Altruism (ethics)

Abstract: Survival of the nicest! Famed Harvard Professor Martin Nowak lays out the five laws of cooperation that make complex life possible.

Abstract: The jurisprudence of rules is the body of legal thought that deals explicitly with the question of legal form. In private law, modern legal thought begins with the rejection of Classical individualism. The rhetoric of individualism so thoroughly dominates legal discourse that it is difficult even to identify a counterethic. Eighteenth century common law thinking does not seem to have been afflicted with a sense of conflict between two legal ideals. Modern legal thought is preoccupied with “competing policies,” conflicting “value judgments” and the idea of a purposive legal order, and to that extent has much in common with pre-Civil War thinking. The correspondence between the formal and substantive economic arguments is more intricate and harder to grasp than the moral debate. There is a connection, in the rhetoric of private law, between individualism and a preference for rules, and between altruism and a preference for standards.

Abstract: Adam Smith argued in a famous passage that people are selfish in their market transactions: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages" (1937, p. 14). In an earlier study, he said with irony, "We are not ready to suspect any person of being defective in selfishness" (1853, p. 446). Selfishness in market transactions has been assumed in practically all subsequent discussions of the economic system. Objections were dismissed with vague allusions to "human nature" or with an assertion that altruism loses out to selfishness in the struggle to survive in the market sector. Yet altruism is generally recognized to be important within a family. Again, Adam Smith said: