Re-posted from earlier this year -
On the top of Maggie's Farm, we seem to reject being subject to the efforts of do-gooders. Is the road to hell paved with good intentions? Do-gooders always seem to either want my money, or want to control me.
This morning, we linked James Taranto's brief discussion of a remarkable paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, titled Concepts and Implications of Altruism Bias and Pathological Altruism.
In just eight dense pages, Prof. Oakley covers a lot of ground and goes far beyond the Law of Unintended Consequences. She touches on psychology, science, medicine, philosophy, and politics. It's a remarkable paper which indeed pulls enough threads together to represent a potential paradigm shift. One quote:
The bottom line is that the heartfelt, emotional basis of our good intentions can mislead us about what is truly helpful for others. Altruistic intentions must be run through the sieve of rational analysis; all too often, the best long-term action to help others, at both personal and public scales, is not immediately or intuitively obvious, not what temporarily makes us feel good, and not what is being promoted by other individuals, with their own potentially self-serving interests.
Indeed, truly altruistic actions may some-times appear cruel or harmful, the equivalent of saying no to the student who demands a higher grade or to the addict who needs another hit. However, the social consequences of appearing cruel in a culture that places high value on kindness, empathy, and altruism can lead us to misplaced "helpful" behavior and result in self-deception regarding the consequences of our actions.
