Are altruistic impulses always right?

It would be an easy solution for our problems if we could say, “In every case follow the altruistic impulse.”  But this simplification is impossible; the ideal of service is not such an Open Sesame to our duty.  And this for several reasons: 

(1) There are frequently clashes between altruistic impulses.  In fact, almost all moral errors have some unselfish impulse on their side which helps to justify them in the eyes of the sinner and his friends.  The politician who gets the best jobs for his supporters, the legislator who puts through a special statute to favor his constituents, the jingo who helps push his country into war for its “honor” or “glory"-these and a host of other wrongdoers are conscious of a genuine altruistic glow.  They ignore the fact that they are doing, on the whole, more harm than good to others, because the smaller group that is apparently benefited looms larger to the eye than the more widely distributed and less directly affected sufferers.

All of our most vexing moral problems are those in which benefit to some must be weighed against benefit to others.  Shall a man who is needed by his family risk his life to save a ne’er-do-well?  Shall we insist that people unhappily married shall endure their wretchedness and forego the possibility of a happier union in order that heedlessness and license may not be encouraged in the lives of others?  Life is full of such two- sided problems; it is not enough that an act may bring good to some, it must be the act that brings most good to most.

(2) An apparently altruistic act, dictated by sympathy, and productive of happiness, may not be for the ultimate good of the very person made happy.  To give everything they want to children is inevitably to “spoil” them, as we rightly say; to spoil their own happiness in the long run as well as their usefulness to others.  To condone another’s sin and save him the unpleasantness of rebuke or the inflicting of a penalty is often the worst thing that could be done to him.  To give alms to a beggar may mean to assist his moral degeneration and in the long run increase his misery.

(3) Even when an act superficially egoistic conflicts with one that seems altruistic, the greatest good of the community often dictates the former.  There is, as Trumbull used to put it, a “duty of refusing to do good.”  A man who can best serve the common good by concentrating his strength on that work where his particular ability or training makes him most effective, may be justified in refusing other calls upon his energies, however intrinsically worthy.  An Edison would be doing wrong to spend his afternoons in social service, a Burbank has no right to diminish his resources by giving a public library.  Emerson deserves our commendation for refusing to be inveigled into the various causes that would have drafted his time and strength.  Even to the anti-slavery agitation