Unthinking Altruism

My friend took me out to lunch the other day. En route in his car we came to a narrow stop-light intersection in a construction zone, with cars backed up. When the light turned green my friend held back to allow a truck to exit an establishment on our side of the road and cross our lane and into the oncoming lane. This caused another delay, so that by the time the truck cleared our lane there was only an opportunity for our car and one or two others behind us to get through the intersection. 

            It struck me that my friend, in being considerate of the truck driver, was failing completely to take into account the needs of the many car drivers behind us. The more effective altruism, therefore, it seemed to me, would have been for us to drive ahead and hope that, when the light turned red, some driver would stop their car far enough behind the stopped car in front of them to allow the truck to pass through while all the cars were stopped anyway.[1] 

            When we got to the restaurant, my friend very jauntily told the maître d’, who had apologized for keeping us waiting at the busy lunch hour, that we were in no hurry. However, in this gesture of consideration for the wait staff, my friend did not consult me. I eventually told him I was “starving” as I watched the waiter, perhaps under the maître d’s direction, casually going from table to table while ignoring ours. It may well be that the staff interpreted my friend’s remark to mean that we preferred to take our time and just chat before any food was served. 

            I conclude that my friend’s altruism was spontaneous but not reflective, and that the two elements working together make for the most altruistic altruism.

[1] This reminds me of the following rabbi joke:

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi are playing golf. Up ahead of them is another group, who are taking a long time to move forward. Finally the rabbi turns to the caddy and asks, “What is taking those people so long?” “Oh,” replies the caddy, “they’re blind.”

Upon hearing the caddy’s response, the priest exclaims, “It’s a miracle! Blind golfers! I’m going to call the Pope.”

The minister chimes in, “We must start up a charity for blind golfers. It’s the right thing to do.”

Then the rabbi says, “So they couldn’t play at night?”

Popular posts from this blog

Vivisection and Ethics: cutting to the quick

Published in AV Magazine , vol. 117, no. 4 , pp. 2-3, fall 2009 issue [January 2010] The central contradiction of vivisection is that animals are used for research precisely because of their similarities to humans, and yet by that very use they are implicitly denied a place in the moral community. Somehow our commonality of physiology and sentience is deemed to be a completely separate matter from our respective rights, including the most basic right simply to be let alone. Procedures that ethical researchers would never think to perform on human beings are, in consequence, routinely performed on other animals. The very condition of being an animal that is used for experimentation would be ruled out for a human being, since at a minimum it involves involuntary confinement and isolation. Beyond this, countless animals are subjected to invasive practices, including the most invasive of all: manipulation of their very nature by being bred specifically for experimental purposes. Thus, vi
Read more

The Singer Diet

Copyright (c) 2007 by Joel Marks Published as “Book makes case for thinking about what we eat” in the New Haven Register , May 16, 2007, page A6 America’s slaughterhouses kill 10 billion animals every year. Think about that. That is what philosopher Peter Singer asks us to do in his new book, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (Rodale, 2006). Co-authored by former farm boy Jim Mason, this book demands a strong stomach to read. It is not often that a philosophy book informs you that an important “factor relative to global warming concerns cows burping and farting” (page 206). By the same token, you are not likely to learn from the typical book on animal husbandry that our treatment of nonhuman animals for food rivals anything in Dante’s vision of hell. It is important that we expose ourselves to this kind of shock treatment. It is a morally necessary antidote to the deceptive depiction of wholesome livestock lives foisted upon us by the food industry. Nevertheless Singer and M
Read more

Turning the Tables: We Matter Because We Are Animals

by Joel Marks Published in Philosophy Now , Issue No. 67, May/June 2008, p. 37. Recent times have seen an ever-increasing interest in our similarity to other great apes and ultimately to all other animals. While sometimes this research has been motivated by sheer interest, it also forms a backdrop to a heightening moral concern about other animals. Following the same logic as earlier efforts (mainly philosophical) to establish human uniqueness by distinguishing us from other animals (for example, Aristotle took us to be the rational animal, and Descartes highlighted our language ability), this new research program seeks to establish the opposite thesis of the moral considerability of other animals by demonstrating their similarity to us. Sometimes the similarity is found at the genetic level, where human and animal genomes turn out to be much more like than different. At other times the similarity is found at the everyday level, such as the sentience, emotions, and even cognitive a
Read more