Abstract
Altruism is an universal experience and kind of behavior that has been studied by economists. However, the assump-tions frequently accepted about psychological foundations of human nature in utilitarian doctrines, as it’s the case of Economics, have caused several problems that make difficult to formulate a general theory of altruism. That is main-ly because utilitarian altruism is not really altruism. We explain the psychological theory that link James & John S. Mill utilitarian doctrines, and show how it’s principal contents, and theoretical problems dealed with altruism, appear again replicated in modern neoclassical models, as Gary S. Becker’s, that explain altruism by means of more devel-oped formal analysis. We propose the need for updating utilitarian tradition on altruism, taking into account the cur-rent findings in cognitive neuroscience. Curiously, these findings connect brain running with the theoretical assump-tions considered by Adam Smith, and the psychology of sympathy tradition.
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