Altruism and Christian Ethics

Separated from its anchorage in religion ethics has followed the social sciences in seeing human beings as fundamentally characterised by self-interest so that altruism is either naively idealistic or arrogantly self-sufficient. Colin Grant contends that as a modern secular concept altruism is a parody on the self-giving love of Christianity so that its dismissal represents a social levelling that loses the depths that theology makes intelligible and religion makes possible. The Christian affirmation is that God is characterised by self-giving love (agape) then expected of Christians. Lacking this theological background the focus on self-interest in sociobiology and economics and on human realism in the political focus of John Rawls or the feminist sociability of Carol Gilligan finds altruism naive or a dangerous distraction from real possibilities of mutual support. This book argues that to dispense with altruism is to dispense with God and with the divine transformation of human possibilities.