Tentative Thoughts on Reciprocity

Overcoming altruism as the basis for helping others

In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged its hero, John Galt, declares:

`I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.`

It is this statement of Rand's ethics which I believe can act as the spring board for an individualist theory of reciprocity which can substantially replace the need for altruism in justifying helping others. I hope to show reciprocity accounts for many of our intuitions far better than altruism does. This is especially so in considering Peter Singer's drowning child thought experiment, where reciprocity allows you to save the imperilled infant, while still allowing you to let Ethiopians starve without any guilt. Now to the substance.

An individual should help others where the expected value of help in return is of net value. Consider this example. You are faced with a stranger who has broken his leg and would have to undergo a very painful walk to get to the hospital by himself. If you drive him to the hospital  you will be late for dinner, have blood on your seats, and be very tired the next morning. Here the altruist will argue since helping costs you little and benefits him significantly you must drive him to the hospital. I think this conclusion is drawn too quickly.

An additional feature brings out the true framework of our intuitions, or rather I think it does for some of my readers anyway. Imagine you had broken your leg last week, and to get to hospital had to undergo the same painful episode. The mentioned stranger saw you and did not help and instead politely said `I would help, but I don't want to get blood on my leather seats`. I contend when you face the same stranger with a broken leg next week you have no moral obligation to help him. I even question it would be superogatory to do so i.e. morally optional but praiseworthy. 

This thought experiment suggests it is reciprocity, not altruism, which motivates our help. Contrawise some may argue it is punishment for not being altruistic to ensure the ethic is widespread. Maybe, nonetheless, by adding detail to the example we can deny this. If the stranger is known to no one, then there will be no deterrent effect on others; and if the stranger refuses to change his ways, or will die very soon; or on him either. In this instance altruism would dictate helping the man, while I take the intuitions of many readers would still point to leaving him to walk.   

If you are still convinced of the altruistic case, believing taking the stranger to hospital is still the right choice, or not doing so is right only for deterrence reasons, Singer's drowning person thought experiment should make you embrace reciprocity, not altruism. We must now run through his argument from `Famine, Affluence and Morality`, which to my mind is one of the best philosophy articles ever written (available here).

You are walking past a shallow pond on the way to a lecture dressed in one of your many suits. Suddenly you hear a small child scream and then notice he is drowning. Singer asks whether you must save the child, thus ruining your suit and shoes. To this almost everyone answers yes. At this point, Singer asks why you are not duty-bound to save Ethiopians who face the same high chance of death, given saving them comes at just as low a cost and even less risk than saving the drowning child. If we believe we are required to ruin a £300 suit to save a child, why are we not also required to go without fine dining to save a starving Ethiopian? Surely distance, and nationality, makes no moral difference. In which case Singer argues we are morally obliged to keep giving away our income until the marginal unit is of equal moral significance to saving another life. In practise we should give most of our income away to alleviate the severe suffering which engulfs much of Africa and Asia. After all, what is another cashmere jumper or trivial gadget, compared to saving a life.

Insofar as you adhere to altruism I believe Singer is right to maintain you are duty bound to give most of your income to effective charities. Not doing so is directly analogous to letting the child drown in the shallow pond. (He addresses all the common objections to the thought experiment in his article, worth a read if you think there is a disanalogy.) Without doubt this means most of us today in Western Europe and North America are evil people who fail at almost every turn to do our duty.

I am not evil. Nor are you. For we are not obliged to help the starving poor. How though are we supposed to maintain you are duty bound to help the drowning child near you, but not the metaphorically drowning child far away? Here I believe the reciprocity theory solves the problem i.e. it allows us to save the drowning child while also letting the Ethiopians die while tucking into a fillet steak with a creamy peppercorn sauce, sautéed potatoes and buttered asparagus. Yum.  Let me explain in more detail.

As per the Rand opener: `I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.` What exactly does this mean? I believe it means you must not sacrifice your interests to others, or allow or expect others to sacrifice their interests to you. Accepting this, how could you offer help to the drowning child, or indeed the drowning child accept it? I contend you should because you gain by reciprocity. The expected value of you or your child being saved is far greater than the expected value, or in most instances, the actual value you have to give up in getting your suit and clothes muddy. You are thus not living for anyone else's sake, not sacrificing your interest to them, nor are they in accepting your help living at your sake, for in exchange they offer to give up the same interests if the situation arises to help you.

Of course each act of helping is not bilaterally reciprocal: Instead reciprocity should be thought of as an insurance pool. Only within the pool, defined by those who commit to helping drowning children, is everyone a net expected gainer. Those who refuse to put themselves in this pool are not bad people, rather they simply have a different attitude to reciprocity. So long as they refuse help in the instances where they themselves would not help they are acting with total proprietary.

Why not defect though? This I cannot answer at the root - I take Rand's statement as given. Nonetheless, I maintain the wrong of taking the benefit of reciprocity, but bearing none of its cost, is analogous to the individual who never buys his round, an intuition many will strongly and immediately identify with. Indeed, in our everyday relations we shun the free rider far more than the friend who walks past the charity box (and thus lets an Ethiopian die without a malaria net). In fact, we usually join with the latter; I certainly do. And although we may think the person who refuses to take part in a round system is strange, we never think he is bad.

Why doesn't the reciprocal theory encourage you to extend your help to the Ethiopians? Quite simply to put yourself in that pool would be to sacrifice your interests, to live for their sake. If alleviating death and severe suffering is your rule, then you receive from them almost nothing, and have to give close to everything. It is blatantly against your self interest, which is prima facie reason not to pursue the path.

I believe these thoughts to enrich individualist thinking. Indeed, I contend they are an improvement on the explicit reasons Rand gives for helping others as found in her `Ethics of Emergencies`. In my view she adopts the entirely ad hoc position you should save a drowning man `only where the danger to one's own life is minimal`. Why then not save the starving child also.  Indeed she even maintains you may help the poor and sick man next door, and that would not be bad, instead it would be `an act of goodwill`. Why though should you help him, for that would involve sacrificing a greater value to a lesser value, contrary Rand's egoism. (Unless the reciprocal theory is embraced.) Rand's explicit moral philosophy simply doesn't cut the mustard.

However, the characters in her fictional books, such as Howard Roark, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, do present a far more compelling, and consistent, moral code: And one which yields some very counterintuitive results, as the next installment of these thoughts will demonstrate.

P.S. I would welcome thoughts on the above and may include or reply to any in the next installment. Also I am aware this article simply appears to reinvent the wheel i.e. the Golden Rule