In most situations I doubt we should care about costly signals of altruism at all. Effectiveness in the work should be all that matters. If I’m hiring, all else being equal I will naturally prefer the person who will work 7 days a week for a lower salary vs the one who will only work 5 days and demand more. I don’t need any signal here, other than making them the job offer on my preferred terms and seeing if they take it. But if the lazier, greedier one is 10x as effective per unit time, I should obviously prefer them despite them being a worse person in some philosophical sense.
Perhaps in extremely critical positions where people could put important projects at risk by making selfish decisions there should be more of a need for people to prove the altruism part. But ultimately if people reliably do the right thing I don’t care if they’re doing it for selfish or altruistic motives. That’s between them and their conscience.
In most situations I doubt we should care about costly signals of altruism at all. Effectiveness in the work should be all that matters. If I’m hiring, all else being equal I will naturally prefer the person who will work 7 days a week for a lower salary vs the one who will only work 5 days and demand more. I don’t need any signal here, other than making them the job offer on my preferred terms and seeing if they take it. But if the lazier, greedier one is 10x as effective per unit time, I should obviously prefer them despite them being a worse person in some philosophical sense.
Perhaps in extremely critical positions where people could put important projects at risk by making selfish decisions there should be more of a need for people to prove the altruism part. But ultimately if people reliably do the right thing I don’t care if they’re doing it for selfish or altruistic motives. That’s between them and their conscience.