The Science of Altruism: Are Humans Wired for Good? Noah Berlatsky - Pacific Standard
go to original December 31, 2014

The Altruistic Brain: How We Are Naturally Good by Donald W Pfaff Check it out on Amazon.com

“We are good,” Donald Pfaff declares early on in The Altruistic Brain. By this he means that all humans are innately moral, not in a philosophical/religious sense, but as a matter of objective science. “[T]he human brain is wired for goodwill,” he argues, “which propels us toward empathic displays of altruism.” The human brain is altruistic, and altruism is good; therefore humans are good. It’s a neat syllogism - but, unfortunately, reducing moral questions to syllogisms doesn’t work as well as Pfaff wants it to.

This is not to denigrate neuroscience, nor to dismiss Pfaff’s insights altogether. The book is most useful as a scientific refutation of the idea that human beings are innately selfish or innately cruel. Pfaff musters a great deal of evidence to show that the Christian notion of original sin - and the capitalist notion of human self-interest as a sole motivating force - are both unsustainable, at least in their more simplistic forms.

First, Pfaff points to the importance of altruism and social connections in human evolutionary development. Humans are born “‘prematurely’ in comparison to our closest ape relatives,” he writes. That means that we need lots and lots of care - and so evolutionary success and survival has depended not just on caring mothers, but on caring fathers, grandmothers, and other relatives as well. Pfaff quotes evolutionary psychologist Micheal Tomasello: “To an unprecedented degree, homo sapiens are adapted for acting and thinking cooperatively in cultural groups, and indeed all of human’s most impressive cognitive achievements - from complex technologies to linguistic and mathematical symbols to intricate social institutions - are the products, not of individuals acting alone, but of individuals interacting.”

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