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Different perspectives on altruism can arise from using narrow or broad definitions of self-interest. Many subscribe to the view that self-interest can be defined in terms of material benefits for the actor, while others argue that self-interest includes psychological rewards, such as the good feeling certain people may get when helping a stranger.
The word 'altruism' was coined by Auguste Comte, the French founder of positivism. Advocates of altruism as an ethical doctrine assert that one's actions ought to further the welfare of other people, ideally to the exclusion of one's own interests. Altruism is distinguished from ethical egoism, according to which one's actions ought to further one's own interests.
In practice, altruism is the performance of duties to others with no view to any sort of personal gain for one's efforts. If one performs an act beneficial to others with a view to gaining some personal benefit, then it is not an altruistic act. As noted above, there are several different perspectives on how "personal benefit" (or "self-interest") should be defined. A material gain (e.g. money, a physical reward, etc.) is clearly a form of personal benefit, while others identify and include both material and immaterial gains (affection, respect, happiness, satisfaction etc.) as being philosophically identical benefits.
According to psychological egoism, while one can appear outwardly altruistic in the practical sense, one cannot have altruistic motivations. That is, while one might very well spend one's life helping others, one's motive for doing so is always the furthering of one's own interests. One claiming to be an altruist might derive great pleasure, for example, from helping others. That pleasure, according to this theory, is both the motive and the resulting benefit one gets from the act. Critics of this theory often reject it on the grounds that it is non-falsifiable; in other words, it is designed in such a way as to be impossible to prove or disprove.
In common parlance, however, altruism usually means helping another person without expecting material reward from that or other persons, although it may well entail the "internal" benefit of a "good feeling," sense of satisfaction, self-esteem, fulfillment of duty (whether imposed by a religion or ideology or simply one's conscience), or the like. In this way one need not speculate on the motives of the altruist in question.
In the science of ethology (the study of behavior), altruism refers to behavior by an individual that increases the fitness (biology) of another individual while decreasing the fitness of the actor. This would appear to be counter-intuitive if one presumes that natural selection acts on the individual. Natural selection, however, acts on the gene pool of the subjects, not on each subject individually. Recent developments in game theory have provided some explanations for apparent altruism, as have traditional evolutionary analyses. Among the proposed mechanisms are:
An interesting example of altruism is found in the cellular slime mouldProtostelia Protosteliida Myxogastria Liceida Echinosteliida Trichiida Stemonitida Physarida Dictyostelia Dictyosteliida Slime moulds are peculiar protists that normally take the form of amoebae, but under certain conditions develop fruiting bodies that rs, such as DictyosteliumDictyosteliidae Dictyostelium Polysphondylium Coenonia Actyosteliidae Acytostelium The dictyostelids are a group of cellular slime moulds. When food is readily available they take the form of individual amoebae, which feed and divide normally. However, wh mucoroides. These protists live as individual amoebae until starved, at which point they aggregate and form a multicellular fruiting body in which some cells sacrifice themselves to promote the survival of other cells in the fruiting body. Objectively, however, this is no different from the behaviour of herbaceous plants, the cells of which expend themselves so that the plant can bear fruit.