Abstract |
Psychological altruism (being motivated by the needs of others) has a tendency to produce behaviour that is costly in evolutionary terms. How, then, could the capacity for psychological altruism evolve? One suggestion is that it is the result of sexual selection. There are, however, two problems that face such an account: first, it is not clear that the resulting behaviour would be altruistic in the relevant sense, and second, it does not seem to fit with key features of our actual helping behaviour. I will argue that both of these problems can be avoided if we adopt a modular account of desire formation.
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DOI | 10.1016/j.shpsc.2007.12.006 |
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References found in this work BETA
Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures.David M. Buss - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (1):1-14.
The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.Robert L. Trivers - 1971 - Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (1):35-57.
Addiction as Defect of the Will: Some Philosophical Reflections. [REVIEW]R. Jay Wallace - 1999 - Law and Philosophy 18 (6):621–654.
Massively Modular Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and Cognitive Architecture.Richard Samuels - 2000 - In Peter Carruthers (ed.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition. Cambridge University Press. pp. 13--46.
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