Is it altruistic if I help my friend move, because I don’t want to study for finals?
Students often arrive hoping to become experts in naming altruism. Richard Feynman observed that you can know the name of a bird in every language and when you’re finished, know nothing about the bird. In PPE 4900: Altruism, Empathy, and Compassion, a sharp demarcation risks becoming — quickly — a way of dividing people rather than attending to them. So we look at the bird. And to look carefully together, we need a medium that can hold what we’re seeing without forcing agreement too early.
“You think because you understand ‘one’ you must also understand ‘two’, because one and one make two. But you must also understand ‘and’.” — Rumi
Between Speech and Prose
Spoken dialogue runs into problems early. Students are still building vocabulary, still mapping new terms onto preexisting intuitions. They talk past one another, unsure what they mean while trying to understand others — and when confusions collide in real time, frustration mounts. Disagreement dissipates before anyone can examine it.
Prose tends toward the same premature closure. Once committed to sentences, an argument acquires an air of finality — and of ownership. To revise prose is to dismantle it. Disagreement hardens before anyone can revise it.
In diagrams, disagreement can be held in place — visible, partial, open to inspection.
Maps Go on the Wall
A few weeks into the semester, each student produces a concept map of how they understand the relationships between the course’s core concepts — empathy, compassion, love, altruistic motivation, altruistic action, and the pathways between them.
“In my initial modeling, I created a concept map to help me understand all the key terms related to altruism. I then used this map to try to piece together how the terms fit.”
Same words. Completely different architectures.
One student places empathy upstream of compassion; another reverses the arrow. One includes near-miss failure states — empathic distress, attachment, naïveté — as explicit nodes; another’s diagram has no failure modes at all. One draws a cycle; another draws a sequence with a hard stop at altruistic action.
This is not a failure of reading comprehension. It is structural. We do not share a nervous system. What is immediately present in one person’s mental model does not transfer cleanly to another. Speech moves too fast to make that gap visible. Prose tends to paper it over. A diagram holds the gap open, where it can be examined.
Because structure is now visible, the conversation changes register. Instead of disagreeing about assertions — altruism requires pure motivation / no it doesn’t — students disagree about relationships: why did you put compassion before motivation, not after? what happens to your model if you add a feedback loop there? The discussion moves from statements to architecture. And because a model is by definition simplified — highlighting certain features, omitting others — its incompleteness is not a liability. It is a design feature. A model that claimed to be complete would be closed. An incomplete model is an invitation.
Diagram-making here is not a one-time exercise but a recurring practice. Students revise their maps as the semester progresses — adding nodes as new concepts arrive, redrawing arrows when seminar destabilizes a connection they thought settled, annotating near-miss conditions they hadn’t originally considered. Does your figure show this? Which of these two structures do you think is more accurate? What would have to be true for this to happen? These are the questions a systems modeler asks when stress-testing a causal diagram — and students, encountering them, begin to ask them of each other.
“Gradually, I came to see the generation of altruistic motivation as a complex phenomenon which relies on many different factors. This wasn’t a realization I came to until I began creating these diagrams and was able to visualize how many different components were involved.”
The diagram did not replace the speech or prose. It helped both of them do more.
Working Together
Students are not handed answers. They are given scaffolding — readings, meditation practices, writing exercises, peer dialogue, iterative mapping — that gives shape to uncertainty without resolving it. The ambiguity is strategic: it keeps the maps provisional, which keeps the conversations open.
Written exercises — timed, iterative, conducted by hand — train attention and surface what students actually believe, as opposed to what they think they should believe. Seminar dialogue then tests that private thinking in public, with the instructor not as authority but as interlocutor: pressing on distinctions, naming contradictions, modeling the same kind of attentive questioning the course asks students to develop.
“Empathy is not a simple or uniformly positive capacity, but rather one that can take different forms — empathic concern, empathic distress, empathic joy — each with distinct implications for how we relate to others. This reframing challenged me to think more critically about my own motivations for helping and caring, and to question whether my responses were grounded in attentiveness to the other or in managing my own emotional reactions.”
“When I was being compassionate, it wasn’t being up in my head about somebody’s experience anymore. There was a push to act upon it. That helped me realize it is compassion that actually brings altruism into the world — it transforms knowledge and love into action. Empathy gives the foundation of understanding, love adds connection, and compassion provides the drive to act. Altruism grows out of those three working together.”
The first insight — that empathy can become a way of managing one’s own emotions rather than attending to the welfare of another — required the precision that writing enforces. The second — that altruism is not separate from empathy, love, and compassion but emerges from their integration — required shared presence in live dialogue to become fully realized. Neither mode alone would have been sufficient.
What Changes?
“How strange it is that I extend warmth so naturally to a friend, but not to someone I pass on the street, or someone I disagree with. I feel like that gap isn’t just about feeling — it’s about who I believe is worth my attention. And that belief is shaped more by habit than truth.”
This observation did not arrive fully formed. It came at the end of a semester in which this student had mapped the gap between empathy and compassion across multiple drafts of a concept diagram, written about it in timed exercises, argued about the boundary between empathic distress and empathic concern in seminar, and heard the instructor push back on an earlier, neater version of the same idea. The insight is precise because the scaffolding was precise.
Students are not told their circle of moral concern is too small. They are given tools that make the structure of that circle visible. Once visible, it becomes an object of inquiry rather than a background assumption.
What changes, when the course works, is not primarily what students believe about altruism. It is how they hold their beliefs — more provisionally, more relationally, more attentively. One student noticed her patience had increased in ways that surprised her: “When I’m less reactive, there’s more space to actually see what someone else needs.” Another found that even the motivation to help, when it doesn’t yet reach action, is itself something: “I realized that even if I don’t always act on altruistic motivations, having the motivation to help others is still a form of altruism.” A third arrived at the course’s central claim from his own experience: “We are not islands. As I learn, I see this even more — I see that the decisions I make have an impact on those around me and vice versa.”
“Before this class, I mostly saw love as something that just happens. But over time I began to understand it as a conscious choice and an ongoing practice — not just about feeling something, but about showing up with intention, effort, and responsibility.”
The Mary Oliver line that circulates in this course — pay attention, be astonished, talk about it — is not a slogan. It is a sequence. Willingness to attend comes first, and it is the hardest part. Astonishment follows from sustained attention, not from sentiment. And talking about it — in speech, in prose, in the incomplete language of diagrams — is how what one person notices becomes part of a shared perspective.
“Real altruism … is about relationships and dynamics, not about individual acts.”
The classroom is not a place where altruism is named. It is a place where students learn to see its structure — what holds it together, what can cause it to fail, what is required from a person who wants to practice it.
“Through the course as a whole, I learned that meaning, ethics, and attention are lived practices rather than abstract concepts… awareness is a source of agency: by choosing where and how I direct my attention, I can shape my responses to the world.”
