The Natural Basis Of Altruism And Its Limits

There is a long discussion about human beings are primarily altruistic or selfish.In fact, altruistic behavior exists widely between human society and nature. In this article, through combing the research results of the modern natural science and social science, I described the altruism behavior and characteristics of natural animal to find the ‘origin’ of human altruism, and through the dual attributes of the human altruistic behavior--natural attribute and social attribute at the same time to investigate the characteristics of human altruism to have a reasonable understanding of human altruism.Altruistic behavior is widespread in nature, so is human altruism.However, there are inherent differences between them.There is also differences in the definition to altruism of different disciplines in the human society, but the essence is consistent, that is a kind of behavior is conducive to the other in the objective. Altruistic behavior of nature has a fixed pattern,and it comes down from the natural genetic and shows such characteristics: Firstly,it is a natural choice of ‘seed’; Secondly, it is also a group selection of ’cooperation’;Thirdly, it is a kind of animal choice with a certain initiative. Although the animal altruistic behavior maybe do harm to their own interests at the time, it is beneficial to its own copy of the gene in the long run, that is to say, there is a consistency between altruism and egoism in the ’original’ meaning. Altruistic behavior of human beings has both natural attribute rules and society attribute rules, and has a high similarity with animal altruism.The altruism defined by attributes of human society made the human altruism beyond animal level, and theorized as altruism further. It is the double attribute of human that makes the altruistic behavior derive from nature but also beyond the nature with the feature of both inheritance and development related to animals.In conclusion, human altruism belong to social morality, but it is not just the culture product of the human ’for-itself’, which has a natural source of its occurrence and development. This natural source appears necessarily objective limit of ’for-itself’ and ‘beyond’ in human culture. Only can we respect the natural foundation and advocate altruism in the reasonable limits of nature, it is possible to add light and color truly and realistically to the good of human society can be a true reality.