X-Message-Number: 16912
Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 21:17:17 -0700
From: Lee Corbin <>
Subject: Values

Robert Ettinger wrote

> Nothing outside yourself has "intrinsic" value; its
> value (to you) arises only as it affects you. In the
> most fundamental sense, there is no such thing as altruism.

I may not be correctly reading "affects you", but I 
think that Bob means "affects your self-interest".

Mike Perry is more explicit:

> it is easy to argue that consideration for fellow beings 
> should be important, without requiring any denial that
> selfish interests, on some level, are really all that
> matter or can matter for the individual.

May I characterize these as the "old view"?  I was surprised
when I read Matt Ridley's "The Origins of Virtue", as he
summarized (and gave plenty of references for) what anthro-
pologists have discovered during recent decades.  Once I
read his account, and several others since then, my views
changed.

Before 1995, if you had asked me why people appeared to be
altruistic towards others (and even appeared to be civil),
I would have answered that children are civilized by adults,
and people are trained as they grow up to be kind and decent.
I would have further elaborated that the old-time religious
views of man as essentially wicked were mostly correct, and
that our self-interest had to be moderated by memes.

Even before then, however, I was vastly amused by how 
libertarians would jump through hoops trying to prove that
everything they did was for their own self-interest.  When
some of those people were obviously acting for the best
interests of others, they seemed to be embarrassed by it.
I would have taken them aside, and explained that their
altruism had indeed become almost "genuine", in the sense
that it had become second nature by virtue of the conditioning
that they had received.  I only partly right.

It is now held that people are *innately* altruistic in many
circumstances.  The biggest and most immediate question for
a modern thinker---i.e., one who seeks evolutionary explanations
for human behavior---is how it could have ever happened.  There
are several persuasive theories, and Matt Ridley describes them
well.  But my favorite comes from Sarah Hrdy's book "Mother Nature".

She says that in the arms race between men and women, the man
had to be pretty convincing that he would be a good husband.
(It's in his evolutionary interest, of course, to hit and run,
i.e., leave as much sperm wherever to generate the maximum number
of offspring.  It's in hers to very carefully raise a number of
specific children (hers) to reproductive age.)  Anyway, the
woman tries to detect whether the man really has the classical
virtues, among them genuine kindness, so that her children will
be the beneficiaries of this disposition.  The man's "strategy"
is to put up a convincing front if possible, and then hit and
run.  This arms race is raging even now, of course.  But, it
is claimed, women have been partially successful in detecting
genuine kindness, and have "rewarded" actually kind men with
favors.  Thus this behavioral characteristic has found its
way into our genes.

That's just one of many mechanisms that evolutionary biologists
are considering.  But the bottom line appears to be that a good
deal of kind behavior towards others lies in the genetic makeup
of many of us.

Lee

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