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An action that causes an organism to leave an additional 10 offspring while causing each organism it interacts with to leave an additional 20 offspring is weakly altruistic but not strongly altruistic.

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1 reason for

2 reasons against

Reasons For

1 perspective

Reason for

1.Strong altruism requires the behaviour to reduce the absolute fitness (number of offspring) of the donor.
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2.Weak altruism requires only that the action reduce the relative fitness of the donor (its fitness relative to the recipient).
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3.The described action boosts the donor's absolute fitness by 10 offspring, so it does not reduce the donor's absolute fitness.
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Reasons Against

2 perspectives

Reason against 1 of 2

1.The strong/weak altruism distinction conflates two distinct fitness metrics, creating an arbitrary boundary dependent on which baseline is chosen.
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2.Elliott Sober and David Wilson argue that relative fitness comparisons are the evolutionarily relevant measure, making 'weak' altruism the more fundamental biological category.
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3.If relative fitness is the proper metric for selection, then an action reducing relative fitness is straightforwardly altruistic without qualification by degree.
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Reason against 2 of 2

1.Hamilton's inclusive fitness framework subsumes both cases under a single coefficient-of-relatedness calculus, rendering the strong/weak distinction theoretically redundant.
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2.An action benefiting both actor and recipients can still satisfy Hamilton's rule (rb > c) and be selected as genuinely altruistic when recipient benefits are sufficiently weighted by relatedness.
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Topics

Consequentialism

Key Terms

Fitness (evolutionary context)(as implied by the statement's focus on offspring numbers): In biology, how successful an organism is at surviving and reproducing—measured by how many offspring it has.
Organism(as what the argument is discussing): Any living thing, like a plant, animal, or human being—something that's alive and can grow, reproduce, and respond to its environment.
Strongly altruistic(as used in evolutionary biology and ethics): An action that helps others but actually harms or provides no benefit to you personally.
Weakly altruistic(as used in evolutionary biology and ethics): An action that helps others more than it helps you, but still gives you some benefit.
altruism(Evolutionary game theory): Any behaviour by an organism that decreases its own expected fitness in a single interaction but increases that of the other interactor

Connections

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Moral Responsibility2 linked

An action benefiting both actor and recipients can still satisfy Hamilton's rule...Elliott Sober and David Wilson argue that relative fitness comparisons are the e...Hamilton's inclusive fitness framework subsumes both cases under a single coeffi...

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SEP: altruism-biological

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A quite different ambiguity concerns the distinction between weak and strong altruism, in the terminology of D.S. Wilson (1977, 1980, 1990). This distinction is about whether the altruistic action entails an absolute or relative fitness reduction for the donor. To count as strongly altruistic, a behaviour must reduce the absolute fitness (i.e., number of offspring) of the donor. Strong altruism is the standard notion of altruism in the literature, and was assumed above. To count as weakly altrui

Extraction notes

Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 3 (1 for, 2 against)
Edits: 1 edit

An action that causes an organism to leave an additional 10 offspring while causing each organism it interacts with to leave an additional 20 offspring is weakly altruistic but not strongly altruistic.

Reasons For

Reasons Against

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