People say altruism is selfish. They’re not wrong

One of the reasons that many people argue there's no such thing as true altruism, people

are never truly motivated to help other people for their own sake, is because, paradoxically

altruism is a source of enormous joy for people who help others

People who have donated kidneys to strangers will reliably tell you it's one of the best

things they've done in their life. They would do it again in a heartbeat if they could. They're glad every day that they did it. And so it's easy to look at something like that and say

oh, well, then it wasn't really altruistic because if it brought you such pleasure

well, then it must have been selfish. I think there was actually a Friends episode about this

exact question. This isn't a good deed. You just want to get on TV. This is totally selfish

Whoa, whoa, whoa. What about you having those babies for your brother? Talk about selfish

What are you talking about? Well, yeah, it was a really nice thing and all, but it made you feel really good, right

Yeah, so? Well, it made you feel good, so that makes it selfish

Look, there's no unselfish good deeds. Sorry. I think there a little bit of a puritanical streak in the idea that for something to be moral it can also be joyful There may be people who are suspicious about any behavior that brings us too much pleasure that somehow it can at heart be simultaneously a source of pleasure and morality

But I don't tend to think that that's true. I would say the best thing about altruism is that it is a source of joy, because this

makes people more likely, once they've done something altruistic, they see what a positive

effect and has on other people, they experience the vicarious joy of helping other people

they're much more likely to do it again. It's one of the reasons we are such an altruistic species is because we take joy in helping

other people. The way philosophers put it is in terms of something called the doctrine of double effect

which is basically the idea that the morality of the behavior is a factor of not just its

outcome, but its intended outcome. So if the goal of helping others was to achieve happiness, then that's not very altruistic

However, if you help other people, given happiness as a foreseeable outcome of that behavior

happens anyways, that doesn't take away from the goal of actually helping them

There's a Buddhist monk, a neuroscientist named Mathieu Ricard, who in his book

Altruism, I think boiled this topic down succinctly. And I'll paraphrase him

He said the fact that helping others brings us joy is not contradictory to the idea of altruism In fact that what it means to be altruistic to find it a source of joy to help other people

If we didn't find helping other people pleasurable, we wouldn't be altruistic

This becomes obvious when you think of the counterexample, which is the person who gives begrudgingly

the person who gives and finds it a source of unhappiness and wishes they hadn't done it

Most of us would not want to be helped by somebody who helped begrudgingly

That would be a source of guilt, not gratitude. And in fact, most people, when they're helped by somebody who they know helped them voluntarily

because they sincerely wanted to, are much more likely to feel all of those positive effects of gratitude

that are a source of joy universally. I think the fact that altruism brings us joy is certainly not evidence that altruism is never genuinely motivated by a desire to help other people

Really, it's a sign that we are a fundamentally social species, that joy is catching, that we are built to want to help those around us, and that that is the basis of a good society

And we want to be members of a society where people take joy in helping others

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