A number of criticisms Utilitarianism – such as “nearest and dearest” objections, “demandingness” “altruistic” objections arise because doesn’t permit partially or wholly disregarding the utility certain subjects. authors, including Sider (1993), Portmore (2008) Vessel (2010), have responded to these by suggesting we adopt “dual-maximizing” theories which provide a way incorporate disregarding....

We analyze the e¤ects of family ties “the fetters of the sib”on the incentives for productive e¤ort. A family is here modelled as a pair of mutually altruistic siblings. Each sibling exerts e¤ort, or makes an investment, to produce output under uncertainty, and siblings may transfer output to each other. We show that altruism has a nonmonotonic e¤ect on e¤ort. Equilibrium e¤ort decreases (incre...

We demonstrate the existence of altruism via kin selection in artificial life and explore its nuances. We do so in the Avida system through a setup that is based on the behavior of colicinogenic bacteria: Organisms can kill unrelated organisms in a given radius but must kill themselves to do so. Initially, we confirm results found in the bacterial world: Digital organisms do sacrifice themselve...

Please cite this article in press as: Nyborg, H. 10.1016/j.paid.2012.03.010 The interview covers Rushton’s background in England, South Africa, and Canada, his education at the University of London (B.Sc., 1970; Ph.D., 1973), and his early research (1970–1980) on the social learning of generosity in 7to 11-year olds. In his first book, Altruism, socialization, and society (1980), Rushton solved...

In the current research we tested a comprehensive model of spirituality, religiosity, compassion, and altruism, investigating the independent effects of spirituality and religiosity on compassion and altruism. We hypothesized that, even though spirituality and religiosity are closely related, spirituality and religiosity would have different and unique associations with compassion and altruism....

Rights © 2015 Lingfei Yu and Pengfei Liu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Routing in mobile social networks is a challenging task due to the characteristic of intermittent connectivity, especially when the nodes be...

This paper introduces the concept of a multi-robot community in which multiple robots must fulfill their individual tasks while operating in a shared environment. Unlike typical multi-robot systems in which global cost functions are minimized while accomplishing a set of global tasks, the robots in this work have individual tasks to accomplish and individual cost functions to optimize (e.g. pat...

Reproductive altruism is an extreme form of altruism best typified by sterile castes in social insects and somatic cells in multicellular organisms. Although reproductive altruism is central to the evolution of multicellularity and eusociality, the mechanistic basis for the evolution of this behaviour is yet to be deciphered. Here, we report that the gene responsible for the permanent suppressi...