John Kearney is a retired philosophy professor who taught at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He has lived in Waterloo, Iowa for the past eight years.
On January 13, 1982, a Boeing 737 took off from Washington National Airport. About one minute later, it struck the 14th Street bridge and plunged into the Potomac River. The flight crew and more than 70 passengers perished. One of the passengers, Priscilla Tirado, could be seen flailing around in the icy waters. A bystander on the shoreline, Lenny Skutnik, a Congressional Budget Office employee, responded to her desperate screams for help, pulled off his coat and shoes, jumped into the river, and saved her life. Two weeks later, President Ronald Reagan hailed Skutnik as a hero in his State of the Union address.
A less publicized story is that of Senator Cory Booker, who, while serving as mayor of Newark, New Jersey in 2012, risked his life by running into a burning, smoke-infested building and saving the life of a neighbor.
Why do individuals like Skutnik and Booker engage in such extraordinary acts of altruism?
The egoist will argue that so-called “selfless” acts actually benefit the person who performs them. Maybe the supposed altruist just wants to “look good” in other people’s eyes. But, as the Skutnik and Booker cases clearly illustrate, individuals who perform heroic selfless acts often do so spontaneously. It’s not as if these men asked themselves, “How will I benefit from my perceived altruistic behavior?” They just acted quickly and instinctively.
Abigail Marsh, Ph.D., the Director of the Laboratory on Social and Affective Neuroscience at Georgetown University, claims that at the root of the capacity for highly altruistic behaviors, such as people who donate a kidney to a stranger, is compassion. A compassionate person is sensitive to the fear detected in another person’s facial expression or voice.
One can readily understand why a person may act selflessly on behalf of a family member. But what drives some people, such as anonymous kidney donors, to be compassionate and engage in actions that benefit complete strangers?
In The Fear Factor (Basic Books, 2017) Marsh claims that there is a part of the brain, the amygdala, a “lump of fat and fiber about a half of an inch in diameter that is buried beneath layers of cortex beneath each temple,” which “plays a critical role in recognizing fearful facial expressions.” Her research team conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans on twenty kidney donors that showed a “robust response” (large spikes of neurological activity) detected in the amygdala when the donor observed the fearful facial expressions, such as a grimace, of a stranger.
At the other end of the spectrum is psychopathic behavior. Marsh claims that psychopaths are “deficient in recognizing and responding to others’ fear.” And they have an amygdala that is 18-20 percent smaller in size than that of highly altruistic individuals. So, a psychopath may come into the world with a serious brain deficit, owing to a smaller amygdala, which may partially explain why he is cold, uncaring, and insensitive to another person’s fearful expressions. (See Marsh’s persuasive and moving TED talk: Why some people are more altruistic than others.)
Marsh’s claims prompt some vexing questions. If Jack the altruist is born with a larger amygdala, does that mean that Jack cannot help being selfless, while Rob the psychopath with a much smaller amygdala cannot help being cold and insensitive? Should Jack be less deserving of our praise and Rob less deserving of our blame?
In a 2017 NPR TED Radio Hour interview, host Guy Raz asked Abigail Marsh if her research indicates that “some of us are just wired to be better than others.” Marsh replied by referencing a 2016 study in Nature Genetics, which “looked across all of the genetic studies that had been done across the last several decades. And they found that on average across almost every human trait, the amount that’s dictated by genetic variation is about 50 percent. And I think the same is probably true for altruism.” She thinks the fact that people are becoming more altruistic than in times past suggests that altruistic impulses are not entirely controlled by genetic factors over which we have no control.
I was heartened to hear that. For there is a part of me that wants to go on praising Lenny Skutnik, Cory Booker, and all those individuals whose first impulse is to render aid, even to complete strangers.
In a very famous and frequently anthologized 1972 article, Famine, Affluence, and Morality (Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1(3): 229–243), the Australian philosopher Peter Singer came up with a principle that seems to fit the times we are living in. It is “the principle of preventing bad occurrences.”
One version of this principle says: “if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.” Singer provides a clear example of an application of the principle: “if I am walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing.” (What is effective altruism? Philosopher Peter Singer explains.)
If it is in our power to do so, who among us would not feel morally obligated to save the life of the drowning child if the only thing we had to sacrifice was muddy clothes? Surely, the life of the child is worth more than getting our clothes soiled.
Now, suppose you are a billionaire, and some of your wealthy friends have donated $300 million to help fund one of your pet projects. You could have asked them to donate their money to prevent starvation and death in various parts of the world, including your own country, or fund cancer research. Instead, you decided to ask them to help fund a 90,000 square foot ballroom that can accommodate close to 1,000 people in your already lavish mansion.
Does any thinking person seriously believe that a ballroom is more important than the lives of starving and dying people or cancer victims?
Happily, there are altruistic-minded billionaires, like Bill and Melinda Gates, and their billionaire friend, Warren Buffett. Their combined philanthropic efforts have significantly reduced the total amount of suffering and preventable deaths in the world.
On the Gates Foundation website, Bill and Melinda Gates write: “One day, we read a newspaper article about millions of children in poor countries who die from diseases, such as diarrhea and pneumonia, that were easily treated in wealthier countries. That blew our minds. As new parents, it hit us especially hard. If there’s anything worse than the death of a child, we said to each other, then surely, it’s the preventable death of a child.”
Since 2000, the Gates Foundation has spent close to 54 billion dollars supporting a variety of causes, much of it aimed at improving global health, and has pledged 200 billion dollars over the next 20 years. This is altruism on steroids! A far cry from the billionaire who places such a high premium on an arguably unnecessary ballroom.
Top image: The White House, showing the construction of the State Ballroom on the east side of the building. The East Wing of the White House has been completely demolished and work at ground level is ongoing. Photo by G. Edward Johnson, taken from the top of the Washington Monument on December 17, 2025; available via Wikimedia Commons.