Pure moral commitment to cooperate is unstable without egoistic reinforcement

Evidence

But the need for these defences implies that the agent has other, in particular egoistic, motivations. Unless cooperation also, to some extent, serves those interests as well, the practices of cooperation will be unstable in the face of those other motivations. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 209

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the doctor’s wife in Blindness: her non-egoistic macro-motivation (pure compassion/altruism) is precisely what keeps collapsing under pressure because it lacks egoistic reinforcement.