Generosity: Virtue in Civil Society

Preface

Generosity is a moral virtue that cannot flourish in a welfare state or in any sort of command economy, because to be generous is to voluntarily help others in certain ways. It will, however, flourish in a free society. That is what this monograph will argue and demonstrate.

Generous acts require the right to private property. The point is ancient—Aristotle argued it nearly 2,500 years ago. But its full import has never been widely enough appreciated. Indeed, many who proselytize for generosity, compassion, kindness, and charity have resisted the establishment of the right to private property as a firm principle of law. For example, the philosopher Thomas Nagel criticized free society as an actual hindrance to generous conduct. As he put it,

Most people are not generous when asked to give voluntarily, and it is unreasonable to ask that they should be. Admittedly there are cases in which a person should do something although it would not be right to force him to do it. But here I believe that the reverse is true. Sometimes it is proper to force people to do something even though it is not true that they should do it without being forced. It is acceptable to compel people to contribute to the support of the indigent by automatic taxation, but unreasonable to insist that in the absence of such a system they ought to contribute voluntarily.¹

That position is the opposite of the present author's. We shall have occasion to examine it in detail in due course. For now, it needs to be noted that such a view is exceedingly pessimistic and ultimately self-defeating, for what one cannot require of free men and women morally will be impossible to demand of them politically. The system Nagel proposes only provides an excuse for people not to act generously, since their government does—or, more precisely, pretends to do—so for them.

Such an outlook injects into political life a spirit not of bona fide generosity but of subterfuge, encouraging moral lethargy and shattered hopes and expectations. One reason the welfare state is often a kind of Hobbesian war of all (special-interest groups) against all is that the ultimately cynical view of human nature Nagel spells out constitutes a good part of the foundation of the welfare state.

The welfare state unabashedly perverts the idea of the right to private property and thus stands as a substantial obstacle to at least one form of human moral intercourse: kindness and generosity among the citizenry. That system has placed its confidence, instead, in forced charity, wealth redistribution at the point of a gun, which does not by any means encourage goodwill among us. It fosters resentment, bureaucratic inefficiency, and frustration—but most of all, it blocks the only way moral excellence can flourish, by way of free choice.

One's prime purpose in life is to be as happy as he can be. Happiness, or as the ancient Greeks who founded the Western moral tradition put it, eudaimonia, is success as the individual human being one has the potential to be. That is the broadest common moral purpose we share, although the details make all the difference in how we actually live our particular lives. In other words, the moral life of one person can be very, very different from the moral life of another, so the practice of any of the moral virtues can and does manifest itself in unique ways, depending on who one is. Yet there are basic common—albeit very general—features that such a life will exhibit, including the practice of the virtue of generosity.

Generosity, as the Greeks saw, is not tantamount to altruism, which means putting others first. To be generous means to extend goodwill toward others because one's own happiness is thereby enhanced, because one lives a fully human life if, among other things, one lives generously.

Politically, the right to be free—including the right to treat one another generously, stingily, kindly, callously, and so forth—is of primary importance for everyone. To make the right choices, human beings have to have their sovereignty as moral agents fully respected. That is the only way a creature of free will can be free to choose to act virtuously, including generously, and thus be capable of living a morally significant life.

Why, however, if one ought to strive to be a happy individual and ought to have one's right to liberty respected, should one also be generous, even charitable? Does that not imply that one ought to support a welfare state rather than the libertarian polity? Many prominent thinkers deny that—among them Milton Friedman, Charles Murray, Antony Flew, and a host of other economists, political scientists, and philosophers.

Others take the opposite view. James P. Sterba, who advocates the welfare state, believes that the free society in the classical-liberal or libertarian tradition fails to help the poor and so requires rethinking and upgrading to include welfare rights. Communitarians such as Charles Taylor, Amitai Etzioni, Robert Bellah and his colleagues, and Michael J. Sandel² think classical liberals and libertarians are mistaken about human nature, which leads them to forget about the necessary communal features of the best society. Those features require placing the right to liberty alongside other, more positive rights—for example, rights to safety and education—that the government must secure for all of us. Those features can even require us to give up the right to liberty itself as fictional. Sandel has recently lamented the loss of what he calls the republican virtues. Those amount to no less than a convivial submergence of oneself into the community, stressing social obligations instead of individual rights.

Those thinkers believe that, in their communities, men and women can be either completely free (i.e., uncoerced), and thus insufficiently decent toward each other, or at least mildly regimented, and thus made to behave properly. In short, we face here once again the well-known alleged opposition of freedom and virtue.

The critics are, however, wrong. No good reason for giving up on free men and women exists; there is only misguided fear, certainly as far as the virtue of generosity is concerned. Free men and women may not choose to use their limited resources for what someone else thinks is worthy of joint attention, even though it may be. But there are likely to be more than enough appeals to generosity in a free community to inspire each individual without the imposition of coercively forced obligations. Unless one has been so deluded as to strive for a Utopian world of guaranteed perfect human conduct, one should trust women and men to be decent, including generous and charitable, without any official regimentation. They will then be free to build and sustain human communities that exhibit care, compassion, and kindness alongside prudence, industry, courage, and other virtues, without sacrificing personal sovereignty in the least.

First I will lay out the general case for connecting generosity with political liberty. I will then indicate how that case can influence our thinking about certain matters welfare statists think should lead one to abandon political and economic liberty. I will conclude this examination with a treatment of a particular problem: can the moral habit of donation—of blood, organs, emergency provisions—be coercively encouraged?

I want to thank Jim Chesher, Doug Rasmussen, Tom Palmer, Bill Davis, and Douglas J. Den Uyl for their support and help. I have learned much from Eric Mack, David Kelley, James Wallace, and Lester H. Hunt. I also thank the Journal of Applied Philosophy for permission to use some material that has appeared there, as well as the Earhart Foundation for supporting my earlier scholarly work on generosity. Kelly Russell Simpson's editorial work on the project is also much appreciated. My colleagues in the Auburn University Department of Philosophy, in particular Clifton Perry and Kelly Dean Jolley, have left their mark on this work with their customary generous criticism and suggestions for improvement.

1. Generosity, a Benevolent Virtue

Ordinary Generosity

Generous persons were originally understood to be ones whose basic nature was sound. Later the meaning of the term generous evolved and came to mean, roughly, a disposition or inclination to act benevolently toward some other persons. Still, the original meaning left its imprint.

We tend to take it that generous people are benevolent because of their character, not as a matter of deliberation or calculation. As a character trait, generosity inclines one to do good for others. It can manifest itself in small or large measures: As he began to shave, he thought to turn off the running water in his hotel bathroom since the pressure during morning hours nearly vanished. If he restricted the flow somewhat in his sink, the rest of the guests would have a better chance at getting water to come out of their faucets. When she heard that those folks wanted to get themselves on their feet, following their narrow escape from their wretched homeland, she went to her desk and wrote out and sent them a sizable check.

No direct personal gain is involved in generous conduct. A generous person doesn't think, If I am good to them, I'll get this or that for my trouble. Generosity, when viewed under a microscope, is a member of the family of benevolent moral principles. One may be benevolent in a variety of ways, among them by being generous, charitable, kind, compassionate, or thoughtful. But what distinguishes generosity from, for example, kindness or compassion is not always clear. The terms are often used interchangeably, although kindness is more of an attitude, and an attitude need not issue in action. Compassion tends to presuppose the beneficiary is pitiable, heartbreaking, deserving of special care. When we are urged to be compassionate, it is toward those who are in trouble.

Generosity involves spontaneously doing good things—giving gifts, providing help or advice, showing tolerance or special consideration—for others, who may or may not be in trouble. The acts are spontaneous in that they flow from one's character, not from calculation or even deliberation. Character, in turn, is a gradually evolved collection of traits that we acquire through our rearing and, later, through perseverance, commitment, and resistance to laxness—all sustained through a kind of low-key reflection on how or who we ought to be.

Charity, in contrast, is benevolence arising from a sense of duty. One would be charitable by extending oneself toward others as a result of the realization that one has the duty to do something for them. A duty is an action that is morally prescribed, a matter of a rule or law that one must explicitly know before one can follow it. Generosity is more of a morally commendable trait, leading as it does to spontaneous acts. Those distinctions are not always observed in ordinary reflection and usage, but there are examples of our use of the terms that clearly suggest what is noted above.

When one talks of a generous person, one usually has in mind someone who does good for others as a matter of course, without hesitation. There is nothing forced or self-disciplined about it. One is not resisting greed when one is being generous. Charity, in contrast, involves telling oneself to give others what one ought to give them, because one has the explicit belief that one ought to give to them. Charity is deliberative, not spontaneous.

One might object that generosity flows from the discipline one has once exercised, just as good, smooth driving follows early training that was rigorous and required considerable direct mental focus. That is a good point, but it characterizes the way someone might become generous, not generosity itself. It misses an important aspect of generosity by ascribing to a given action a quality that has not yet been absorbed within the agent. Generosity, in contrast, is such a quality—absorbed and ready to go into action effortlessly, as it were, on all appropriate occasions. Charitable conduct may involve deliberate discipline or concentration, but generosity does not. It is a character trait, an aspect of a person and not a form of behavior a person imposes on himself.

Yet one's generosity is extended as a result of a generalized—perhaps even automatized or self-programmed—outlook or disposition one has toward (some) other people in one's life. Generosity involves giving of oneself or what one has to those one finds precious or to persons or causes one thinks highly of or feels close to. Generosity flows from a generalized valuation of some other people or their goals.

Lack of generosity is a moral vice. That vice must, as must all moral vices, in principle be possible for the opposite, the moral virtue, to amount to something morally praiseworthy. Those who want to prohibit