 Views like Hobbes’ have come to be called  egoism,[1]  and this rather depressing conception of human motivation has apparently been favored, in one form or another, by a number of eminent philosophical advocates, including Bentham, J.S. Mill and  Nietzsche.[2]  Egoism was also arguably the dominant view about human motivation in the social sciences for much of the twentieth century (Piliavin &amp; Charng 1990: 28; Grant 1997). Dissenting voices, though perhaps fewer in number, have been no less eminent. Butler, Hume, Rousseau, and Adam Smith have all argued that, sometimes at least, human motivation is genuinely altruistic.