Are There Altruistic Motives, Not Just Altruistic Behaviors?
The second part of this book focuses on the psychology of altruism. That is, it asks whether altruism exists as a human motive. It looks for cases in which an action not only has an altruistic effect, but whether that was the intention of the actor. There is evidence that rules out selfish motives in some situations. For example, it is not true that we are altruistic because we want others to like or trust us, or to avoid their punishment of us if we are selfish. People will be compassionate whether or not others will know what they did. Nor is it true that we are altruistic only to avoid discomfort of guilt. People will be altruistic even when they are given a good justification for not doing so. However, it is difficult to truly disprove that selfishness is the ultimate motivation for an altruistic behavior. As said earlier, we might simply be not aware of how our selfishness evolved into a conscious motivation not to be selfish. The difficulties inherent in sorting out motivations m
