Is Altruism Really About Self-Sacrifice?
by Joseph Rowlands
Sometimes it's difficult to communicate radical ideas to people unfamiliar with them. An excellent example of this is the Objectivist view that altruism is at its essence a morality of self-sacrifice. If you were to describe altruism as aiming at self-sacrifice, or suggest it is a morality aimed at death, you'd probably lose all of your credibility on the spot.
When people think about altruism, they think about helping other people. They see it as a positive thing. In their eyes, it's a morality that aims at life, peace, and universal happiness. They probably don't even think about the need to sacrifice, and they certainly wouldn't describe it as the point. So if you came in trying to tell them that they worship death and the sacrifice of everything positive in their lives, they'll assume you've been brainwashed by some cult.
Even if they didn't write you off on the spot, how far do you think you'd get by telling them everything they believe is good is really all evil? If you intend to persuade them, going on the attack is usually not an effective method.
Instead, there's another way to approach the issue, without obscuring the message. The goal is to bring clarity to the issue, instead of conclusions and judgments.
In the conventional view of morality, which we refer to as altruism, helping other people is the goal. But to call a particular action 'moral' requires more than just helping people. You have to do it for the right reason. If you're really looking to benefit yourself, it's not really a moral act. Yes, you may donate to a charity that helps people. But if you call a press conference for it, aren't you really just trying to buy good publicity? Doesn't that demean the act? Is it really moral if you're just doing it for your own personal gain? You're just using those who are in need. You don't really care about them at all.
Anytime you personally gain from helping others, it casts a shadow on the whole action. How does anyone know you really did it for the right reasons? Maybe you're just trying to look like a good person. Certainly a large public donation fits that theory. But there are other ways to gain. If some rich person donated money to a medical research fund, and it turns out they have that illness, isn't that less noble than if they did it out of caring for their fellow man? You're just trying to help yourself.
So while the point of the altruism is to help other people, it's easy to see that personally benefiting from the action corrupts the moral status of the act. The larger the personal gain, the less praiseworthy the act is. The only way to have your motives be pure is if you don't gain at all from your act. Only then can you be sure that your doing it for the right reasons.
And in fact, you can even go further. You can show how much you really care by actually giving something up in order to act virtuously. Donating a few dollars to a charity might be good, but it's not a very note-worthy act. If you donate a much larger chunk of money, even more than you can really afford, then it really shows how good of a person you are. Not only do you not have any selfish benefits from the act, but the large cost you're incurring shows your commitment to doing the right thing.
But now we arrive at the problem. The morality was supposed to be about helping other people. That's what everyone thinks about when they think of their morality. But along the way, it was decided that it wasn't enough to just help other people, you had to be entirely motivated by their needs. If you gained while helping other people, your actions were no longer considered morally praiseworthy. But if you sacrificed greatly while helping other people, it showed that you were a good person.
Suddenly the focus of the morality has shifted from simply helping other people to sacrificing in order to do it. You're judged as virtuous if you sacrifice a lot for the cause. In fact, how moral the act is gets measured by how much you benefit or sacrifice for it. If you benefit, it lowers how moral it was. If you sacrifice for it, it increases the virtue of the act by showing how dedicated you are to helping other people.
So the morality stops being about helping other people. It doesn't even matter if you've really helped them at all, as long as you tried. Certainly the morality of the act is not measured by how much good you did. The cost you incurred is what gets measured. And when that's the case, the morality becomes all about how much suffering your willing to take for the sake of being moral. It becomes a morality of self-sacrifice.
From here, there are many places you could lead the conversation. You could describe how this morality seems to pit the interests of others against your own, when in reality our interests often go hand in hand. You could point out that if they're really interested in helping others, they should look for ways to help where they themselves benefit. You could point out that this morality views personal gain as evil, or at best, highly suspect.
The approach is designed to let them understand that the intentions of the morality is only one part of it. When you put it into practice, it's a completely different beast. And you can do this without condemning it or them. You can do it by providing them the arguments, and let them come to their own conclusions. Your job is simply to help them get a clearer understanding of the nature of that moral system.
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