Explaining human altruism
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Explaining human altruism Michael Vlerick1,2,3 Received: 24 March 2020 / Accepted: 19 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Humans often behave altruistically towards strangers with no chance of reciprocation. From an evolutionary perspective, this is puzzling. The evolution of altruistic cooperative behavior—in which an organism’s action reduces its fitness and increases the fitness of another organism (e.g. by sharing food)—only makes sense when it is directed at genetically related organisms (kin selection) or when one can expect the favor to be returned (reciprocal altruism). Therefore, evolutionary theorists such as Sober and Wilson have argued that we should revise Neo-Darwininian evolutionary theory. They argue that human altruism evolved through group selection in which groups of altruists were naturally selected because they had a comparative advantage over other groups. Wilson and Sober’s hypothesis attracted followers but is rejected by most of their peers. The heated debate between advocates and critics of group selection often suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity. In response, I set out to clearly distinguish ‘genetic’ from ‘cultural’ group selection (developed by Boyd, Richerson & Henrich) and argue that the latter does not face the potentially debilitating problems plaguing the former. I defend the claim that human altruistic dispositions evolved through cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution and offer empirical evidence in support. I also argue that actual altruistic behavior often goes beyond the kind of behavior humans have evolved to display. Conscious and voluntary reasoning processes, I show, have an important role in altruistic behavior. This is often overlooked in the scientific literature on human altruism. Keywords Human altruism · Behavioral game-theory · Group selection · Genetic group selection · Cultural group selection · Moral reasoning
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Michael Vlerick [email protected]; [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands
2
University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
3
Afsnee, Belgium
123
Synthese
1 Introduction Humans often behave altruistically towards strangers with no chance of reciprocation. Many people donate blood and funds for the benefit of people they will never meet and often do so anonymously. In experimental settings, people often cooperate with strangers in one-shot prisoner’s dilemma’s (in which ‘defecting’ always yields a higher individual payoff) and offer something rather than nothing in dictator games to strangers (when they could have kept everything for themselves) (Camerer and Thaler 1995; Camerer 2003; Henrich et al. 2001; Fehr and Rockenbach 2004; Gächter and Herrmann 2009). Many people are also willing to incur costs to punish those who have harmed the group or others. This too is altruistic behavior. (Fehr and Gächter 2002a). While there is variation between cultures, altruistic behavior is a human universal (Gächter and He
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