Quest for Altruism Quest for Altruism Ethic Beyond Biology, Economics and Theology Artur Stern Bion Institute
Abstract In this article I argue against a too loose nowadays usage of the term altruism. Since its introduction into the domain of biology as a technical term, it has lost a great deal of its ethical meaning—which, to be true, had been disputed even before, by philosophers of the Hobbesian stream. Arguments herein are produced first in order to detach altruism from manipulatedness, reciprocity and kin selection, which are three large domains in the present-day biological thought. If, further on, altruism is to be freed of any additional doubts about its ethical value it also has to transcend the sphere of economics, and finally the one of theology as well.
Introduction Ever since antiquity in western civilization there has been much talk about ethical attitude towards other human beings. Yet the term altruism was not used until around 1830, when it was introduced by Auguste Comte. In his Systeme de la politique positive (1854) he defined it as attachment to fellow-people, respect for them, and a positive, good attitude towards the mankind (Sruk 1986, p. 27). Confucianism, however, had been using the term zhu, which bore a much similar meaning to the above-described one, more than two thousand years before that (Hribar 1988, pp. 140-146). Altruism itself—not as a name but as a phenomenon—had surely been known longer, still. Moreover, it might had existed even before the time when it could have possibly been observed—at least by the human mind 1. On the other side there exists nearly as powerful a tradition in the stream of the philosophical thought, which contradicts the former entirely. It was thoroughly elaborated by Thomas Hobbes (1651/1987) and expressed in his famous statement about bellum omnia contra omnes and in the outcoming conviction that there was no such phenomenon as altruism 2; but one can trace back its origins down to Greek sophists or even further—in a similar way as was the case with the formerly described stream. A new scientific purview was made possible by the advent of the era of Darwinism. By the first glance this evolutionary theory seemed to support 1Namely, there are certain proposals from the area of philosophy of biology, to equal life and cognition (Heschl 1990)—which, if accepted, would lead us to adopt evolutionary epistemology (Wuketits 1990), and would also undermine our statement above that implies the difference between existence and being observed.
2Words were different—since altruism as a term did not exist—but the meaning was as it goes.
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