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Sruton re Axelrod's third person definition of altruism

Roger Scruton made an interesting point in Soul of the World that I'm recasting in terms of the contrast between the first-person/third-person perspectives on reality.

Referring to Robert Axelrod in The Evolution of Cooperation, Scruton points out that the third-person definition of altruism given by Axelrod ("An organism acts altruistically if it acts in a way that benefits the other at a cost to itself") cannot serve to help us understand how one can be motivated to act altruistically.  In other words, it can't tell us what it's like for the one who acts altruistically to knowingly and deliberately act in that manner.  That sort of description must recognize that the first-person, teleological perspective tells us something that the quantitative, a-teleological, third-person perspective can't, so that one can't construct the former from the latter.


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