Quotes About Altruism

If it has the potential to do good, then we should do it

Real love...is when you get as much pleasure from giving pleasure as you do from receiving it.

We have gut feelings, but we also have the capacity to override them, to think through issues, including moral issues, and to come to conclusions that can surprise us. I think this is where the real action is. It's what makes us distinctively human, and it gives us the potential to be better to one another, to create a world with less suffering and more flourishing and happiness. There

Being a good person likely is more related to distanced feelings of compassion and kindness, along with intelligence, self-control, and a sense of justice. Being a bad person has more to do with a lack of regard for others and an inability to control one's appetites.

The idea I'll explore is that the act of feeling what you think others are feeling—whatever one chooses to call this—is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good. From a moral standpoint, we're better off without it.

It's not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists.

How much money and time—and attention and emotional energy—should we spend on ourselves, on those close to us, and on strangers?

In contrast to empathy, compassion does not mean sharing the suffering of the other: rather, it is characterized by feelings of warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other's well-being. Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other

Less empathy, more kindness.

Natural selection may be selfish (in a metaphorical sense), but if so, it's selfish about genes, not individuals. The story goes that J. B. S. Haldane was asked if he would give his life to save his brother and he said he wouldn't, but he would happily do so for two brothers or eight cousins. Only a biologist would say something like that, but Haldane was nicely expressing how evolution works.

The willful suffering we see in religion—fasting, sacrifice, even self-mutilation—might well reflect a more general feature of what we see as virtuous. It isn't good if it doesn't hurt, so when we do good, we are willing—in fact, eager—to experience pain. This is why savvy charities sponsor walkathons and marathons, not group massages and beach parties.

If you absorb the suffering of others, then you're less able to help them in the long run because achieving long-term goals often requires inflicting short-term pain.

Helgeson and Fritz speculate that the gender difference here explains women's greater propensity to anxiety and depression, a conclusion that meshes with the proposal by Barbara Oakley, who, drawing on work on "pathological altruism," notes, "It's surprising how many diseases and syndromes commonly seen in women seem to be related to women's generally stronger empathy for and focus on others." The

In experimental work, people tend to contribute more to a charity when they expect to endure pain and suffering for that cause—the so-called martyrdom effect.

It isn't good if it doesn't hurt, so when we do good, we are willing—in fact, eager—to experience pain.

Seeing the world through the eyes of others is essential to many acts of kindness. For me to respond to your worries and alleviate your fears, I need to understand your thoughts, even if I don't share them. (I might soothe a child who is terrified of a small dog, even if I'm not frightened in the slightest.)

Our altruism and kindness are grounded in the capacity to imagine the world as others see it. But so is our cruelty and manipulation. Another name for this capacity to suss out the minds of others is "Machiavellian intelligence," and the name captures the dark side of this power.

So if the world were a simple place, where the only dilemmas one had to deal with involved a single person in some sort of immediate distress, and where helping that person had positive effects, the case for empathy would be solid.

If our concern is driven by thoughts of the suffering of specific individuals, then it sets up a perverse situation in which the suffering of one can matter more than the suffering of a thousand.

So what's the difference between people who are high in communion (positive) and those who are high in unmitigated communion (negative)? Both sorts of people care about others. But communion corresponds to what we can call concern and compassion, while unmitigated communion ends up relating more to empathy or, more precisely, empathic distress—suffering at the suffering of others.

Always try to be nice,' he hissed through the increasing pain. 'But never fail to be kind.

We simply weren't constructed to live only for ourselves. We were placed on earth to be part of something bigger than the narrow borders of our own survival and our own little definition of happiness.

We would prefer to lob grenades of truth into people's lives rather than lay down our lives for them. But this is exactly what Christ did for us. Can we expect to be called to do anything less?

We simply weren't constructed to live only for ourselves. We were placed on earth to be part of something bigger than the narrow borders of our own survival and our own little definition of happiness. The