How Is Altruistic Motive Possible From A Framework Of Empathy?

What is the motivation behind people’s tendency to do good or help others in need,which may come at a cost to themselves?Psychological egoists believe that all human behaviors,when properly understood,can be regarded as behaviors driven by selfish desires,and that the goal of each person’s actions must be self-centered.They argue that human beings have no altruistic motives.For the viewpoint of psychological egoism,many scholars try to refute it from their own perspective.Reviving past theories,we can find that many philosophers or psychologists connect altruism with a certain psychological mechanism,and demonstrate the existence of altruistic motivation according to the characteristics of a certain psychological mechanism,and this psychological mechanism is empathy.The theory that empathy produces altruistic motives can be traced back to David.Hume,Hume tried to prove that human beings have altruistic emotions,desires and motives,but Hume’s theory makes human emotions depend on cognition and reasoning,and there are still many problems in responding to questions of psychological egoism.The modern philosopher Michael.Slote also continued this path,overcoming some problems of Hume,and put forward the theory of empathy ethics.But Slote’s theory in the face of the interpretation of the psychological egoism also cannot effectively.Danial.Batson fully explained the theory that empathic concern produces altruistic motivation and redefined the concepts of empathic concern and altruism.He analyzed the conditions of empathic care,and focused on the core hypothesis of empathic concern-altruistic motivation.On the basis of theoretical research,Batson designed many experiments,and all the experimental results supported the empathic concern-altruistic motivation hypothesis,which effectively refuted the explanation of psychological egoism.So far,in response to psychological egoism,batson’s empathic concern-altruism hypothesis is convincing,but batson’s experiments also have some problems need to be solved,incluing the problems that the experient is open-ended and all versions of the empathy-egoism hypothesis cannot be tested at the same time.