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Altruism and the Experimental Data on Helping Behavior

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Abstract

Philosophical accounts of altruism that purport to explain helping behavior are vulnerable to empirical falsification. John Campbell argues that the Good Samaritan study adds to a growing body of evidence that helping behavior is not best explained by appeal to altruism, thus jeopardizing those accounts. I propose that philosophical accounts of altruism can be empirically challenged only if it is shown that altruistic motivations are undermined by normative conflict in the agent, and that the relevant studies do not provide this sort of evidence. Non-normative, purely causal, psychological factors would be empirically relevant only if the notion of altruism is broadened to include the requirement that one recognize certain situations as calling for altruism. But even in that case, the relevant studies are not designed in such a way that could threaten philosophical theories of altruism.

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Notes

  1. See Ross and Nisbett (1991), Mischel (1968), Doris (2002) for the details of these and other relevant studies.

  2. “Can Philosophical Accounts of Altruism Accommodate Experimental Data on Helping Behaviour?” (Campbell 1999). Unless otherwise noted, all page references are to this text.

  3. Impressed with the lessons of the fundamental attribution error, some philosophers argue that the error has significant consequences for ethics. They have argued mostly that the data undermine the notion that we have robust, stable character traits of the sort needed for certain forms of virtue ethics. Cf. Doris (1998, 2002) and Harman (1999). Attribution theorists themselves have also argued that their work has moral implications of various sorts, especially concerning the attribution of moral responsibility. See Schoeman (1987) for some discussion of their work. Finally, philosophical accounts of altruism in general have also been supposed to be undermined, and this is what I will speak to.

  4. Accounts of morally worthy helping behavior will generally, I think, take the desire to help another to be an ultimate, and not merely instrumental, desire. Altruism in this sense contrasts with psychological egoism, the theory about motivation that holds that the only thing that is intrinsically desired is something such as one’s own perceived well-being. I leave to the side here the thorny issue of whether and how the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic desires is amenable to empirical investigation. The distinction is not relevant to the sort of argument considered below. (I say a few more words about the egoism/altruism debate when discussing what is at stake in Section 2.)

  5. Note that the issue is not just that of attention, but also concerns disentangling the effects of the ambiguity of the situation (the distressed confederate may have seemed menacing, for example). Perhaps, also, there is a ‘diffusion of responsibility’ effect at work here, if the subjects could reasonably expect that other potential helpers would also pass by the same area.

  6. Moreover, there exist plenty of other studies with similarly surprising behavioral results, in which it is not plausible to think that perception is impaired.

  7. Of course, there are philosophers who have suggested, for various reasons, that we should do away with such explanations anyway.

  8. Sabini and Silver implicitly recognize the same point in passing, when they claim that the standard situationist interpretation of certain social psychological studies “does impugn all forms of ethics,” and that it “denies the idea that behavior follows from beliefs, desires, and values” (2005, 536, fn. 5).

  9. John Doris thinks that it would be, as he puts it, a “serious mistake” to interpret the empirical evidence as counting against the existence of altruism. However, his reason for thinking this is that he doubts that “questions about the possibility of altruism admit of empirical resolution, since the issue concerns what sort of motivations should be counted as altruistic, and this is substantially a conceptual difficulty” (2002, 35). Dale Jamieson (2002) argues that, on the view that desires are internal representations, one can never be sure that a particular desire takes others’ welfare to be ultimate. However, he thinks that there is empirical evidence that renders the view that people have psychologically ultimate altruistic desires more plausible than the alternative.

  10. There is the further, distinct, question of how to evaluate the actions of those subjects who do not help, and of whether they are blameworthy for failing to help. I will return to this below; my own interpretation of the study does not entail that they are. Some may be epistemically blameworthy (because they didn’t notice) and others morally blameworthy (because they noticed but did not care), and yet others blameless in both senses.

  11. There may be a problem with this formulation, connected with my use of ‘reason’-talk. As such talk is ubiquitous, most should not have a problem with my reasoning on that account.

  12. In the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, of course, the priest and the Levite did have such reasons clearly present to them. In the story, it’s clear that each man came directly upon the hurt and wounded man lying by the road, saw and understood the bad state he was in, and decided to cross the road and pass by on the other side. They are each motivated anti-altruistically—and that they are so motivated is essential to the power of this parable. It highlights the proper moral understanding of what the Samaritan did in contrast to the actions of the priest and Levite (Luke 10: 27–37, King James version).

  13. Schoeman (1987) seems to invoke this same distinction when discussing what makes certain decisions hard. “The notion of a hard or difficult choice is ambiguous; it can mean that something is unlikely to be selected for a variety of reasons, or it can mean that the options engender moral conflict” (304–5). But the examples he gives to illustrate this ambiguity do not capture the sort of case we need here involving immediate background conditions that manipulate the likelihood of helping. He contrasts the scenarios of being tempted to accept a bribe because one has been socialized to value affluence with being tempted to accept it because it would pay for a life-saving operation for one’s child. In one case, the moral responsibility of accepting the bribe is mitigated and in the other it is not. In my terms, both of these scenarios count as cases of normative overriding, in virtue of the fact that both the reason not to accept the bribe and the potentially mitigating reasons are consciously available.

  14. Depending on how they’re interpreted, the Milgram experiments might show that altruism—or at least compassionate behavior—is “normatively overridden” in this sense, by showing that certain reason-giving considerations diminish the frequency of helping behavior (Milgram 1963, 1974). On one interpretation of those studies, people’s ordinary desires not to harm another are overridden by their motive to obey what they take to be legitimate authority figures. Given the robust anecdotal evidence of psychological stress observed (and also filmed) by the researchers, it would seem that here the motive to obey resides squarely in the realm of (subjective) reasons—albeit maybe not very good reasons. The subjects experience a value conflict that renders them too weak to do the right thing; their desire to help another is normatively overridden by their desire to follow instructions given by institutional experts.

    However, since obedience is not obviously a morally trivial concern, the Milgram studies do not highlight situational features that we take to be morally irrelevant to the performance of the act of helping. On this interpretation, they involve substantive reasons-based conflict, in which one’s reasons to obey apparent authority figures conflict with and override one’s reason to be compassionate. (For an alternative interpretation, one that takes the Milgram studies to involve non-normative overriding, in which subjects act contrary to their dispositions to help because of a lack of confidence in their own judgment and a corresponding fear of embarrassment that is not reason-providing, see Sabini and Silver 2005.) The pertinent question is whether the subjective normative reasons are morally trivial ones. Though the Milgram studies do help to establish that altruism is undermined, they do not show that it is as easily undermined as would be needed to abandon philosophizing about the motive. To do that, we would need evidence that morally irrelevant features serve as subjective reasons that normatively override an agent’s subjective reason to be altruistic.

    Cases that demonstrate the bystander effect might seem to provide a better candidate for this role—the role of showing that morally irrelevant reason-giving considerations diminish the frequency of helping behavior, and thus that the motive of altruism is “normatively overridden”—to the extent that we take the relevant motive (say, fear of embarrassment) to be a normative reason that explains the subjects’ inhibition to act. (For overviews of such cases, see Latané and Darley 1970, and Latané et al. 1981.) But it is hard to accept that this is the correct interpretation of such studies; the relevant situational factors at play in those cases do not provide subjective reasons in the required sense. Indeed, the bystander studies are interesting in that they seem, like the Good Samaritan study and possibly unlike the Milgram studies, to pick out a situational influence that does not qualify as a reason-giving consideration. Same with the other studies mentioned at the outset of this paper. The presence of others, like the presence of a dime or the smell of baking cookies or the fact that one has siblings, all seem to operate on a level of awareness that is not sufficiently conscious to make these considerations deliberatively relevant, or to bring them into the realm of reasons for action. Indeed, these most discussed studies in social psychology seem to show that subjects’ desires to do the right thing are non-normatively inhibited by situational features; they do not involve value conflict, or show that the subjects have bad values.

  15. In a paper defending virtue ethics, Sreenivasan suggests that “the fact that one is in a hurry can defeat the reason to help someone in distress. Naturally, it depends upon a comparison of various factors, such as the importance of what one is hurrying for and the nature of the victim’s distress” (2002, 60). Though I agree with his general claim, this particular passage misses the point. The very question of justifying reasons cannot come up until one can identify a subject’s reasons. Indirectly, Sreenivasan seems to want to address this when he argues that the relevant studies must take into account the subjects’ construal of their situation. But the particular test he proposes for ensuring this—that “the subject and the observer must agree” on whether a behavioral measure specifies a response that is paradigmatic of the relevant virtue, the reason for which is not defeated by reasons elicited by the situation (61–62)—does not go far enough. Whatever one’s method for determining whether there is such agreement, it is reasonable to think that most of the subjects in this study would agree with the experimenters’ (and our) normative judgments regarding their case. The criterion he proposes does not capture what reasons a subject has in the study conditions.

  16. This point is addressed in Sreenivasan (2002).

  17. For example, the bystander effect disappears when the situation is unambiguous. As Doris observes “[n]umerous studies of staged emergencies have found impressive rates of intervention, in some conditions approaching 100% [....]. The situationist point is not that helping is rare, but that helping is situationally sensitive” (2000, 35. Cf. also p.19).

  18. The assignment of responsibility based on the attribution of evaluative attitudes is a distinct enterprise from that of providing a causal explanation, and the two can come apart. For one interesting illustration of this, see the experiments in Woolfolk et al. (2006).

  19. This is, surprisingly, true even when people have been apprised of particular situational effects; they are in general very poor at generalizing what they’ve learned when making causal attributions in very similar cases. Indeed, in Pietromonaco and Nisbett (1982), it is noteworthy that subjects had difficulty accurately recalling the results of Darley and Batson, let alone generalizing the lessons learned from that study about the effect of hurrying. Moreover, as Pietromonaco and Nisbett report: “Fully 36% recalled, incorrectly, that the personality variable had affected helping [in that study]. Since the subject population and materials were similar to those used in previous studies, we must suspect that prior beliefs distorted the perception or recall of the information” (1982, 3).

  20. What counts as an ‘opportunity’, and how pressing it must be to constitute a moral requirement, is of course a controversial issue in moral philosophy. For one compelling account based on the notion of physical proximity, and relevant to the present study, see Jeremy Waldron (2003).

  21. Cf. especially Doris (1998) and Harman (1999) for thoughts on some of the moral effects and benefits that can follow from appreciating situationism and the fundamental attribution error.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful comments on previous versions of this paper, I would like to thank John Campbell, Jens Haas, Julie Kelly Szil, Brian Loar, Barbara Montero, Katja Vogt, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal. Thanks also to the audiences at the CUNY Graduate School Cognitive Science Group led by David Rosenthal and at Lafayette College, where this material was first presented.

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Beardman, S. Altruism and the Experimental Data on Helping Behavior. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 15, 547–561 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9309-4

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