Altruism and Reality PDF Download

Author: Paul Williams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136810730
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Brings together Paul Williams' previously published papers on the Indian and Tibetan interpretations of selected verses from the eighth and ninth chapters of the Bodhicaryavatara.

Author: Charles Daniel Batson
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195341066
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
We send money to help famine victims halfway around the world. We campaign to save whales and oceans. We stay up all night to comfort a friend with a broken relationship. People will at times risk - even lose - their lives for others, including strangers. Why do we do these things? What motivates such behavior? Altruism in Humans takes a hard-science look at the possibility that we humans have the capacity to care for others for their sakes rather than simply for our own. Based on an extensive series of theory-testing laboratory experiments conducted over the past 35 years, this book details a theory of altruistic motivation, offers a comprehensive summary of the research designed to test the empathy-altruism hypothesis, and considers the theoretical and practical implications of this conclusion. Authored by the world's preeminent scholar on altruism, this landmark work is an authoritative scholarly resource on the theory surrounding altruism and its potential contribution to better interpersonal relations and a better society.

Author: Paul Williams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136810803
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Brings together Paul Williams' previously published papers on the Indian and Tibetan interpretations of selected verses from the eighth and ninth chapters of the Bodhicaryavatara.

Author: Oren Harman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393339998
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
Describes the intellectual journey of eccentric American genius George Price, who tried to answer the evolutionary riddle of why people are nice, and eventually gave away all his belongings and took his own life in a squatter's flat.

Author: Kris Putnam-Walkerly
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119606063
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
How you give matters. Discover philanthropic strategies for creating transformational change. Whether you regularly donate to charity, run a small family foundation, or are responsible for millions of dollars in grants, you are a philanthropist. Delusional Altruism: Why Philanthropists Fail To Achieve Change and What They Can Do To Transform Giving looks at how you can create transformational change. It reminds us that how we give is as important as the amount we give. The author describes common practices that hinder transformational change and explains how to avoid them, ensuring that your gifts help create the impact you seek. Delusional Altruism—a set of all-too-common errors in philanthropic strategy—can derail a program of giving and result in a loss of efficiency and effectiveness. This book asks philanthropists and charitable organizations to consider whether they have fallen under the spell of Delusional Altruism. Are you cutting out impactful giving in order to save money or avoid uncertainty? Is your philanthropic approach unnecessarily restricted by traditional thinking? This book will help you answer these questions and determine how you can achieve better outcomes through the process of Transformational Giving. Ask questions that spur learning and fuel innovation Believe that investment in yourself and your operation is important Increase the speed of your actions to increase the impact of your giving Give in ways that create lasting, sustainable change Follow strategies to make your philanthropy unstoppable Although enhanced opportunities for philanthropic giving are on the horizon, changes to philanthropic practice are needed to prevent this philanthropy boom from becoming under-leveraged. Implementing updated approaches now can lead to positive change for the future. Read Delusional Altruism to learn how you can transform reality with strategic giving.

Author: Ann Swidler
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691183201
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
In the wake of the AIDS pandemic, legions of organizations and compassionate individuals from faraway places descended on Africa to offer help and save lives. Ann Swidler and Susan Cotts Watkins vividly describe the often mismatched expectations and fantasies of altruists who dream of transforming lives, of the villagers who desperately seek help, and of the brokers on whom both Western altruists and impoverished villagers must rely. Based on years of fieldwork in the heavily AIDS-affected country of Malawi, this incisive, irreverent book digs into the sprawling AIDS enterprise and unravels the paradoxes of policy and practice. All who want to do good—from idealistic volunteers to world-weary development professionals—depend on brokers as guides, fixers, and cultural translators. The mutual misunderstandings among these players create all the drama of a romance: longing, exhilaration, disappointment, heartache, and sometimes an enduring connection. A Fraught Embrace unveils the tangled relations of those involved in the collective struggle to contain an epidemic.

Author: Joan Halifax
Publisher:
ISBN: 1250101344
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
"[This book is] an ... examination of how we can respond to suffering, live our fullest lives, and remain open to the full spectrum of our human experience"--Amazon.com.

Author: Stefan Klein
Publisher: Scribe Publications
ISBN: 1925113337
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ conjures an image of the most cutthroat individuals rising to the top. But Stefan Klein, author of the international bestseller The Science of Happiness, makes the startling assertion that the key to achieving lasting personal and societal success lies in helping others. Klein argues that altruism is in fact our defining characteristic: natural selection favoured those early humans who cooperated in groups. With their survival more assured, our altruistic ancestors were free to devote brainpower to developing intelligence, language, and culture — our very humanity. As Klein puts it, ‘We humans became first the friendliest and then the most intelligent apes.’ To build his persuasive case for how altruistic behaviour made us human — and why it pays to get along — Klein brings together an extraordinary array of material: current research on genetics and the brain, economics, social psychology, behavioural and anthropological experiments, history, and modern culture. Ultimately, his groundbreaking findings lead him to a vexing question: if we’re really hard-wired to act for one another’s benefit, why aren’t we all getting along? Klein believes we’ve learned to mistrust our generous instincts because success is so often attributed to selfish ambition. In Survival of the Nicest, he invites us to rethink what it means to be the ‘fittest’ as he shows how caring for others can protect us from loneliness and depression, make us happier and healthier, reward us economically, and even extend our lives.

Author: Paul S. Penner
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004495975
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
This book is an inquiry into the motivation for altruistic behavior. It uncovers the condition that prompts or sometimes even compels us to act intentionally for the benefit of others. This condition, the pre-reflective experience of another person as a self-conscious individual just like oneself, finds its origin in the very structure of the mind. The essay is a synthesis of evidence from neuroscience, phenomenology, Eastern philosophy, analytic philosophy of mind, and cognitive psychology. Hence, it is an excellent example of work in applied cognitive science. The book includes a critique of the several main approaches to the explanation of the motivation for altruistic behavior: biological, psychological, and philosophical. The path of the main inquiry produces several innovative proposals in the philosophy of mind in addition to the main conclusion. Included in these are a detailed account of the structure of the human mind, an ontological categorization of mental states, a naturalistic explanation of so-called mystical states, a proposal for the role of consciousness in the downward causation of physical events, a new interpretation of the Buddhist doctrine of no-self and a unique view of the nature of love.

Author: C. Daniel Batson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190651393
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
For centuries, the egoism-altruism debate has echoed through Western thought. Egoism says that the motivation for everything we do, including our seemingly selfless acts of care for others, is to gain one or another self-benefit. Altruism, while not denying the force of self-interest, says that under certain circumstances we can care for others for their sakes, not our own. Over the past half-century, social psychologists have turned to laboratory experiments on humans to provide a scientific resolution of this debate about our nature. The experiments have focused on the possibility that empathic concern-other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need-produces altruistic motivation to remove that need. With carefully constructed experimental designs, these scientists have tested the nature of the motivation produced by empathic concern, determining whether it is egoistic or altruistic and, thereby, providing an answer to a fundamental question about what makes us tick. Framed as a detective story, this book traces the scientific search for altruism through numerous studies and attempts to examine various motivational suspects, reaching the improbable conclusion that empathy-induced altruism is indeed part of our nature. The book then considers the implications of this conclusion both for our understanding of who we are as humans (the bad news as well as the good) and for how we might create a more humane society.