Dear me! What a pretty pass we find ourselves in, if it is now necessary to apologize for/justify altruistic acts of charity.
Charity -- "caritas" -- of course embraces much more than alms-giving (just as alms-giving embraces much more than hand-outs to professional beggars). I like to define it primarily as "generosity of spirit." In an earlier post, I quoted Mohammed: "Even meeting your brother with a cheerful face is charity." Practicing charity, broadly understood, is central to all three major Middle Eastern religions. Buddhism is less activist, but it places even greater emphasis on the emotion that fuels charity - compassion, by which is meant not just compassion for one's fellow humans, but for all creation.
At the same time, no major religion regards charity/altruism as the antithesis of self-interest/self-regard. On the cont rary. For Christians, for example, it is seen as a way of "saving" one's own soul. For Buddhists, developing compassion for all living things helps one reach Nirvana (although a Bodhisattva will refuse to enter Nirvana, until the rest of creation can enter along with him/her). In short, practicing charity is for the purpose of self-improvement; it makes one a better, a more developed person.
Philosophers, as you know, have also had plenty to say on these matters. I don't know whether you have read it, Neo, but I think you might find some congenial thoughts in Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He spends a good deal of time discussing altruism. Of particular interest to you, I should think, would be Smith's position that self-interest and what he calls "other-interest" both spring from the same sentiment (sympathy); that is to say, they are not antagonistic to one another, but represent different points on the same continuum.
Here is a brief summary of the salient points:
Concerning benevolence, Smith stressed that sympathy expresses the genuine concern over the interests of others, in short "other-interest." This concern entails that the benefactor has to suspend his own interest. The negation of self-interest, however, does not mean that altruism stems from a principle which is radically different from self-interest. For Smith, the motive to satisfy self-interest and other-interest stems from the same
general tendency of humans to sympathize--in one case with the self and in the other with the beneficiary. That is, Smith did not view self-interest as radically different from other-interest: both are simply different instances
of sympathy. We witness that man acts more often in sympathy with the self(i.e., out of self-interest) because man is obviously more familiar with the circumstance of his own self than with the circumstance of others: Every man, as the Stoics used to say, is first and principally recommended
to his own care; and every man is certainly, in every respect, fitter and abler to take care of himself than of any other person. Every man feels his own pleasures and his own pains more sensibly than those of other people. The former are original sensations; the latter the reflected or sympathetic images of those sensation.
To ground altruism on sympathy _ la Smith allows one to explain why altruistic action is contingent on the donor's familiarity with the donee. There is a stronger motive to help a stranded person if the person happens to be a close acquaintance rather than, ceteris paribus, a distant
associate. And man is more motivated to help, after himself, the ones who live in the same house with him than "the greater part of other people"; after himself, the members of his own family, those who usually live in the same house with him, his parents, his children, his brothers and sisters, are naturally the objects of his warmest affections. They are naturally andusually the persons upon whose happiness or misery his conduct must have the greatest influence. He is more habituated to sympathize with them. He knows better how every thing is likely to affect them, and his sympathy with them is more precise and determinate, than it can be with the greater part of other people. It approaches nearer, in short, to what he feels for himself.
home.uchicago.edu
I don't know whether Smith makes this argument or not, but it seems to me that the obvious conclusion to be drawn here is that the more highly developed an individual's capacity for empathy is, the more highly developed his imagination (his ability to "put himself in the other fellow's place") is, then the wider the circle of his "other-interest" will be.
I also don't remember whether Smith deals with two clear problems in this rather sunny scheme: 1) self-interest is not always benign; in some people you find a pathological ego, incapable of understanding, let alone sympathizing with, anyone/anything outside itself; 2) "other-interest" can also be malign, as when it extends exclusively to members of one's own group -- one's own family, or one's own tribe, or nation, or race, or whatever. That produces the "bad WE," the "US vs. THEM" mentality, groupism.
But the wider the individual's sympathies, the less likely that is to occur. In fact, I don't at all understand what some folks here appear to be arguing: namely, that there is some sort of I/WE dichotomy between practitioners of (enlightened) self-interest, on the one hand, and practitioners of (disinterested) altruism on the other.
I have had the privilege of knowing a few people in the latter category, whose "generosity of spirit" was truly extraordinary. They were all highly independent, colorful, even "ornery" characters. Nothing "we-like" or "sheep-faced" about them.
One last point, Neo. I think you worry overmuch about the possibility that "other-interest" is going to overpower "self-interest." I would be more concerned about the reverse.
Joan |
