From personal acts of kindness to charitable gifts to strangers, altruism is seen as a high point of moral virtue. Yet studies suggest altruism is driven by self-interest and personal satisfaction. Does true altruism exist? Is altruism an evolved behaviour shared with animals, or can it be pure and transcendental?

Linda Woodhead is professor in the sociology of religion in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, and director of the AHRC Religion and Society Programme. She has been described by Matthew Taylor, head of the Royal Society of Arts, as “one of the world’s leading experts on religion”.

Here Woodhead speaks to the IAI about Levinas, Nietzsche, her trouble with Christian ethics, and the heroics of true altruism.

Is altruism a coherent idea? What kind of action is altruism, and does it assume a certain model of human agency?

The way we talk about altruism is not coherent because we talk about it as if it is something that’s desirable as a feature of everyday life and interaction on a regular basis. That’s not coherent because I would define altruism not just as selflessness but as self-sacrifice.

It is important to make this distinction between selflessness and self-sacrifice. You can be selfless when you are, for example, chairing a meeting, and you put yourself out of the picture. You are trying to get all those other people to have space to speak and reach a decision. That’s something that’s fairly common and important in life. But altruism is about a bit more than that. It’s about actually sacrificing yourself for the sake of someone else. We talk about that too lightly. It’s a very important thing but it’s also a rare and noble and heroic thing, and we ought to be more parsimonious about the way we use the word.

You talk about altruism as a heroic, self-sacrificing act that should be extraordinary or exceptional somehow. But isn’t there still a point to the more everyday sense of altruism as a habitual ethical practice, not just in what we do but in how we think about others?

That’s certainly how it’s been used. But I’ve noticed that those who are very keen on extolling people’s altruism are usually those in the most privileged positions in society. It’s easy to find middle-class white men saying that altruism’s very important and we’re losing it and we need it. Of course they are the ones who are least likely to show such altruism because they are the ones that are taking up the most resources. Over time, that has made me suspicious of altruism. It is often a way in which powerful people – often unconsciously – commend self-sacrifice on the part of other people, even though it’s not something that is a feature of their own lives.

In addition, the idea of altruism is used very commonly in Christianity. If you look historically, it has been used to keep down women, children, lower classes, and other races. Altruism is a very dangerous tool when used as an everyday feature of life because it makes it very hard for oppressed people to resist their oppression. As soon as they start claiming their own rights, they’re told: “Oh, that’s not very loving. That’s not very altruistic. That’s very selfish of you claiming your own rights.” Eventually, this has made me realise that we need to be much more careful about how we use this idea of altruism.