The Impossibility of Altruism

It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings.

--Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual

An old joke has it that sadomasochist relationships are impossible because the masochist would beg his partner to hurt him and the sadist would refuse. 

By the same token, altruism (meaning the ethics of self-sacrifice, not merely niceness) is impossible. Theoretically, in an altruist world, no one could find anyone willing to accept his sacrifices because that would be selfish. But altruism requires other people to do so or else virtue is impossible. The way out is hypocrisy: people who preach self-sacrifice but who nevertheless stand ready to receive.

Rand would go on to say -- and I'm inclined to agree -- that the hypocrites shouldn't be called egoists, though many observers would do so. She'd say that people who relate to others not as traders but rather as parasites love themselves too little, not too much. Aristotle would agree. In contrast to altruism, rational egoism, or "selfishness," is an ethics that everyone can live by simultaneously without contradiction.

What Is Mutual Altruism?

According to Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, theft is "selfish," while trade is "mutually altruistic." If genes and people are "selfish," as Dawkins believes, why does mutual altruism, which includes all forms of cooperation, ever happen? He replies that it happens because mutual altruism benefits the parties more than "purely selfish" behavior would. This is an astounding acknowledgment. 

If that's so -- and I believe it is -- why not call cooperation mutual selfishness, mutual self-interest, or something like that? Why introduce the idea of mutual altruism if in fact such actions are more "selfish" than what Dawkins thinks of as pure selfishness. 

I admire Dawkins a great deal, but here is a case where better philosophy would have made for better evolutionary theory. As he would have it, altruism, at least in its mutual mode, is more selfish than selfishness, and that makes little sense.

No one shed more light on the mutual self-interest of cooperation than Ludwig von Mises in Human Action. See the section titled "The Harmony of the 'Rightly Understood' Interests" in chapter 24, where he writes, "The fact that my fellow man wants to acquire shoes as I do, does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier." Thus in the market human beings convert competition for consumption, which is the rule in the rest of the animal kingdom, into competition for production, which benefits all people.

That doesn't sound much like the law of the jungle, does it?