a reader asked:

If an adult sacrifices his life to save the lives of 3 children, do you consider this an altruistic act?

If you do, why is it wrong?

If you don't, then are you saying sacrificing ones life for children is selfish because it is acting in a way that is consistent with the moral values of the individual making the sacrifice?

It's hard to answer that because the word ‘altruism’ is, in our culture, used in two different senses, one factual and one moral, and it's customary to equivocate heavily between them. So I'll have to answer by giving a brief history of morality.

I think that the story so far is something like this:

In primitive societies, moral behaviour was conceived of as being obedience to the authority of the ruler, the priest, the parent and the traditional taboo. Moral rightness could therefore be defined as the degree to which one sacrificed one's own welfare for the sake of such duties. In the West, when Christianity came along, this conception of morality was overlaid (but in no way replaced) by the idea of a religious duty of self-sacrifice for the benefit of other people – also known as altruism. Unlike the old duties, this new duty was almost never enacted. But by serving as a universal unattained standard, it helped to create a state of mind dominated by guilt, fear, self-loathing, lack of self-confidence, pathological selfishness, and self-sacrifice, all of which stabilised society. But it was an unimaginably bad society, by our standards.

Then came the Enlightenment, with its principled scepticism, hostility to authority both secular and religious, and celebration of the value of individual human beings. Rejecting the arbitrary and overtly irrational elements of previous moral philosophy, Enlightenment thinkers swept away the idea that morality was based on obedience or duty. But even though many of them were atheists or agnostics, they were still Christians at heart, and it did not occur to them to question the identification of morality with altruism. Thus they arrived at utilitarianism:

In the sphere of individual decisions affecting only oneself, altruism is irrelevant to utilitarian considerations, and utilitarianism amounted to ‘do what you like’. This does not assert anything positive: It must immediately be followed by, but inherently cannot answer, the question ‘thank you, but what should I like? What would it be best for me to strive for?’. But it was invaluable in its day simply for contradicting earlier conceptions of what constituted right behaviour in the individual domain, and by extension, in the domain of mutually consenting interactions between people. In those areas there was no longer any way of defending an exhortation to sacrifice oneself for some supposedly transcendent purpose. All that mattered was that the preferences of individual human beings be satisfied.

But in regard to society as a whole, and the relationship between it and the individual, utilitarianism floundered a bit. A doctrine of inviolable human rights was developed to protect that domain of individual and mutually consenting interactions. But beyond that, the best that utilitarianism could come up with was the maxim of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. This suffered from all the lack of content of the individual version, plus the irremediable problem of the inter-subjective comparison of utilities (what is the ‘good’ of more than one person?). And, given the previous history, it was taken for granted that what this means in practice is: it is right to sacrifice oneself, and others, for the greatest good of the greatest number. One's own welfare is technically included in this ‘good of the greatest number’, but when the numbers in question are in the millions and billions, that makes no practical difference whatsoever.

Again, these values were virtually never enacted by anyone, but the real effect of their adoption was to continue to cause those same old pathological states of mind which stabilised the remaining moral traditions of obedience and duty. These were now increasingly confined to obedience and duty to the state. People were then ready, intellectually and psychologically, for totalitarianism and socialism.

Totalitarianism, and to a lesser extent socialism, acquired poor reputations during the twentieth century. (Totalitarianism because it led so reliably to mass murders, and socialism because of its failure ever to achieve prosperity, and because of the relative success of ‘capitalist’ economic systems.) But the underlying morality that led to them both is still largely unchanged and unchallenged (Randians are an honourable exception, but their philosophy has its own problems that inhibit its widespread adoption), and so many forms of both are still popular under other names, such as environmentalism, and under disguised forms of the same moral justifications, such as the ‘public good problem’.

And that brings us to the present day.