects of my appetites and not the appetites from the pleasures.  If I like protein and fat and sugar, etc., it is because such appetites promoted the interests of my ancestor’s genetic success and make it more likely that I will leave offspring to pass on my genes.  What happens to my distant progeny will not benefit me, but I care about it nonetheless. 

The fact of the matter is that I do care about my family and my friends and my Republic.  I may care about them enough to sacrifice myself for the one or the other, though there is no way to tell until the moment of truth.  If caring about others in that way is part of the most satisfying human life, and I think that it is so, then it is simply wrong to say that I should act selfishly. 

Human beings are capable of acting from deliberation and not merely from impulses of pain and pleasure.  We are capable of caring as much or more about others than we do about ourselves.  The best human life is a life lived not only for selfish ends but also for the sake of other people.  Egoism says nothing much that is useful to say, except as a series of illuminating errors.  

Group Selection and the Evolution of Morality

Perhaps the best single article I have read on the group selection debate is “Evolution ‘for the Good of the Group’”, in American Scientist, September-October 2008.  It is another collaboration between the two Wilsons, E. O. and D.S.  I would add that it is also a very good introduction to the general question of the levels of selection‑genes, individuals, and groups, within a population. 

Group selection is one explanation for the evolution of altruism.  Any time one organism (or any unit within an organism) behaves in such a way as to confer a reproductive advantage to another organism at its own expense, this is evolutionary altruism.  Honey bee workers who serve the queen but do not themselves reproduce are behaving altruistically.  A vampire bat who regurgitates some hard won blood to feed a hungry roost mate is another example.  Many examples of altruism are easily explained in terms of deferred gratification (reciprocity) or benefit to closely related individuals (kin selection). 

Group selection theory is based on the claim that some altruistic behaviors are selected for because they benefit the group without any return to the altruist whether direct (deferred gratification) or indirect (kin selection).  A group with more altruists will be more reproductively successful than a group with fewer and so altruists may increase in the total population, at least initially.  Increase in the total population is what we mean by evolution. 

There seems to be an insuperable problem.  While between group selection might well favor altruistically endowed groups, within group selection will favor the selfish over the public spirited organisms.  Altruists would seem to be doomed to inevitable extinction as their selfish fellows outbreed them.  In this view, which held the field for a long time, group selection is unsustainable. 

However, group selection does in fact occur.  Wilson and Wilson present a number of forceful examples.  My favorite is the bacterium Pseudomonas fluorescens.

When this species is cultured in an unstirred broth, the cells soon consume most of the oxygen in the bulk of the medium, so only a thin layer near the surface remains habitable. A spontaneous mutation called wrinkly spreader causes cells to secrete a cellulosic polymer that forms a mat and helps them colonize the water surface. Production of the polymer is metabolically expensive, which means that nonproducing “cheaters” have the highest relative fitness within the mat; they get the benefit of the mat without contributing to its upkeep. However, if the proportion of cheaters grows too high, they are undone by their own success. The mat disintegrates, and the entire group sinks into the anoxic broth. Experiments by Paul B. Rainey and Katrina Rainey have shown that the wrinkly spreader trait is maintained in the population by group selection, even though it is disadvantageous within any one group.

This example illustrates the fact that the “free rider problem” is real.  The benefits of altruism in between group selection can indeed be undone when selfish cheaters crowed out the altruists.  At the same time, the very fact that mats form at all demonstrates that group selection was a powerful force in the evolution of this microbe.  Wrinkly spreader can only be maintained by its benefit to the community. 

Obviously, what is needed to maintain group selection is some mechanism for suppressing cheating.  I have no idea how this is done by bacteria but Christopher Boehm has a good idea how it is done among human hunter gatherers.  He argues in Moral Origins that social selection (reproductive benefits that result from a reputation for altruistic behavior) and sanctions against bullies (free riders) functioned to protect altruists from cheaters. 

Human beings are extraordinarily capable of altruism toward unrelated individuals.  Explaining this is a big challenge for evolutionary theory.  Boehm considers a number of explanations that are current in the scholarship.  He doesn’t reject them, but argues that some of them work only when cheating is suppressed by the mechanisms mentioned above. 

In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates argues that justice is analogous to medicine: it is a response to dysfunction in the social body.  I am inclined to think that the theory of group selection is beginning to uncover something like the Platonic idea of justice.  It may be that retribution is something that shapes all life on earth. 

The Two Wilsons on Group Selection

In connection with the paper I have been writing, I have been thinking a lot about group selection.  I have incorporated this quote from E. O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of the Earth:

An iron rule exists in genetic social evolution.  It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.  The victory can never be complete; the balance of selection pressure cannot move to either extreme

This strikes me as a very powerful formulation.  It includes the fundamental problem presented by the evolution of morality.  Here is how David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson put it in RETHINKING THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATION OF SOCIOBIOLOGY (Quarterly Review of Biology, December 2007).  

During evolution by natural selection, a heritable trait that increases the fitness of others in a group (or the group at a whole) at the expense of the individual possessing the trait will decline in frequency within the group. This is the fundamental problem that Darwin identified for traits associated with human morality, and it applies with equal force to group-advantageous traits in other species. It is simply a fact of social life that individuals must do things for each other to function successfully as a group, and that these actions usually do not maximize their relative fitness within the group.

The question here is how to explain the emergence of genuinely altruistic behaviors in human beings and other animals.  What separates the Mensheviks from the Bolsheviks in contemporary evolutionary theory is that the former try to explain it away whereas the latter try to explain how it can be what it seems to be. 

Explaining it away means interpreting apparently altruistic behavior as selfish behavior, keeping the rule that any behavior selected for must advance the genetic interests of the individual within the group.  If I share my kill with the rest of the tribe, that is because big hunters get lots of pussy. 

Explaining altruistic behavior while accepting that it is, genuinely, altruistic, may require group selection.  Cooperation is a trait not of individuals but of partnerships.  If you and I make sacrifices for each other, our business model turns a profit.  Groups with a lot of altruists out compete those with few, resulting in an increase of altruists in the larger population. 

I suppose that both approaches have value, but that puts me squarely on the side of the Bolsheviks.  The Mensheviks will allow only the selfish interpretation. 

The other thing that is presented in the E. O. Wilson quote is that group selection best makes sense of the moral dimension in human beings.  If group selection works, it will work against directly selfish behavior and the resulting schema will produce a being at odds with himself.  That would be me and you and all of us human beings. 

I also note that E. O. Wilson’s quote contains the paradox that we find in the prisoner’s dilemma.  In that diabolical issue of game theory, it makes perfect sense for each of us to defect in our partnership; nonetheless, we would both be better off if we cooperated.  I think that the Wilson’s are on to something.