12/30/2023 0 Comments Pathological behavior definition![]() ![]() ![]() She suggests that “pathological altruism can be thought of as a pattern of nurturing or beneficial behavior with evolutionarily unsuccessful consequences,” seemingly switching the definition away from her previous commitments, and uses the example of “the unwitting hosts of brood-parasitism, as with the wood thrush who devotes substantial resources to raising the offspring of cowbirds.” It’s not clear to me that any of the key elements of pathological altruism are satisfied here. When Oakely moves to the non-human animal world, the link between observations and behavior is even more obscure. Actually, it has several names, such as “myopic,” “short-sighted,” or perhaps “ being impatient.” The phenomenon is essentially that people sometimes choose to pursue short term goals (keeping brother out of pain and out of trouble with the boss) even though this conflicts with achieving some long term desirable outcome (ending brother’s addiction to painkillers). It seems to me that while Oakly has identified something interesting, that something already has a name. doing X caused result R, a (net, long term) harm to you AND.When I try to put this slightly more formally, it seems to me that she means that PA is defined thusly: Further, mental states are important for the second condition, having to do with what a third party could “reasonably” foresee. In particular, for something to be pathologically altruistic, the doer of the deed must have the intention of helping. Pathological altruism – in contrast to garden variety altruism – turns on intentions. Pathological altruism can be conceived as behavior in which attempts to promote the welfare of another, or others, results instead in harm that an external observer would conclude was reasonably foreseeable. Barbara Oakley, in a piece called “Concepts and implications of altruism bias and pathological altruism,” seems to have surrendered any clarity gained by behavioral definitions. ![]() Defining altruism in behavioral terms, while subject to certain sorts of worries, at least purges intentions from the whole business.Īnd now to the PNAS article. Because the definition refers only to behavior, we don’t need to worry if mother wanted to help her child (or the drug dealer), and equally we don’t have to worry if a worker ant wants to aid her colony-sisters. Now, one might quibble with the former part of the example, insofar as mom is increasing her own inclusive fitness as well as baby’s, thus making the action (still somewhat oddly) “cooperation,” but the addict does seem to conform to the definition of altruism insofar as one is committed to definitions that refer only to the fitness effects of a given behavior.Ī key advantage of the behavioral definition of altruism, for which we have Hamilton to thank, is that it takes a term rooted in folk psychology and frees us from having to worry about the perennially tricky notion of intentions. One paper did catch my attention, in part because it touches, if only gently, a topic I’ve mulled before having to do with the strangely contentious issue of how to define the term “altruism.”īefore I get to the paper, here is a recent remark by John Tooby in the context of the recent Edge discussion of group selection on the issue that amuses:įor example, using the definition of selfishness and altruism that biologists use, a loving and self-sacrificing mother is acting selfishly, while a drug addicted mother who starves her children to give all her money to her dealer is an altruist (i.e., she is lowering her own fitness in a way that increases a nonrelative’s). The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has a collection of papers, based on a colloquium “which aims to survey what has been learned about the human “mental machinery” since Darwin’s insights.” I haven’t read all of them, but I think it likely that readers of this blog will find some, even many, to be of interest.
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