Putting Altruism in Context∗

I argue that Rachlin’s notion of self control is imprecise and not well suited to the discussion of altruism. Rachlin’s broader agenda, to improve collective welfare by identifying behavioral mechanisms that increase altruism, neglects the fact that altruism is neither necessary nor sufficient for desirable social outcomes. ∗I thank Philip Babcock, Vincent Crawford, Jim Moore, and Joel Watson for useful comments and NSF for financial support. †University of California, San Diego. Email: [email protected]. Altruistic behavior presents a puzzle for both biology and economics. Biology must explain why traits that do not maximize an organism’s fitness survive. Economics, which starts from the assumptions that individual actors are selfish and rational, must explain why individuals take actions that do not appear to maximize short-term self interest. Evolutionary biology provides powerful ways of understanding unselfish behavior to closely related individuals (Hamilton [5]) or to reciprocity in long-term relationships (Trivers [12]), Rachlin is concerned with instances of human altruism that are hard to explain using these theories. Evolutionary mechanisms that rely on group selection (Boehm [3] or Sober andWilson [11]) or community enforced morality (Alexander [2]) provide explanations for unselfish behavior in human communities. These approaches teach us that to understand altruistic actions, we should examine the individual in connection with the composition and norms of the society in which he lives. Economic theory assumes that agents select from their available choices only an action that maximizes utility. Unselfish behavior does not occur. Economics adapts its methodology in the face of apparently contradictory evidence by broadening the definition of self interest, for example by assuming that individuals obtain utility from the act of giving or through the consumption of others, or by recognizing that economic relationships are dynamic and that an individual’s long-run selfish best interest is best served by doing things that are not consistent with short-term selfish goals. The approaches of both biology and economics illustrate that the context of actions is important and require careful attention to the definition of altruism. Rachlin [7] argues that one must consider altruism in the context of patterns of behavior and provides a definition that makes the mechanism supporting altruism a special case of the mechanism that determines self control. Rachlin should be commended for pointing out the importance of patterns of behavior. Altruism generated by a preference for establishing a pattern of “good” behavior is internally motivated. It does not rely on generating reciprocal responses from others that are vital to the dynamic arguments in biology and economics. Rachlin’s emphasis on patterns should motivate behavioral researchers to widen the context of their experiments. Choice models, at least as they are used in applications, may need to be broadened Sobel [10] provides an overview.