 A crucial question that needs to be addressed is: What, exactly, is the debate about; what is altruism? Unfortunately, there is no uncontroversial answer to this question, since researchers in many disciplines, including philosophy, biology, psychology, sociology, economics, anthropology and primatology, have written about altruism, and authors in different disciplines tend to use the term “altruism” in quite different ways. Even among philosophers the term has been used with importantly different meanings. There is, however, one account of altruism—actually a cluster closely related accounts—that plays a central role both in philosophy and in a great deal of psychology, including Batson’s work. We’ll call it “the standard account”. That will be our focus in the remainder of this  section.[18]