I am fortunate indeed at Tiffin to be surrounded by colleagues who are fertile sources for many things, not least fine book recommendations. In my experience, the nonpareil of all recommenders is the redoubtable Mr. Courtin, who shortly before the recent half-term break, very kindly brought in his copy of Year of Wonders for my holiday reading. Geraldine Brooks’ story is a reimagining of events during a plague-ridden year in the English village of Eyam. The horror accumulates quietly: death, decay, suspicion, and the unravelling of social fabric. And at the heart of this, we meet Anna Frith, an 18-year-old widow and mother of two boys, turned healer, who works herself to the bone tending the sick, comforting the dying, and carrying the grief of others as if it were her own.
As you know your Director is always happy to receive suggestions as to what we should discuss in these Columns. Well, at about the moment I was halfway through the book, another of my esteemed colleagues, Mr Rennie, suggested that this week’s paltry words should be directed towards the business of ‘altruism’. It seemed as if the planets had aligned. And so here we are.
It’s easy enough to see why altruism appeals to us. Selflessness, compassion, sacrifice; we’re moved by stories of it, sometimes aspire to it, and quietly hope others will practise it, particularly when it comes to trays of biscuits being handed around. Let’s have a look at what it’s all about then.
By most common understandings of the word, Anna Frith of Eyam acts altruistically. There’s no applause waiting for her. No reward. No tidy narrative arc of triumph. She acts not because she knows she will be thanked, but because something within her insists that she must. Not for the first time I found myself asking: what is that something? What moves a person to care for others so completely, especially when doing so places them directly in harm’s way?
Once asked, these questions always seem to echo. We live in a world that offers many explanations for altruism, but between you and me, dear reader, I have to admit, there aren’t many that satisfy.
Our first port of call for some answers must of course be our old friend, Richard Dawkins. I know very little, as you are always being reminded, but as far as I understand it, he has his own answer to the question of altruism. Ever the evangelist for the mechanistic view of life, dear Richard wants to reassure us that altruism is not what it seems. He wants to insist that even our noblest acts are just cunning disguises for genetic self-interest. In The Selfish Gene, he paints a picture of organisms as mere vehicles for DNA, and acts of compassion as long-term strategies for reproductive success. We may think we are sacrificing for others, but really, we are advancing the survival of our genetic material. So it’s the gene, not the person, that is the true operator: a cunning little molecule manipulating us into protecting copies of itself, whether in kin or kind. One could be forgiven for wondering whether Dawkins is describing an act of generosity or a Bond villain’s jiggery-pokery.
To be fair to our friend Richard, his view builds in part on the work of evolutionary biologist W.D. Hamilton, whose now-famous expression of inequality: rB > C attempts to explain altruism in strictly genetic terms. According to Hamilton’s rule, an altruistic act is likely to occur when the genetic relatedness between actor and recipient (r), multiplied by the benefit to the recipient (B), outweighs the cost to the actor (C). It’s tidy enough maths and may explain why we might jump into a river to save a sibling but hesitate when it’s a stranger. And yet, even Hamilton’s logic, neat as it is, begins to fray when confronted with someone like Anna Frith, who offers everything for people to whom she owes no biological debt. No equation quite accounts for that. It’s not that Hamilton and Dawkins are wrong, exactly; the explanations are elegant and plausible, in their own terms. But like many elegant models, as far as this Director is concerned, they explain too much and understand too little. In reducing altruism to a biological tactic, they drain it of its moral resonance, like reducing love to hormonal patterning or music to wave interference. It is not that these explanations are false. It is that they are incomplete. They forget what it feels like.
And don’t get me started on the metaphor itself: ‘selfish gene’. It is, as I suspect, Prof. Dawkins is himself, a little mischievous. As though our double helix were a master strategist, plotting at the level of molecules. Genes do not think, scheme, or strive; they replicate. That is all – as I believe we may have discussed in previous columns. The selfishness, if anything, lies in the interpretation, not the gene. For in Dawkins’ world, nothing is ever really given; it’s all just long-term genetic investment. The hug, the helping hand, the self-sacrificing soldier, and the offered favourite biscuit, are not moral acts, but molecular tactics. The soul is nowhere to be seen; only the strategy remains. And if a model requires us to believe that a plague nurse is motivated by hidden strands of invisible ambition, it might be time to revisit the model.
If Dawkins reduces altruism to biology, Ayn Rand rejects it altogether. In The Virtue of Selfishness, she castigates altruism as the root of moral corruption; an ethical system, she claims, that demands the sacrifice of the self for the unworthy. True morality, she insists, is about rational self-interest. To live for others, in Rand’s world, is not noble but degrading; a betrayal of one’s own reason, values, and purpose. Rand’s philosophy is stern and unapologetically libertarian. It sounds, at times, like a motivational speech delivered by a hedge fund. There is no room for weakness, need, or shared burden. One imagines her wandering through Anna Frith’s plague village suggesting that people stop being so dependent and try creating some value. Her world is tidy, but also cold.
And yet, between Rand’s rugged individualism and Dawkins’ genetic determinism, a strange consensus emerges: that altruism is not quite real. It is either a mistake or a mask. It’s either bad economics or good camouflage. But what both positions fail to grasp is what we actually see when we look at people like Anna Frith. Or, for that matter, pretty much everyone we’ve ever encountered. The thing, I may boldly venture to say, is that we all know what it is to act without calculation. We’ve seen it in the student who gives up their lunchtime to help someone struggling; in the friend who listens, without advantage, because they care; in the teacher who, though exhausted, stays to support a student not because it’s efficient or profitable, but because it’s somehow right.
Perhaps this is where the mech-metaphors fail us. Altruism doesn’t emerge from mechanism; it arises from relationship. It is not the negation of the self, nor the extension of a selfish gene, but the recognition that we are not sealed units moving independently through space. We are already bound up in one another.
In his Confession, Tolstoy recounts how, having achieved literary fame and financial success, he found himself teetering on the edge of despair. The only people he observed living with any real meaning were the ‘peasants’, those who gave what little they had, not because they had worked out the moral calculus, but because they saw others in need. “They lived,” he wrote, “more than I did.”
Simone Weil, writing under the shadow of war and deprivation, came to a similar realisation: that the attention we give to another’s suffering is “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Altruism, for Weil, is not a strategy or a duty but more of a kind of radical seeing. To attend fully to the other is to allow their suffering to interrupt your comfort, their face to disturb your self-containment.
This idea is picked up more explicitly by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who argues that ethics begins not with principles, but with encounter; that moment when one is called to responsibility simply by the presence of another person. The self, he says, is summoned into moral responsibility not through abstract rules, but through the vulnerability of another human being. From this perspective, altruism is not a strategic calculation nor a self-negating command but a fundamental relational reality. Likewise, Martin Buber speaks of the “I–Thou” relationship, in which we meet others not as objects to be used or understood, but as beings with whom we are in living relation. In these encounters, altruism is not performed, it is revealed.
In schools, we sometimes speak of altruism as a value to be instilled; as though it were a virtue, theory or set of moral commandments to be injected through assemblies and slogans. But altruism is best understood as an invitation into relationship itself. And as we have discussed before, it is relationship which is what the universe is made from. Understood in this way, altruism is not the negation of the self nor the extension of genetic interest, but the unfolding of a deeper truth: that we are, all of us, profoundly entangled. So we do not learn altruism so much as we remember it, because somewhere, in our bones, we know that we are not separate.
The Latin root of altruism—alter—means “other.” But perhaps that is the paradox at the heart of it: that in turning towards the other, we begin to see there is no other. Altruism is not the erasure of the self, nor the conquest of it, but the opening of the self towards relationship. It begins with the face of another and ends with the quiet undoing of the boundary between us. It’s not that we lose ourselves in altruism, it’s more a case of locating ourselves more fully. For in that attention, that gift, that unguarded gesture, we glimpse the truth that we are not alone, not separate, not sealed. Altruism, properly understood, is not the triumph of morality over instinct, nor strategy dressed as kindness. It is the recognition that the self is always already in relation. And in acting for the other, we finally see that there is no other. And so, for whom does the self toll? It tolls on us all.
Until next time, Happy Reading/Altruisticalising!
Today sees a new series of final thoughts. This focus, as suggested by a reader of the Column who wishes to remain anonymous, is to be Thorny Philosophical Questions (TPQ).
TPQ #1
Can you want what you don’t want to want? (Thorniness level out of 10? 6.5)
This potentially teases apart the tangle of our inner life, reminding us that we are not so much single selves as uneasy coalitions. It suggests that our desires do not always report to the same authority, and that beneath the polished surface of what we call willpower lies something altogether more unruly.