“The Tiny Flicker of Altruism” by Mjreard

This is a Forum Team crosspost from Substack.

between status, power, and identity, is there any room for the real thing?

Dan Williams’ 2024 posts on altruism and cynicism struck a chord with me. In the posts, Dan reflects on the basic and, as far as I can tell, well-accepted story of the origins of altruistic sentiment in humans. Glossing over considerable detail: cooperation and trust create gains from trade and social interdependence that improves the genetic fitness of all the individuals concerned, so traits that tend to signal cooperativeness and trustworthiness get favored and altruism is one of those traits. The trouble is that you only get as much altruism as improves your own reproductive success and well… if you only have a thing to the extent there's something in it for you, you run into some definitional problems with calling that thing altruism.

I interpret [...]

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Outline:

(02:23) What is Goodness?

(06:37) Spreading Joy

(10:25) Animals

(13:38) Why it's so hard to get there

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
June 3rd, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HfFzuydGQBQPqx635/the-tiny-flicker-of-altruism

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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