Hazel,
Thank you for a well researched and well presented piece on an important subject. It was great to see you give examples from a diversity of cultures to provide balance, because altruism has in the West at least, been deliberately devalued for political and ideological reasons. It’s been presented as based on selfishness; that selfishness in turn has been presented as the driver behind natural selection. Both of which are false, so it was pleasing to see that you rejected the position that true altruism is impossible. It’s easy to be taken in by the enthusiasm and writing style of selfish-gene theorists like Richard Dawkins, it’s only when you condense their theories to a concise summary that the nonsense becomes obvious. So I was surprised to see in the quote from Peter Singer that such an energetic thinker seems to have accepted that selfishness is innate and plays a major role in evolution. We’ll just have to work on him!
Steve Davis