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?

Hayek on Rules, Tradition, and Freedom

There is advantage in obedience to such [moral and other social] rules not being coerced, not only because coercion as such is bad, but because it is, in fact, often desirable that rules would be observed only in most instances and that the individual should be able to transgress them when it seems to him worthwhile to incur the odium which this will cause. It is also important that the strength of the social pressure and of the force of habit which insures their observance is variable. It is this flexibility of voluntary rules which in the field of morals makes gradual evolution and spontaneous growth possible, which allows further experience to lead to modifications and improvements. Such an evolution is possible only with rules which are neither coercive nor deliberately imposed -- rules which, though observing them is regarded as merit and though they will be observed by the majority, can be broken by individuals who feel that they have strong enough reasons to brave the censure of their fellows. Unlike any deliberately imposed coercive rules, which can be change only discontinuously and for all at the same time, rules of this kind allow for gradual and experimental change. The existence of individuals and groups simultaneously observing partially different rules provides the opportunity for the selection of the more effective ones. 

F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960: 62-63)