Your assumption is that the cooperative sheep will get slaughtered, that in the end, altruism is a luxury.
However, altruism is appearing more and more to be a product of evolution. (i.e. a part of "Human Nature.")
http://www.newsweek.com/id/195117 Adventures In Good And Evil
What makes some of us saints and some of us sinners? The evolutionary roots of morality.
By Sharon Begley | NEWSWEEK
Published Apr 25, 2009
From the magazine issue dated May 4, 2009
It isn't surprising that the best-known experiments in psychology (apart from Pavlov's salivating dogs) are those Stanley Milgram ran beginning in the 1960s. Over and over, with men and women, with the old and the young, he found that when ordinary people are told to administer increasingly stronger electric shocks to an unseen person as part of a "learning experiment," the vast majority—sometimes 93 percent—complied, even when the learner (actually one of the scientists) screamed in anguish and pleaded, "Get me out of here!" Nor is it surprising that Milgram's results have been invoked to explain atrocities from the Holocaust to Abu Ghraib and others in which ordinary people followed orders to commit heinous acts. What is surprising is how little attention science has paid to the dissenters in Milgram's experiments. Some participants did balk at following the command to torture their partner. As one of them, World War II veteran Joseph Dimow, recalled decades later, "I refused to go any further."
On second thought, ignoring the few people who did not fit the pattern—in this case, of throwing morality to the wind in order to obey authority—is not that surprising: in probing the neurological basis and the evolutionary roots of good and evil, scientists have mostly focused on the majority and made sweeping generalizations. In general, most people's moral sense capitulates in the face of authority, as Milgram showed. In general, the roots of our moral sense—of honesty, altruism, compassion, generosity and sense of justice and fairness—are sunk deep in evolutionary history, as can be seen in our primate cousins, who are capable of remarkable acts of altruism. In one classic experiment, a chain in the cage of a rhesus monkey did double duty: it brought food to the monkey who pulled it, but delivered an electric shock to a second monkey. After observing the effect of pulling the chain on their companions, one monkey stopped pulling the chain for five days and one stopped for 12 days, primatologist Frans de Waal recounts in his 2006 book, "Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved." The monkeys "were literally starving themselves to avoid inflicting pain on another," he writes. The closer a monkey was related to the victim, the longer it would go hungry, which supports the idea that morality evolved because it aided the survival of those with whom we share the most genes. Darwin himself viewed morality as the product of evolution. But monkeys and apes, like people, have taken a trait that evolved to help kin and extended it to completely unrelated creatures. De Waal once saw a chimpanzee pick up an injured starling, climb the highest tree in her enclosure, carefully unfold the bird's wings and loft it toward the fence to get it airborne.
And the final "in general" is that people's ethical decision making is strongly driven by gut emotions rather than by rational, analytic thought. If people are asked whether they would be willing to throw a switch to redirect deadly fumes from a room with five children to a room with one, most say yes, and neuroimaging shows that their brain's rational, analytical regions had swung into action to make the requisite calculation. But few people say they would kill a healthy man in order to distribute his organs to five patients who will otherwise die, even though the logic—kill one, save five—is identical: a region in our emotional brain rebels at the act of directly and actively taking a man's life, something that feels immeasurably worse than the impersonal act of throwing a switch in an air duct. We have gut feelings of what is right and what is wrong.
These generalizations are all well and good, but they get you only so far. They do not explain, for instance, why Joseph Dimow balked at Milgram's experiments. They do not explain why a Tibetan monk who had been incarcerated for years by the Chinese said (in a story the Dalai Lama is fond of telling) that his greatest fear during captivity was that he would lose his compassion for the prison guards who tortured him. They do not explain why—given the human capacity for forgiveness and revenge, for compassion as well as cruelty, for both altruism and selfishness—some people fall at one end of the moral spectrum and some at the other. Nor do they explain a related mystery—namely, whether it is possible to cultivate virtue through the way we construct a society, raise children or even train our own brains.
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