Generosity: Virtue in Civil Society. - book reviews

Reason, May, 1998 by Loren Lomasky

My friend the economist was puzzled, but only for a minute. Our flight was almost full, and the young family who boarded late had not been seated together. The mother and baby had a middle seat across from us, and the father was seated in another middle seat some rows to the rear. But before takeoff the seating arrangements changed; the passenger on the aisle next to the father had traded his seat for the mother's.

An unexceptional incident? Yes, unless you happen to be an economist trained at the University of Chicago. With a straight face I opined, "Looks to me like market failure." This secured my friend's attention. "That fellow gave up the better seat without compensation," I continued. "Don't you think it would be more efficient to have a market in passenger seat rights?"

While mulling this over the economist muttered some ritual phrases about "transaction costs" and "informational asymmetries." That, though, was wheelspinning. Eventually he offered two suggestions. First, the passenger who offered the seat exchange may have done so to avoid feelings of guilt (and to avoid replacing guilt with embarrassment he did not ask for compensation). Second, the passenger may have given up the better seat because coming to the rescue of the separated family gave him pleasure. (The economist said "positive psychic returns," but I'm pretty sure this is what he meant.)

This was explanation enough for my friend; subsequently we chatted about design possibilities for airplane-seat auctions and the failings of the Republicans. But this would not have been enough for the distinguished libertarian philosopher Tibor Machan, who in his latest book provides a simpler and altogether more intuitively satisfying answer: The passenger acted out of generosity.

Couldn't any schoolboy have come up with the same answer? No doubt that's true, but for philosophers (and economists) it isn't so easy. There are basically two reasons why that is so. One is the suspicion that authentically generous action does not exist - that despite appearances, whatever people elect to do is motivated by the relentless pursuit of self-interest. The other is that even if individuals do from time to time act for the sake of others' well-being instead of their own, they are thereby rendering themselves suckers, dupes, inadequate agents of their own flourishing. On the one hand, generosity is deemed to be impossible, and on the other, it is thought to be irrational. Whichever fork is taken, generosity becomes problematic and manifests a political dimension: If people are not in fact generous, or if they are ill-advised to act generously, then institutionalized and coercive mechanisms will be needed to address social problems. The name for those mechanisms is, of course, the welfare state.

Machan rejects the propositions that generosity doesn't exist and that generosity is a mug's game. He also emphatically rejects the proposition that the welfare state is superior to voluntary action as an instrument for meeting human needs. On all counts he is thoroughly persuasive. Generosity may not be the highest of the virtues, and it certainly isn't the only virtue, but it is a crucial piece of the puzzle of living a good human life among others. Thus, that which impedes the free flow of generous behavior damages people. That is Machan's chief indictment of the welfare state. By substituting the drear hand of mechanistic bureaucracy for private compassionate acts, society is literally demoralized. Notwithstanding contrived political rhetoric to the contrary, governments are incapable of being kind or compassionate because these are moral stances the existence of which presupposes free choice. Even apart from questions of effectiveness, coerced transfers negate choice and thereby deprive individuals of opportunities to open their hearts - and their pocketbooks - to their fellows.

This is a novel and insightful critique of the welfare state, but Machan overplays his hand when he claims that "despite all the rhetoric about compassion, kindness, and charity, supporters of the welfare state in effect make it impossible for citizens to be compassionate, kind, and charitable." That, for better or worse, is to give much too much credit to the enemy. Has public education eradicated ignorance, has public housing wiped out slums and homelessness, have transfer programs banished poverty and hunger? Not in this world. So there is no paucity of opportunities for acting generously toward those who have fallen through the cracks - or canyons - of the welfare state. That isn't to dismiss Machan's indictment, but rather to agree with scholars such as Charles Murray and Marvin Olasky that the demoralization occasioned by the welfare state predominantly falls on its alleged beneficiaries.

Underlying these political debates is a foundational moral question: Why is it good to be generous? For those who take morality to be a studied exercise in impartiality among persons, the answer comes quickly enough. Generous people act to secure the greater good in place of the lesser good, even if the lesser good forgone is one's own and the greater good accrues to someone else. Machan, however, heavily influenced by Aristotle and Ayn Rand, vociferously rejects impartiality as the be-all and end-all of ethical life. Rather, the overriding moral task for the individual is to flourish in his own activities. From this perspective, making the case for generosity as a virtue is no easy task. For those (like myself) who concur with Machan's rejection of impartialism, there is considerable interest in seeing how smoothly he can motor his way along this alternate route to generosity.