ABSTRACT
In their important book, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology 01' Unselfish Behavior, E11iott Sober and David Sloan Wilson offer a new and interesting evolutionary argument aimed at showing that in the venerable dispute between psychological altruism and psychological egoism, altruism is the likely winner. In this paper, I'll argue that Sober and Wilson's argument relies on an implicit assumption about the cognitive architecture subserving human action, that much recent work in cognitive science suggests the assumption may be mistaken, and that without the assumption, their argument is no longer persuasive. Before getting to any of that, however, we'l1 need to fi11 in a fair amount of background.
