Would you give a penny to the needy? How about a kidney? A heart?
The thought of spring break brings up images of partying in warm weather, drunken one-night stands, and the raging hangovers that follow; yet for Rachel Garneau, a junior at Notre-Dame, it represented an pseudo-holiday opportunity for giving, and give she did. This twenty year old gave up a kidney for a complete stranger. There was an air of psychosis to her as she walked right into the University Of Chicago’s Bernard Mitchell Hospital, calm as ever; her demeanor quite indifferent, her nonchalance quite unnerving. Funny how we find this act of complete altruism ‘weird’; because it is weird, all that we know from evolution, Darwinism, basic human tendencies, and even the insightful field of behavioral economics contradicts what Rachel Garneau chose to do at 5:45 a.m. on a Tuesday: she gave till it hurt, and then some more.
Economics, a field based on profit and gain, when taken into context of human choices and decisions, leads to a deeper understanding of the motivation behind our actions. The fundamental theory behind welfare Economics is: “Assume all individuals are selfish price takers. Then a competitive equilibrium is Pareto optimal (Feldman 1987, IV, 890)”. The amalgamation of the life’s work of Adam Smith was proving that humans are selfish and that we will, when it comes down to it, succeed for our own profit. So how would he explain a concept so selfless as altruism? How would he go about making sense of Rachel Garneau’s actions?
Surprisingly, it is a culmination of pure science and theories of economics that helps us unravels the mysteries of this very ‘God-like’ selflessness. Research in modern cognitive neuroscience has led to a new theory on altru...
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...sness, Rachel Garneau fostered a chain reaction of kidney donation. A family member who was planning on donating but who wasn’t a match donated their kidney to someone else, and this chain saved countless lives. The end justifying the means is not really valid here, since the ‘means’ itself is self-evidence; we should see justification in the act itself. We are intrinsically programmed to do good, and maybe the reason we do that is because it brings us happiness, maybe we are, as Richard Dawkins puts it, a species consisting of “A Selfish Gene”; but we are human, and if I had to choose between a person bringing no good into this world, and a person fostering a cycle of good both to the subject and to themselves, I would never even consider that to be a choice worth weighing. Give that penny, that kidney, or simply show them love. Give them a ‘piece of your heart’.
Adam Smith may have best described self-interest in his book, The Wealth of Nations: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” So why does the baker choose to bake? It is not because of his benevolence, or kindness, it is because of his
One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is not a book about a superhuman. It is not a story about someone who is weaker and more desperate than everyone else. It is not a tale of greatness, nor is it about extraordinary faults. Instead, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn chose to center his story around Ivan denisovich Shukhov, an average, unnoticeable Russian prisoner.
Judith Lichtenberg successfully conveys her moral theory with many questions regarding her topics of abstractness, the sense of futility and ineffectiveness, overestimating our generosity, distance, the relativity of well-being, the power of shame, and the drops in the bucket. Using these practical and philosophical ideas she explains why we as a people should search to discover the obstacles that are preventing us from giving more, rather than the finding our charitable obligations and the amounts we should be giving. She leads us to the ideal of motivation and tells us to pay less attention to obligation, because without X being moved to do an act, does it really matter what the act was if X never induces the action?
Cullity argues the conclusion that we should always help others who are in need as long as doing so does not cause significant harm to yourself is too demanding, it seems as though mostly all sources of personal fulfilment would be morally impermissible if the demand to donate to aid agencies were to be fully carried out. If, for example, I wanted to do anything with my free time that involved what could be considered unnecessary spending then this would be considered immoral because theoretically the money you would spend on yourself could have been spent on donating to an aid agency which could use the money to save a child’s life. It is for this reason that Cullity argues in his paper that the Severe Demand can be rejected from an appropriately impart...
In Richard Dawkins book “The Selfish Gene,” he writes about how Darwin was the first person to develop a theory as to how evolution occurs, the issues of the beginning of life, and the double immortal helix of DNA.
Ethical egoism is diametrically opposite to ethical altruism, which obliges a moral agent to assist the other first, even if he sacrifices his own interest. Further, researchers justify and rationalize the mental position of egoism versus altruism through an explanation that altruism is destructive for a society, suppressing and denying an individual value. Although the ‘modern’ age unsubtly supports swaggering egoistic behavior in the competitive arena such as international politics, commerce, and sport, in other ‘traditional’ areas of the prideful selfishness showing off, to considerable extent discourages visible disobedience from the prevalent moral codes. In some cases, the open pro-egoist position, as was, per example, the ‘contextual’ interpretation of selfishness by famous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, can be described as a ‘grotesque anomaly’.
4) In Defense of Selfish Genes , Dawkins refute to claims made about his theory by Mary Midgely
Richard Miller finds Singer’s conclusion unrealistically demanding. He approaches the problem differently and claims that we should instead accept the Principle of Sympathy. According to Miller’s Principle, what morality directly demands is a sufficiently strong concern towards neediness. One’s disposition to help the needy is “sufficiently strong” if expressing greater concern would “impose a significant risk of worsening one’s life” . The Principle of Sympathy differs from Singer’s Principle of Sacrifice mainly in two ways. First, the Principle of Sympathy is a moral code that concerns more with an agent’s disposition to give rather than the amount of money he end...
... are given a broadly inclusive definition under Singer's argument, compose an in-ignorable chunk of the world economy. It is difficult to foresee how things would play out if the extreme altruism proposed by Singer became the norm. While the conclusion Singer produces appears to logically follow from his thought experiment, its appropriateness for actual application in the real world requires much greater justification. Nonetheless, if we hypothetically assume that the intended positive outcome will always be the result of our charity, Singer's argument still relies on several Utilitarian assumptions; namely that we consider the lives of strangers to be of equal value to the lives of our loved ones, and that we should regard the saving of a life as a greater good than marginal increases in the quality of life of a moderately healthy and financially secure individual.
These individuals do so much more than help people live a healthier life, in most cases, it is literally giving them the gift of life to someone in desperate need of an organ. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states that one organ donor has the capability to rescue eight lives (2015). A lot of people feel that they are only assisting one precious life, but the reality is they are helping more than one person. The lack of lifesaving organ is not the only problem for the U.S. but around the whole world. There are nearly 7,000 unnecessary deaths each year because people were not able to receive these precious organs they desperately needed to save their lives (Forbes, 2007). Unfortunately, the vast general, people don’t understand how valuable an organ can relate to someone in crucial need of one until they experience themselves this despairing situation. The experience affects an enormous amount of individuals that they have a passionate to give something in return to the community. Individuals love ones also has an enormous amount of influence from this desperate experience and are more willingly open to organ donation. This effect is meaningful to them because it is something that most individuals took for granted and has a lot more meaning to someone that is patiently waiting to receive their desperate need of a miracle of life. Furthermore, organ donation is
Even forms of human beings preforming selfless acts derives from ones desire to help others, which in a way makes that person feel importance. Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, better known as Mother Teresa, devoted her life to helping those in great need. To many these acts may appear as selfless and gallant acts that are not performed by anyone with any type of ego. Yet when taking a psychological look at why she performed such acts they may appear a somewhat more for herself. Every time anyone does anything, even when for someone else, they are doing it for some type of feeling that they experience. With the holiday season approaching, there will be a specific emphasis on giving unlike any other time of the year. We give yes to show gratitude for someone we love, but also to experience the joy in seeing someone enjoy something they them self-caused. Even while being selfless humans have the unique ability to still be doing something that involves caring for them self. This outlook toward the human condition completely debunks Wolf’s claim that “when caring about yourself you are living as if you are the center of the universe.” When choosing to do anything positive or negative, for others or for yourself, you are still taking your self-interest into consideration, making it
One of the biggest pitfalls within our medical field in today’s world has to be the lack of donations seen when it comes to organ transplants. On average, 17 people die each die each day in the failure to find a organ match and an astonishing 115 people are added to that very same list while this tragedy is occurring (Kishore 362). A topic of debate that has arisen from this senseless dying is whether or not to allow the sale of organs, similar to what is seen in Iran where they allow a market. However, opponents of this proposed solution argue that the idea would be “ineffective, perhaps counterproductive” and that "we can make the system of donation effective without such ethical risks” (Childress**). Proponents argue that if we as humans
Some psychologists believe that altruism stems from evolution, or the survival of the fittest. They point to examples where ants will willingly bury themselves to seal the anthill from foreign attacks, or the honeybee’s sting. That sting rips out the honeybee’s own internal organs, and has been described as “instruments of altruistic self-sacrifice. Although the individual dies, the bee’...
There are certain things that everyone seems to agree upon, selfishness is frowned upon in society, whereas selflessness is applauded, everyone agrees that murder is wrong, and that stealing things is wrong. “Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him.
An individual's internal values have the capacity to persuade them into doing what they otherwise wouldn’t be inclined to do. These sacrifices are made in the name of the "Greater Good", when a person's ideals lead them to visualize only what they want to protect, rather than themselves. Often humans are perceived as a selfish species, but as other species do, we also have protective instincts, and when those instincts kick in, we have the capacity to be remarkably self-abnegating. Self-abnegation is a quality that all of us obtain for something, but that something depends entirely on our person's values. Our values are the motivator for sacrificing ourselves. This selfless quality reveals itself when the circumstances