altruism
Enable an AI agent to recognise and assess candidate instances of altruism and identify supportable actions without treating helpful outcomes as proof of selfless motivation.
Research draft, second pass
A second pass drafted this model: the structure a model of this thing needs, and what is known about it in the world. The line under this one says how the second half was obtained - researched against sources, or recalled without web access, in which case nothing here was read anywhere and every claim is a lead to verify. Unreviewed either way.
Researched by: Codex + Grok
Purpose and description
Enable an AI agent to recognise and assess candidate instances of altruism and identify supportable actions without treating helpful outcomes as proof of selfless motivation.
Altruism is other-benefiting behaviour or motivation in which the actor incurs a net cost, identified in evolutionary biology by fitness consequences (a loss of the actor's direct fitness and a gain to the recipient) and in psychology by the actor's ultimate goal of increasing another's welfare rather than their own.
It can be Assess a candidate act against an explicitly stated interpretation of altruism.; Request missing evidence about intended benefit, competing motives and beneficiary preferences.; Compare ways to pursue the intended benefit while reducing harm and avoidable personal burden.; Propose continuation, adaptation or withdrawal of help in light of recipient wishes and observed effects.; Revise an assessment when evidence changes without converting it into a global character judgment..
Distinguishing features
Identify whose welfare the actor sought to improve and what supports treating that welfare as an end; a helpful outcome alone establishes neither intent nor altruism.
Distinguish expected repayment or strategic advantage from incidental personal satisfaction; record mixed motives instead of assuming either eliminates concern for others.
Establish what discretion the actor had: fulfilling a duty or following an order requires separate assessment of the actor's welfare-directed reasons.
Separate the cost borne by the actor from the benefit sought for others; sacrifice alone does not establish altruism.
Check intended benefit against beneficiary preferences and observed effects; benevolent intent can coexist with unwanted or harmful intervention.
Scope
+ Actions, decisions and sustained practices proposed as instances of altruism
+ Evidence that another's welfare is an end rather than solely a means to personal gain
+ Intended beneficiaries, their expressed needs and their actual experience
+ Costs, risks, rewards and alternatives facing the acting party
+ Voluntariness, obligations, reciprocity and conflicting motives
+ Differences between intended benefit, observed benefit and unintended harm
- General moral evaluation of people or their character
- Administration of donations, grants and charitable organisations
- Clinical explanations of empathy or personality
- Biological altruism defined through reproductive fitness effects
- General theories of justice and allocation of public resources
- Contractual exchange and legal duties except where they affect an altruism assessment
Characteristics
- Assessment target
- single action | decision | sustained practice Prevents evidence about one act from becoming an unsupported judgment about an entire person.
- Intended beneficiary
- Identified person, group, nonhuman recipient or future population, with relationship to actor Makes the proposed other-directed benefit concrete and exposes uncertainty about who is meant to benefit.
- Welfare-directed motivation
- unassessed | supported | contested | insufficient evidence Represents the strength of an interpretation without claiming direct access to private motives.
- Expected personal return
- Repayment, reputation, affiliation, emotional satisfaction, strategic advantage, none identified or unknown; multiple values allowed Supports assessment of mixed motives and distinguishes incidental rewards from benefits on which the action depends.
- Actor burden
- Time, money, foregone opportunities and risk estimates, recorded separately with context and uncertainty Shows what the actor bears without assuming unlike burdens share a universal scale.
- Discretion and pressure
- freely chosen | duty-bound with discretion | pressured | compelled | unclear Clarifies how far the action expresses a choice and what evidence is needed to interpret it.
- Beneficiary endorsement
- requested | accepted | declined | disputed | not sought | unavailable Separates the actor's idea of helping from the recipient's preferences.
- Welfare effect
- Beneficiary-relevant indicators with baseline, time horizon, comparison and uncertainty; no mandatory aggregate score Allows intended and realised benefit to be assessed independently of motivation.
- Assessment conclusion
- unassessed | provisionally supported | contested | unsupported under stated interpretation Makes the judgment conditional on explicit criteria and available evidence.
Also called
Where this came from
wikidata · CC0 1.0
Drafted structure
Bundle to layer to finding to question, as the second pass will find it: 6 bundles · 11 layers · 18 findings · 28 questions.
Act and beneficiary Identifies the conduct being assessed and the welfare it is meant to serve.
An altruism assessment needs a bounded act and an identifiable other-directed purpose.
Assessment boundary
Separates the candidate action or practice from judgments about the actor as a whole.
Bounded candidate
Record the conduct, actor, occasion and assessment unit without presuming that it qualifies as altruism.
- Which action, decision or sustained practice is being assessed? definition
- What would be an unjustified extension of this assessment to the actor's other conduct or character? boundary
Intended welfare
Locates the proposed benefit in the circumstances of its intended recipients.
Recipient and benefit
Record who is meant to benefit, what improvement is sought and whose account establishes that need.
- Whose welfare is the actor trying to improve, and in what specific respect? definition
- Does the account of the need come from recipients, the actor or another source? provenance
Motives and personal returns Examines concern for others alongside rewards, expectations and competing purposes.
Helpful conduct can arise from different motives, and evidence rarely warrants treating motivation as wholly selfless or wholly self-serving.
Concern for others
Assesses evidence that recipient welfare matters to the actor in its own right.
Welfare as an end
Record evidence supporting or challenging the interpretation that helping others is a purpose rather than only an instrument.
- What statements or choices support the interpretation that the beneficiary's welfare matters independently of the actor's gain? provenance
- Which alternative explanations remain consistent with the observed conduct? boundary
Reward dependence
Distinguishes accompanying rewards from returns that appear necessary to the actor's choice.
Mixed motives and reciprocity
Record anticipated repayment, recognition, satisfaction and advantage without treating their presence as a conclusive classification.
- What personal returns did the actor anticipate, and was any repayment explicitly or implicitly expected? provenance
- What evidence, if any, indicates whether the actor would still help without recognition or repayment? boundary
Burden and freedom Examines what the actor gives up and how freely the contribution is chosen.
Sacrifice, obligation and pressure affect interpretation and sustainability but cannot substitute for evidence of concern for others.
Personal stakes
Places the contribution in the actor's actual resources and alternatives.
Cost, risk and opportunity
Record expected and actual burdens separately, including opportunities forgone and burdens transferred to others.
- What time, resources, opportunities or safety did the actor expect to give up, and what did the act actually cost? measurement
- Which burdens fall on dependants or other parties rather than on the actor? boundary
Choice and obligation
Examines the available freedom to help, refuse or choose a different form of assistance.
Discretion under pressure
Record duties, sanctions, social expectations and meaningful alternatives relevant to the act.
- What obligations or pressures applied, and what choices remained available to the actor? boundary
- What changes would preserve useful help while allowing the actor a meaningful choice to reduce or stop the contribution? action
Recipient agency and effects Examines whether help is wanted and whether it improves welfare in practice.
Assessing altruistic intent must remain distinct from deciding whether an intervention should continue.
Recipient voice
Records recipient preferences and the authority to act when direct consultation is unavailable.
Wanted and authorised help
Record requests, acceptance, refusal and uncertainty about representing recipient interests.
- Have recipients requested, accepted or refused this help, and how was that established? provenance
- If recipients cannot express a preference, what grounds support acting on their behalf? action
Benefit and harm
Compares intended improvement with observed effects and plausible alternatives.
Welfare consequences
Record benefit, harm, distribution and uncertainty without inferring motive from success or failure.
- Compared with what likely would have happened otherwise, what benefits or harms are supported by evidence? measurement
- What recipient feedback or harmful effects would justify adapting or stopping the help? action
Judgment and responsible support Turns incomplete evidence into a qualified assessment and bounded recommendations.
An agent needs to decide what the evidence permits it to say and how it can support helping without exploiting the actor or overriding recipients.
Qualified classification
Makes the interpretation of altruism and the limits of the resulting judgment explicit.
Criteria and confidence
Record the operative criteria, evidence gaps and disagreements underlying a provisional classification.
- Under the interpretation being used, what evidence supports or fails to support calling this act altruistic? definition
- Which missing or conflicting evidence could materially change that assessment? provenance
Support and reassessment
Identifies feasible next actions and conditions for revisiting them.
Sustainable welfare-directed action
Record ways to pursue recipient welfare within the actor's resources, consent and responsibilities.
- What feasible alternative could preserve or improve the intended benefit with less harm or avoidable burden? action
- What changes in recipient wishes, actor capacity or expected benefit should trigger reassessment? action
Evidence and external alignment What the world already says about this thing, gathered so the model can be checked against it.
A model that cannot be lined up against existing standards, identifiers and practice cannot be adopted by anyone who already uses them.
Reported evidence
Findings from the breadth pass, kept separate from the structural claims.
Kinds and varieties
Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.
- Kin altruism (costly help biased toward genetic relatives, as in Hamilton's rule)
- Reciprocal altruism (costly help contingent on return help from the same partner)
- Indirect reciprocity (help given because reputation draws later help from third parties)
- Psychological or empathic altruism (the ultimate goal is the other's welfare)
- Pure altruism (in economics: preference over the recipient's outcome, not the act of giving)
- Impure or warm-glow altruism (utility from giving itself)
- Parochial altruism (in-group help that can impose costs on out-groups)
- Strong reciprocity or altruistic punishment (costly enforcement of norms with no material return)
- Which of these kinds and varieties hold for the sense of altruism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Identifiers and schemes
Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.
- Wikidata - Q170075 - Item for altruism as a concept.
- MeSH - D000530 - National Library of Medicine descriptor Altruism.
- LCSH - Altruism - Library of Congress Subject Heading; used in library and archival cataloguing.
- Which of these identifiers and schemes hold for the sense of altruism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Standards and regulation
Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.
- WHO Guiding Principles on Human Cell, Tissue and Organ Transplantation (World Health Organization, WHA63.22, 2010): donation is to be voluntary and unpaid.
- National Organ Transplant Act 1984 (United States Congress): criminalises transfer of human organs for valuable consideration.
- Directive 2002/98/EC (European Union): blood and blood components to be obtained from voluntary unpaid donations so far as possible.
- Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (Oviedo Convention, Council of Europe, 1997): prohibition of financial gain from the human body and its parts.
- Internal Revenue Code §170 (United States): tax treatment of charitable contributions, the main legal record of monetary giving framed as altruistic.
- Which of these standards and regulation hold for the sense of altruism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Real-world use
Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.
- Unpaid whole-blood donation and deceased- or living-organ donation, legally framed as gifts rather than sales.
- Household charitable giving and formal volunteering to nonprofits, congregations and disaster funds.
- Laboratory and field games used to measure other-regarding choice: dictator, ultimatum, public-goods and third-party punishment games.
- Emergency helping (first aid, bystander intervention) and everyday favours, childcare and food sharing.
- Humanitarian aid, caregiving and some military or rescue acts of high-cost help to non-kin.
- Effective-altruism practice: donors routing money to evaluated interventions (for example global health charities) rather than local or expressive gifts.
- Which of these real-world use hold for the sense of altruism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Typical measurements
Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.
- Coefficient of relatedness (r) between actor and recipient - 0-1; full siblings or parent-offspring ~0.5, half-siblings or grandparents ~0.25, first cousins ~0.125 - dimensionless
- Share of endowment transferred in the dictator game - 0-50 for most subjects; mean often about 20-30 in meta-analyses; a minority give 0 or 50+ - percent of endowment
- Household charitable giving as a share of income - commonly 0 for non-givers; among givers often about 1-3 of income in several high-income countries (higher in some religious tithing populations) - percent of income
- Self-Report Altruism Scale (Rushton): summed Likert ratings of helping acts - 20-100 total score on the 20-item 1-5 form - scale points
- Whole-blood donation rate - from well under 10 in many low-income settings to about 30 or more in several high-income systems - donations per 1,000 population per year
- Which of these typical measurements hold for the sense of altruism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Failure modes and hazards
Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.
- Pathological or indiscriminate helping that harms the intended beneficiary, the helper, or third parties (for example enabling dependency, unsafe rescue, or medically futile sacrifice).
- Exploitation and free-riding: altruists absorb costs while non-contributors take the benefit.
- Parochial altruism that funds in-group welfare while escalating out-group conflict.
- Crowding-out: payment, publicity or mandates that displace intrinsic or reputational motives and can reduce net helping.
- Caregiver burnout and compassion fatigue in high-demand helping roles.
- Ineffective or counterproductive charity (high overhead relative to impact, harmful aid, or gifts that satisfy the donor more than the recipient).
- Signalling and prestige substitution, in which visible giving is mistaken for welfare improvement.
- Organ- and blood-system failure when 'altruistic gift' rules are breached by trafficking, coercion or covert payment.
- Which of these failure modes and hazards hold for the sense of altruism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Regional variation
Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.
- Blood and plasma: WHO and EU policy privilege voluntary unpaid donation; paid plasma collection is routine in the United States and some other systems.
- Organ donation default: opt-in explicit consent versus opt-out or presumed-consent systems (for example Spain's high deceased-donation model).
- Religious giving forms and obligations differ: Islamic zakat as a required transfer, Jewish tzedakah, Christian tithe and alms, Buddhist and Hindu dāna; these are not interchangeable with secular 'charity'.
- Helping targets: many studies find stronger in-group or family priority in more collectivist settings, versus more stranger-directed or abstract giving in some Western samples; the contrast is a tendency, not a rule.
- Effective altruism as an organised donor culture is concentrated in Anglophone academia, tech philanthropy and related networks, not as a global folk category.
- What counts as commendable self-sacrifice versus foolishness or kin neglect varies with kinship norms, honour cultures and welfare-state coverage.
- Which of these regional variation hold for the sense of altruism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Neighbouring kinds and how to tell them apart
Reported by the breadth pass; each item needs checking against its source before it becomes normative.
- Mutualism or mutually beneficial cooperation - Both parties gain in direct fitness or payoff; altruism requires a net cost to the actor in the currency being used (fitness or utility).
- Reciprocity as exchange - A return is expected from the same partner; psychological altruism does not require that expectation, though evolutionary reciprocal altruism is defined by the return contingency.
- Prosocial behaviour - Broader class that includes fairness, cooperation, conformity and helping; altruism is the costly, other-benefiting subset (or the other-regarding motive, in psychology).
- Psychological egoism - The ultimate goal is the actor's own welfare (relief of distress, warm glow, reputation); altruism in Batson's sense is present only if the other's welfare is the ultimate goal.
- Charity as an institution - Organised transfer via nonprofits, churches or the state can be altruistic, strategic, tax-driven or obligatory; the institution is not evidence of the motive.
- Heroism - High-risk, often public, helping under acute threat; most altruism is low-risk everyday cost, and not all heroism is other-regarding in motive.
- Effective altruism (the social movement) - A doctrine about how to allocate helping resources for impartial impact; it is a use of altruism, not a biological or psychological kind of it.
- Spite - The actor pays a cost that reduces the recipient's payoff; altruism requires a benefit to the recipient.
- Which of these neighbouring kinds and how to tell them apart hold for the sense of altruism this model covers, and on what evidence? provenance
Sources
- The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I - Biological definition via fitness costs and benefits; kin altruism and Hamilton's rule (rB > C).
- The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism - Reciprocal altruism as a distinct evolutionary kind, and the conditions under which delayed return can sustain costly help.
- The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer - Psychological definition by ultimate goal; empathy-altruism versus egoistic alternatives (aversive-arousal reduction, reward, punishment).
- Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow Giving - Pure versus impure (warm-glow) altruism in charitable giving and public-goods provision.
- The nature of human altruism - Strong reciprocity, experimental measures (dictator, public-goods, third-party punishment), and the gap between fitness-based and motive-based senses.
- Altruism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - Philosophical neighbours (psychological egoism, ethics of self-sacrifice) and the need to keep biological and psychological senses apart.
- Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior - The evolutionary versus psychological distinction and multilevel-selection arguments about when altruism can spread.
- WHO Guiding Principles on Human Cell, Tissue and Organ Transplantation (WHA63.22) - Altruistic unpaid donation as a governing principle for organs, cells and tissues in real-world regulation.
What the second pass must settle
- Should this registry entry require a motivational interpretation of altruism, or also support behavioural interpretations that do not claim to establish motives?
- Is personal cost necessary for classification, and how should low-cost helping or mutually beneficial conduct be treated?
- What evidentiary standard can support judgments about mixed motives without presenting self-reports or behavioural counterfactuals as decisive?
- How should duty, family attachment, group loyalty and expected reciprocity affect classification across different social contexts?
- Does this entry extend to organisational or AI actors, and what evidence could support attributing welfare-directed motivation to them?