Thomistic Personalism as the Key to Understanding Human Altruism

Surrounded as we are by stories of incredible human cruelty, we are also amazed by the incredible extent to which human beings make sacrifices to show kindness to others. This is fascinating because it contradicts prima facie the standard picture of competition for survival painted by the evolutionary theory. This has raised several questions and led to divergent scientific claims. The most pressing question has to do with the ultimate explanation of this behavior among human beings: why is the human being altruistic? The considerable study in psychology and evolutionary biology, sociology, and anthropology only beg the question. The best scientific analyses offer descriptive accounts of observed human altruistic behavior but are helpless in trying to plumb into the sources of motivation for such behavior. There is a diversity of interesting questions with respect to altruism, some of which address the possibility of altruism itself. It is fairly obvious that the core question of altruism belongs less to the sphere of the natural sciences than to philosophy. How do we get to an adequate philosophical answer to this question? In this paper, I search for the answers within the philosophical framework of Thomistic personalism. Any account of human altruistic motivation must assume