Blood From a Stone

Today I went down to the local blood bank and allowed them to siphon away a considerable quantity of my precious, precious blood.  It was my first time; I was inspired to donate by a book I recently read, The Red Market, a fascinating (and frequently gut-wrenching) examination of worldwide markets in human tissue from 'blood farms', kidneys and anatomical skeletons to human eggs, surrogate pregnancy, and international adoption.  The book takes a severely critical stance toward the mandates of privacy and altruism prevalent in all forms of tissue exchange, which combine to encourage shortages and black-marketeering, proposing instead a regimen of extreme transparency and direct connection between the human beings involved in the transaction.  Seriously, go read it; despite its often moralistic tone and an unfortunately bioluddite-inflected chapter on longevity research, it's a great read purely for the insane stories of how tissue trafficking has influenced people and communities and discussions of the ethical issues involved.

All of which primed me perfectly for a call from Canadian Blood Services and a quickly scheduled trip to the clinic (which I scheduled for the next evening in case of an attack of nerves; ultimately, I felt no discomfort or distress at all at the sight of my blood flowing down a tube into a machine, and calmly sat and read while it was taken.)  Which might raise the question, in an observer, as to why a person such as myself would do something as altruistic as give blood with no recompense beyond a stale donut.  After all, as a stated ethical egoist I have in the past railed against the stupidity of altruism; I continue to advocate that the principle of self-interest is the highest of ethical obligations and that any supposed moral requirement of self-sacrifice is tantamount to slavery.

At this point I would like to make a firm distinction between 'absolute altruism', the moral requirement to sacrifice one's own self-interest for the sake of others, and 'situational altruism', the occasional calculated sacrifice of one's immediate self-interest in expectation that it will ultimately bring one greater benefit.  One is a compelled action demanded from without, the other a voluntary action inspired from within.  Another concept which may prove illuminating is 'reciprocal altruism', the habitual sacrifice of self-interest which leads to greater benefit for all involved.  Though I'm not entirely comfortable with the use of the term 'altruism' to describe these latter two principles, there doesn't seem to be a more appropriate one available and I'm not quite up to the point of creating my own philosophical neologisms just yet.

Seen from this perspective, the decision to do something like donate blood is not so inexplicable from an egoist perspective.  Of course if blood was traded on an open market and I could get cash money for it I probably would have started selling it regularly years ago; but it's not like I got nothing for an hour of my time and a bag full of my blood.  Firstly, I good a good feeling from the thought of helping someone in trouble.  This is not coincidental; evolutionary psychologists believe that our species may have such good feeling hard-wired into us by evolution as a way of reinforcing the benefits of reciprocal altruism.  Of course these reward mechanisms can be reinforced, deadened, expanded and manipulated -- not the least by the toxic meme of absolute altruism, which has relocated this quite physical pleasure into the realm of the metaphysical as some sort of ethereal signal that you are doing a 'good' thing rather than an evolved response to the problem of effectively distributing shared resources.  But the reality is that, through whatever combinations of neurogenetic hardwiring and socialogical programming, I feel good at the thought of helping out a stranger who needs my blood.  To ignore that pleasure in choosing my actions would itself be a violation of self-interest; after all, the very first of the Satanic Statements speaks against the sacrifice of carnal pleasure to metaphysical principle.

Second, by becoming a blood donor I get a notch in my favour in the continual negotiation of social hierarchy which we all must undergo.  If people learn that I donate blood, their estimation of me will rise and I will gain social benefits concomitant with that knowledge.  (Of course, I must not tell anyone in an ostentatious way, mind you, nor with any hint that I do it for anything other than purely altruistic reasons - that would be self-serving dontchaknow.  Shhhh, don't tell anyone.)  Again, this is something remediated between genetics and socialization.  If the social benefits of such an act were less, fewer people would be inspired to do it, and the system of blood banking, which is very important to our modern medical system, would be impaired.  This is part of why being a blood donor is built up as a heroic and even intimidating act, instead of the somewhat boring process it actually is.

And finally, there is the fact that I am now a tiny part of the system which saves the lives and treats the illnesses of my fellow citizens.  In the future, the fact that my blood is available will permit a surgery or transfusion to go ahead that otherwise might be postponed or not occur in time.  The person who is thus assisted will then be able to contribute more productively to civil life than otherwise.  They will be able to return to their job earlier and thus make the economy more productive, and undertake other non-economic activity which contributes to the common good, and thus to my welfare and well-being.  They will be happier, and will spread that happiness to others, thus making those others happier, and so on until that goodwill ultimately makes its way back to me.  By giving away a bag of blood, I have made the world I live in a slightly better place for everyone -- an everyone that does, should it need to be recalled, include my self.

Would I have liked some more immediate, material reward for my sacrifice?  Perhaps (though I'm not sure the negative social effects of a cash-for-blood system would ultimately be worth it), but I'm pretty satisfied with the deal I got.  Lest it seem that I am some sort of robot who humourlessly calculates the expected benefit of every decision I make, let me assure you that this choice was just as ad-hoc and off-the-cuff as any other.  The blood bank lady called, and in the moment I made a snap decision to give blood; I did it because it felt like something I wanted to do, and that is the only justification I really need.  My point is that this is pretty much the same way most people make most of their decisions.  I'm really not convinced that people who habitually give away their time and money or blood because of an ostensible commitment to 'Christian charity' or 'social justice' or 'humanism' or what-have-you make those decisions based on fundamentally different criteria than I do.  It feels good, it will make people like them more, and it makes the world they live in more like the one they want to; is that not the meat of the matter?  The supposed satisfaction of an abstract commitment to the good of their fellow human beings just seem like a somewhat bitter icing on a cake that is tasty enough on its own.  And as for those who really follow the dictates of absolute altruism, giving everything they have and working tirelessly to help others -- well, we tend to recognize those people as being edge cases, doing something the vast majority of us couldn't and wouldn't do.  A lot of people see them as saints.  I tend to see them as pathological.  What does it profit a man if he saves the world but loses his own soul?