Abstract
In their book Unto Others, Sober and Wilson argue that various evolutionary considerations (based on the logic of natural selection) lend support to the truth of psychological altruism. However, recently, Stephen Stich has raised a number of challenges to their reasoning: in particular, he claims that three out of the four evolutionary arguments they give are internally unconvincing, and that the one that is initially plausible fails to take into account recent findings from cognitive science and thus leaves open a number of egoistic responses. These challenges make it necessary to reassess the plausibility of Sober & Wilson’s evolutionary account—which is what I aim to do in this paper. In particular, I try to show that, as a matter of fact, Sober & Wilson’s case remains compelling, as some of Stich’s concerns rest on a confusion, and those that do not are not sufficiently strong to establish all the conclusions he is after. The upshot is that no reason has been given to abandon the view that evolutionary theory has advanced the debate surrounding psychological altruism.
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Notes
It is important not to confuse psychological altruism with the very different notion of evolutionary altruism (the existence of phenotypes that reduce the fitness of an organism, relative to that of the other members of its group). For more on the latter, see the first five chapters of Sober and Wilson (1998).
Note that Sober & Wilson claim that FPH can be ruled out for philosophical reasons alone (Sober and Wilson 1998, pp. 281–287). For present purposes, though, it is better not to follow them in this, and to assume that FPH is still a live option—this is more in line with Stich (2007), and makes the exposition of the arguments below easier.
A brief remark about why Sober & Wilson focus on reliability and parental care. They focus on reliability, as they think that considerations of availability and energetic efficiency do not distinguish between the two motivational architectures (Sober and Wilson 1998, pp. 221–223). While Lemos (2004) calls this into question, it is best to grant this assumption here. They focus on parental care, as they (reasonably) think that the latter is likely to be adaptively important to the parent: helping one’s children, by and large, will increase one’s own fitness as well as that of one’s children (see also Stich 2007, p. 270).
I follow Stich (2007) in the way the arguments are presented, ordered and numbered (which differs slightly from how they are laid out in Sober and Wilson 1998). Doing this should not introduce any infelicities—in particular, there is no reason to think that Stich (2007) has misread Sober and Wilson (1998) in any way.
In fact, this counter-reply was offered to me by Stephen Stich (in personal communication).
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Acknowledgments
I thank Elliott Sober, Stephen Stich, Kim Sterelny, and an anonymous referee of this journal for useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
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Schulz, A.W. Sober & Wilson’s evolutionary arguments for psychological altruism: a reassessment. Biol Philos 26, 251–260 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-009-9179-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-009-9179-5