Is Altruism Dead?

Abstract

In 1964 most Americans were shocked to hear Kitty Genovese, a young New York City girl, had been murdered within sight and sound of 38 of her neighbors. Not one of them came to her rescue or even called the police. Since then similar cases have been reported. Some doctors fearing malpractice suits no longer stop to help accident victims and Americans in general often just walk on by. Many persons feel apathy and dehumanization are emerging as dominant characteristics of society because of today's sprawling urban civilization. Psychiatrists and psychologists are attempting to find out if these characteristics are replacing altruism and, if so, why. One reason they may be is altruistic motives are often looked upon with distrust and suspicion. The medical profession, for instance, sometimes tends to suspect living organ donors of being mentally ill or emotionally unbalanced and therefore excludes them from donation. Experience indicates, says Dr. Jean Hamburger, a respected transplant pioneer and professor of medicine at the University of Paris, that individuals who write to a transplant center in order to donate a kidney to a prospective recipient to whom they are not connected by any kind of emotional tie are frequently pathologic by psychiatric criteria. This type of thinking has become evident with the increase in human kidney transplants. Kidney transplants are becoming more and more successful. Since survival rates are higher when the kidney comes from a living donor rather than a cadaver, the number of living transplants increases yearly. So do the associated behavioral and ethical problems. Drs. Carl H. Hellner and Shalom H. Schwartz of the University of Wisconsin in Madison have tried to answer some of these problems. They feel altruism and moral concern, rather than psychopathology, account for a person's willingness to be a donor. They have conducted a study indicating the bias against living donors by the medical profession may be out of step with public opinion and altruism still exists. Written questionnaires were completed by 116 adults in a Midwestern city. Results published in the March 18, 1971 NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE show 75 percent of respondents thought success with unrelated donors was adequate to justify expanded use of the procedure. Sixty-three percent considered the continued use of live donors justified. Only 24 percent definitely ruled out donation of one of their kidneys to a stranger. The doctors also pointed out the more schooling a person had the more likely he was to approve the use of unrelated and live donors. And the younger a respondent was, the more willing he was to personally donate a kidney.