Evolution, altruism and cognitive architecture: a critique of Sober and Wilson’s argument for psychological altruism

Abstract

Sober and Wilson have propose a cluster of arguments for the conclusion that ''natural selection is unlikely to have given us purely egoistic motives'' and thus that psycho- logical altruism is true. I maintain that none of these arguments is convincing. However, the most powerful of their arguments raises deep issues about what egoists and altruists are claiming and about the assumptions they make concerning the cognitive architecture underlying human motivation. In their important book, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior, Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson offer a new and interesting evolutionary argument aimed at showing that in the venerable dispute between psychological altruism and psychological egoism, altruism is the likely winner. In this paper, I'll argue that Sober and Wilson's argument relies on an implicit assumption about the cognitive architecture subserving human action, that much recent work in cognitive science suggests the assumption may be mistaken, and that without the assumption, their argument is no longer persuasive. Before getting to any of that, however, we'll need to fill in a fair amount of background.