 One way to see this is to ask which action guiding principles are moral  principles.[26]  There is ongoing debate about this question in both philosophy and psychology (Stich 2018). Though Batson does not address that debate, the examples he offers (“fairness or justice or the utilitarian principle”) suggest that when he talks about moral principles he has a rather limited set of principles in mind. But if principlism is limited to a relatively small set of moral principles familiar from the philosophical literature, then principlism hardly exhausts the non-egoistic alternatives that defenders of psychological altruism must rule out. In recent years, there has been a growing body of work on the role of norms in human life, where norms are understood as action guiding rules that can govern just about any human activity. Researchers from a variety of disciplines have argued that norms, and a robust innate psychology for acquiring, storing and acting on norms, have played a fundamental role in shaping human culture and making humans the most successful large animal on the planet (Henrich 2015; Boyd 2018; Kelly &amp; Davis 2018). Others have proposed accounts of norm psychology on which people have ultimate desires to comply with culturally acquired norms (Sripada &amp; Stich 2006) and accounts of how a psychological system generating such ultimate desires might be favored by natural selection (Sripada 2008). The sorts of behavioral rules that count as norms in this literature might well include the sorts of moral principles that Batson had in mind when he characterized principlism. But these are only a small subset of the norms that these researchers have in mind. What makes all of this relevant to our current topic is that any culturally acquired norm might generate an ultimate desire to comply, and most of those ultimate desires are neither egoistic nor altruistic. Thus to make a plausible case that an episode of helping behavior is altruistic, it is not enough to rule out egoistic explanations and explanations that appeal to principlism. The defender of psychological altruism must also rule out explanations that trace the helping behavior to an ultimate desire to comply with any of the vast collection of norms that prevail in human cultures. And that’s a job that defenders of altruism have not even begun. 