Thammasat University students interested in philosophy, ethics, morality, civic education, political science, sociology, and related subjects may find a new book useful.

The Rules of Rescue: Cost, Distance, and Effective Altruism is an Open Access book available for free download at this link:

https://academic.oup.com/book/45520

Its author, Professor Theron Pummer, teaches philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about different aspects of the morality of altruism.

His book discusses our duty to help others even when it may be difficult and costly to do so. Apart from emergencies, in everyday life there are opportunities to give time or money to help strangers who need food, shelter, or medical care.

Professor Pummer suggests that it is often wrong to provide less help rather than more, even when personal sacrifice involved makes it permissible not to help at all.

From a moral perspective, helping distant strangers by donating or volunteering is closer to rescuing nearby strangers than most of us realize.

Since many opportunities exist, helping others can make morality extremely demanding, and we must consider cost and our own plans and projects.

The word altruism in the book’s subtitle refers to unselfishness or devotion to the welfare of others, the opposite of egoism.

The term derives from a French would meaning to others, insofar as altruism means all action that benefits others instead of benefiting oneself.

The author also argues that it is important to donate to charities that are cost effective.

In this way, he states, it would be wrong to donate to less cost-effective charities rather than to more cost-effective charities, so it is a good idea to research charities before donating to them.

If the opportunity arises, it is wrong to save one stranger’s life at great cost to ourselves when instead we might be able to save this stranger’s life and another’s at the same great cost to ourselves.

He defines effective altruism as the project of using time, money, and other resources to help others the most.

He notes that everyone

“should be thinking about how to help more, whether by shifting our career, volunteering, or donating.”

Here are some thoughts about altruism by authors, most of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:

It is more blessed to give than to receive.

• Jesus, quoted in Acts of the Apostles 20:35

Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish.

• Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976)

Altruism is an instinct we’ve inherited from the small society where we knew for whom we work, whom we serve. When you pass from this, as I like to call it, ‘concrete society’, where we are guided by what we see, to the abstract society which far transcends our range of vision, it becomes necessary that we are guided not by the knowledge of the effect of what we do, but by some abstract symbols. Now, the only symbol which tells us where we can make the best contribution is profit. And in fact by pursuing profit, we are as altruistic as we can possibly be, because we extend our concern to people who are beyond our range of personal conception. This is a condition which makes it possible to produce what I call an extended order, an order which is not determined by our aim, by our knowing what are the most urgent needs, but by an impersonal mechanism which by a system of communication puts a label on certain things which is fully impersonal.

• Friedrich Hayek, in 1985 interview

Life has its beginning and its maturity comes into being when an individual rises above self to something greater. Few individuals learn this, and so they go through life merely existing and never living. Now you see signs all along in your everyday life with individuals who are the victims of self-centeredness. They are the people who live an eternal “I.” They do not have the capacity to project the “I” into the “Thou.” They do not have the mental equipment for an eternal, dangerous and sometimes costly altruism. They live a life of perpetual egotism. And they are the victims all around of the egocentric predicament. They start out, the minute you talk with them, talking about what they can do, what they have done. They’re the people who will tell you, before you talk with them five minutes, where they have been and who they know. They’re the people who can tell you in a few seconds, how many degrees they have and where they went to school and how much money they have. We meet these people every day. And so this is not a foreign subject. It is not something far off. It is a problem that meets us in everyday life. We meet it in ourselves, we meet in other selves: the problem of selfcenteredness. […] An individual has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow horizons of his particular individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. And this is one of the big problems of life, that so many people never quite get to the point of rising above self. And so they end up the tragic victims of self-centeredness. They end up the victims of distorted and disrupted personality. […] And there is another way to rise above self-centeredness and that is by having the proper inner attitude toward your position or toward your status in life or whatever it is. You conquer self-centeredness by coming to the point of seeing that you are where you are today because somebody helped you to get there. And so many people, you see, live a self-centered, egocentric life because they have the attitude that they are responsible for everything and for their position in life. For everything they do in life, they feel, somehow, that they are responsible and solely responsible for it. […] You are what you are because of somebody else. You are what you are because of the grace of the Almighty God. He who seeks to find his ego will lose it. But he who loses his ego in some great cause, some great purpose, some great ideal, some great loyalty, he who discovers, somehow, that he stands where he stands because of the forces of history and because of other individuals; he who discovers that he stands where he stands because of the grace of God, finds himself. He loses himself in that something but later finds himself. And this is the way, it seems to me, to the integrated personality.

• Martin Luther King, Jr., in his speech “Conquering Self-centeredness”, delivered on 11 August 1957 at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)