ABSTRACT
Thomas Hobbes suggested that man cares for others because those others are of use to him. Another explanation was put forward by Adam Smith and later supported by Edward Westermarck. Smith suggested that people care for others because they have a capacity to imagine themselves in the other person's situation. This is the famous argument from analogy. Both these perspectives are still influential today in various fields, such as evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, moral philosophy and economic theory. This chapter focuses on the role that these two perspectives have come to play in the thinking of some central modern evolutionary theorists' conception of altruism. It suggests that both of the perspectives on altruism just described are problematic in their own ways. The main problems about them are, on the one hand, reliance on a transactional model of interpersonal relationships and, on the other hand, the view on interpersonal understanding as consisting mainly of the capacity for analogical imagination.
