Helping others without trying to withdraw benefits for oneself raises many debates. Different opinions on whether a person can voluntarily do something good for another human being without pursuing personal interests exist. The assumption about pure altruism is that the only motive for giving is “the utility derived from the charity’s output” (Ottoni-Wilhelm, Vesterlund, & Xie, 2017, p. 3617).
The positive feelings and emotions that individual experiences after helping others or doing a morally good deed can also be considered as satisfaction and advantages that a person gets. Consequently, it is challenging to say that pure altruism exists. The purpose of this paper is to argue that perfect altruism does not exist and that people’s motivation to help is always driven by personal feelings of satisfaction, although sometimes unconscious ones.
Around the globe, many people continue to do good for society and other individuals through such acts as charity, volunteering, donations, or simple acts like helping a friend. Still, all those actions are impurely altruistic because “individuals receive some benefit not only from improvement in a public good but also from the act of giving itself” (Simon, 2016, p. 372). Thus, pure altruism implies a complete absence of a self-worth feeling or satisfaction. Instead, the concept of impure altruism does exist when an individual chooses to act in a way that benefits others to feel pride (Saito, 2015).
Thus, it does not follow the theory that altruism is pure when it focuses on total utility (Galperti & Strulovici, 2017). In other words, those who give selflessly still have a conscious or unconscious gratification for their actions and are motivated by personal preferences. Such motivations as the feeling of being needed, selfishness, or even happiness from helping those who are in need, often drive people to be altruistic.
In conclusion, altruism exists among societies, which can be seen starting from large charitable events and not-for-profit organizations. However, pure altruism implies a total absence of any moral benefits for an individual, which leads to the thought that altruistic actions taking place are impure. Untrue altruism is also referred to as prosocial behavior driven by “self-centered motives or even by narrow self-interest” (Wittek & Bekkers, 2017, p. 579). The fact that people have a specific motivation already implies that altruism is imperfect.
References
Galperti, S., & Strulovici, B. (2017). A theory of intergenerational altruism. Econometrica, 85(4), 1175-1218.
Ottoni-Wilhelm, M., Vesterlund, L., & Xie, H. (2017). Why do people give? Testing pure and impure altruism. American Economic Review, 107(11), 3617-3633.
Saito, K. (2015). Impure altruism and impure selfishness. Journal of Economic Theory, 158, 336-370.
Simon, J. (2016). On the existence of altruistic value and utility functions. Theory and Decision, 81(3), 371-391.
Wittek, R., & Bekkers, R. (2015). Altruism and prosocial behavior, sociology of. In J. D. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences (pp. 579-583). Oxford, UK: Elsevier.