Fundamental and Fundraising
Heart of Philanthropy
Now that you have finished this week’s reading on the Heart of Philanthropy, I would like to focus on the information and brief videos that you watched on the “Operation Smile” organization.
As discussed in the readings, philanthropy exists for many reasons including to make the world better, and also “because things go wrong” (This Reading PDF File I also attached). Based on the “Operation Smile” material, do you feel this organization was created out of a need to make the world better, or because he saw things go wrong? You must use supporting material (and additional research,if needed) from the readings in your discussion post.
Here is the link for videos on the “Operation Smile” organization
Watch it before you start to write!
1 full page.
3
Because Things Go Wrong:
Philanthropy as a Response
to the Human Problematic
Philanthropy appears in some form in all cultures and civiliza-
tions and through all recorded history. It seems there is something about
the world, and about humans in this world, that calls philanthropy into
being. Philanthropy is a response. But to what? What is it about the world
that causes us to respond philanthropically, that makes philanthropy seem
to be a reasonable response?
The purpose of this chapter is to begin to establish the larger context
for philanthropy, the general condition of the world—what we will call the
human problematic—to which philanthropy is a response. We follow the
previous chapter’s summary of our broad conception of philanthropy with
an exploration of how that conception fits into the larger world and how
it relates to some fundamental questions about humans. We believe un-
derstanding these issues is essential to understanding why philanthropy ex-
ists—why it emerges as a human response to the human condition in the
world.
While we will be making some bold claims about elementary features
of the human condition and human nature, this chapter is not so much an
exercise in presenting universal knowledge as an exercise in conceptual
generalization and practical philosophy. Like much of this book, it consid-
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ers fundamental characteristics and causes of voluntary action for the pub-
lic good in human societies, but tries not to lose sight of the fact that this
philanthropic action is always expressed in ways that are patterned by cul-
ture and history. Philanthropy is found everywhere as a response to in-
evitabilities of the human condition, yes, but what is defined as an appro-
priate or conventional philanthropic response is different in Elizabethan
England than in Maoist China.
The Human Problematic
Like it or not, we humans face difficult problems. This means there are
questions that humans everywhere and always must attempt to answer.
These fundamental problems and questions are the inevitable reality we
call the human problematic. The human problematic is defined by two other
basic realities: the first is the human condition; the second is human nature.
It is this human problematic that sets the context for why philanthropy ex-
ists in the world.
Philanthropy exists because of two truths about the human condition:
things often go wrong, and things could always be better.
First, things often go wrong. Systems fail. Natural and human, social and
political, economic and biological systems fail, and as a consequence hu-
mans suffer. As we grow up, we all learn by experience as well as by obser-
vation that in many situations individuals and societies are overwhelmed
by circumstances either natural or man-made, that we sometimes can’t
cope without help. It is through no lack of will or desire or moral fiber that
Ethiopians die of starvation. It is through no ethnic flaw or cultural decay
that people find themselves swept away by a tsunami. We are all vulnera-
ble to suffering, even if some of us are more vulnerable to certain types of
suffering than others. Philanthropy is an act of response to this inevitable
suffering; we shouldn’t forget there are other possible responses. Also, we
shouldn’t forget that sometimes what is going “wrong” is disputed or that
the definition of wrong varies across cultures, groups, and times. Whether
husbands routinely beating their wives is an example of something going
wrong or not depends on when and where and whom you ask, and this will
then influence whether philanthropy or any other intervention is called for.
In fact, philanthropic action itself—the exercise of the moral imagina-
tion—is often part of the process of declaring which “conditions” are de-
fined as “problems.” What we do to make things better reveals what we
consider to be going wrong.
Second, things could always be better. That is, humans can imagine ways
in which life could be more agreeable, comfortable, congenial, pleasant,
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fruitful, productive, profitable, etc. Philanthropy is an expression of this
human moral imagination that seeks to improve the quality of life. (In the
next chapter, we will see how this belief that things can be made better
through philanthropy fits with a philosophy we call “meliorism.”) Of
course, “could always be” does not necessarily imply “will always be.” Phi-
lanthropy is about trying to make things better, sometimes in the face of
dauntingly unfavorable odds.
These two features of the human condition set the stage for humans to
respond to problems, and the philanthropic tradition is the history of this re-
sponse. In the stream of this tradition usually called “charity,” we respond
to suffering and distress and acute need. In the stream of this tradition usu-
ally called “philanthropy,” we respond to our awareness of ways we can im-
prove the quality of life. Both streams mingle in a shifting current with the
political forces of order and the economic forces of the market, all adapt-
ing to one another and to the natural course of the river of humanity.
What makes the philanthropic response to the human condition diffi-
cult is that the human condition is uncertain. Many of the most funda-
mental threats to human well-being are far beyond human control. The
media make it possible for us to observe the incredible power and destruc-
tiveness of routine natural phenomena like earthquakes, floods, hurricanes,
and volcanic eruptions. But humans themselves are capable of behavior
that tests our most generous definition of the human; we often make the
human condition worse. We delude ourselves if we forget that barbarism
is usually rationalized as necessary and that this usually leads to acts of even
worse barbarism. Most wars, civil and otherwise, contain evidence of this.
And, of course, the media now makes it possible for us to observe these acts
of barbarism, regardless of where they occur.
Human nature—the other reality contributing to the human problem-
atic—sometimes leads us to make things worse. However, it is also human
nature, in part, that impels us to respond philanthropically. Yes, it is hard
to deny what many people believe, that egoism and self-interest are “just
human nature.” But we need not deny this in order to accept that the op-
posite quality, altruism, is also “just human nature.” Concern for others is
a defining characteristic of humans. We see this illustrated time and again
in the philanthropic response to the human condition.
One conclusion to draw from all of this is that life is problematic.
Utopia is a useful way of thinking how things might be better; it is not use-
ful to expect that things will ever be perfect or even settled. A problematic
life in a problematic universe is apparently inevitable. That humans, both
individually and in society, are also problematic seems to be another in-
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evitable reality. The combination of those different kinds of problems
often leaves us trying to make sense of evil and misfortune—and of good-
ness and joy. And we often make sense of these things through our philan-
thropic response.
Perhaps it is useful to pause and summarize this argument about the
context for philanthropy before going into it more deeply.
Because Things Go Wrong / 65
1. Things often go wrong; things could always be better.
2. Philanthropy is one response to those aspects of the human condition,
a response that is essential to our understanding of our human nature.
3. The human condition creates often unpredictable opportunities and
challenges.
4. Human nature responds in often unpredictable ways to alleviate
suffering and to improve the quality of life.
5. The unpredictable quality of the human condition and human nature
constitute the human problematic to which philanthropy responds.
In the sections that follow, we explore more deeply the specific ele-
ments of this argument. We discuss the human condition in terms of our
life in the natural world and in terms of our “life chances” in the social
world, and then we examine what it means to say that concern for others
is part of our human nature. Once we have established philanthropy as a
human response to the human problematic, though, we will argue that
philanthropy is only one possible response. Self-help, mutual aid, and gov-
ernment assistance are others. But philanthropy is distinctive and neces-
sary.
Life in a Natural World
Humans exist in a physical and material world, in turn a habitat in a larger
universe, and throughout that universe external forces impinge on human
affairs in often unpredictable ways. From a human perspective, the natural
world is an uncertain place, often friendly but also often hostile. From a
geophysical perspective, earthquakes are perfectly normal phenomena that
result from the movement of tectonic plates; from a human point of view,
earthquakes are often catastrophes. Like earthquakes, floods, tornadoes,
hurricanes, droughts, famines, and plagues are usually seen as “evils” of
human existence, some of the consequences of living in a less than perfect
world. They cause vast loss of life as well as other, sometimes unbearable
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costs. For example, the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 was com-
pletely understandable—though extremely rare—from a scientific point of
view, but utterly devastating in terms of human suffering. Beyond the in-
calculable cost of perhaps 300,000 or more lives, the economic, environ-
mental, and psychic costs of this natural event are staggering. No more
dramatic illustration that the human condition is uncertain need ever be
presented for us to understand this truth.
Such “failures” of a natural system are opportunities for philanthropic
initiative. Some of our best and most honorable philanthropic work is done
under the banner of humanitarian assistance when natural systems mal-
function. Our worldview is likely to assume that human reactions to nat-
ural disaster and human suffering will be roughly the same wherever dis-
asters occur. We know that people will suffer, will find themselves beyond
their ability to cope, and may call for help from anyone, even people half a
world away.
Natural disasters are part of the human condition, part of the physical
environment in which we must live. But that physical environment also has
a remarkable set of chemical and biological characteristics that make what
we call human life possible. Disasters exist alongside the fecundity of the
soil, the rainfall that nourishes it, and the sunshine that rescues us from
winter, both physically and psychologically. Despite the sometimes over-
whelming scale of destruction and loss of life, humans generally seem to
accept the human condition and to find the struggle for survival worth-
while.
So the human condition involves existence in a world that permits sur-
vival, growth, and development, but also a world in which things often go
wrong. While Earth sustains human life, it also makes human life difficult.
Not everything goes wrong, and things do not always go wrong, but the
human condition is one in which many humans find survival difficult,
growth inadequate, and development impossible.
We should also remember that humans are expected to survive in the
most diverse physical circumstances, and the different natural environ-
ments in which people live have something to do with their social and cul-
tural condition. Generally there is enough stability of environmental con-
ditions that most people are able to accommodate to severe environments
and live fulfilling lives. Or so we sometimes think, when our empathy is
great enough for us to imagine how their lives could be fulfilling under
such severe conditions. This raises important questions for philanthropy:
Who are we to decide that some people are so miserable in their circum-
stances that they need help—our help—to improve their condition or to
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escape from it? Whose definition of what is “going wrong” here should de-
termine the actions taken? And, again, what business is it of ours?
There may be a tendency to think of natural disasters as simply “nat-
ural,” that is, not mediated by human intervention. But during the famine
in Ethiopia in 1984 we became aware of how political and economic action
(or inaction) can turn a natural lack of rainfall from a manageable burden
into social chaos. And, tragically, most of us watched on television as the
delay in human response to Hurricane Katrina multiplied the suffering.
The lesson here is that human systems malfunction; all systems do. John
Gall even claims that any large system is going to be operating most of the
time in “failure mode.”1 In Ethiopia, the political-economic system failed
and contributed to famine because of tribal conflict and other problems.
Similarly, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the newly indepen-
dent republics were faced with a legacy of environmental pollution that
was much worse than in Western Europe and in the United States, in part
because of decades of governmental neglect and suppression of those few
who dared to advocate environmental responsibility in this system. And, of
course, humans alone—sometimes intentionally, sometimes not—create
disasters that have catastrophic effects akin to natural disasters; they even
hijack planes and fly them into crowded buildings.
With those bad examples in mind, we know, too, that although human
interventions to reshape or weaken natural forces often fail, they also often
succeed. The damage from earthquakes causes immediate suffering but
sometimes leads to new building materials and improved architectural and
engineering design. The air in Pittsburgh is cleaner, after years of damage
to the public health, thanks in part to some citizens who could envision a
city with clear skies instead of a city with skies thick with industrial pollu-
tion—and because humans developed the technology to remove more of
the toxic material before it escaped into the air.
The point is that while humans often can and do make their lives worse
than natural conditions alone would impose on them, humans also have
the capacity to correct nature, reduce the severity of biological accidents,
and eliminate some diseases altogether. Very often, they do this through
philanthropy.
In sum, the Earth is a place where humans react to nature in complex
ways—political, economic, and moral—sometimes to improve the human
condition and sometimes to make it worse. The idea of “progress” assumes
that on the whole the human condition has been improved through these
human reactions, that the human condition is better now than it was in the
past largely because of human interventions. Philanthropic responses to
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the human condition, in particular, often occur under the assumption that
people in extreme circumstances, at home or abroad, would be better off
with our help, whether they ask for it or not.
Life Chances
The human condition involves more than humans responding to a natural
world. It also involves humans dealing with the reality of widely varying
“life chances” in the social and economic world. The concept of life chanc-
es comes to us from Ralf Dahrendorf, a German-born sociologist whose
long and illustrious career included a stint as the head of the London
School of Economics and service on the board of the Ford Foundation.
Dahrendorf borrowed the idea of life chances from Max Weber, who used
the term in his massive Economy and Society as a way to describe someone’s
class position.2
Dahrendorf expanded on Weber’s view and claimed that life chances
are the social conditions in which individuals realize their potential.3 Life
chances is one way to talk about the varying circumstances in which hu-
man beings find themselves. The notion of the human condition grows
more problematic when we think, for instance, of the contrasting life
chances of an eight-year-old girl in Pyongyang in 2005 and her counter-
part in Peoria.
Apart from the qualities of the individual, life chances often seem to be
the result of a dice game in which others throw the dice. A child born with
spina bifida in the United States in the twenty-first century has a good
chance of living; born in an earlier time, the child would have died. In ei-
ther case, the choice is not the infant’s to make. The life chances of most
Americans are materially superior to those of most Rwandans, Kurds, or
Haitians. Actuarial tables projecting the life expectancy of a white male
born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1926 would reveal a longer life expectancy
than if that same person had been born in South Bend fifty or a hundred
years earlier. Some people are born into situations in which nutrition will
be inadequate while others will be born into circumstances in which good
food is never a question; for the latter, the more pressing problem may be
whether the parents will be able to afford college tuition. The Physical
Quality of Life Index developed by the Overseas Development Council
once identified Sri Lanka as the most desirable place in the world to live
based on measures of literacy rate, infant mortality, and life expectancy.
The irony is that Sri Lanka has also been the site of an endless and mur-
derous ethnic civil war.
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Dahrendorf explored two aspects of life chances that influence their
significance for us: ligatures and options. Ligatures are the ties that bind us
to a place, to a culture, and to people. Options are the choices we are free
to make. Ligatures are critically important in helping people to know their
place in the scheme of things; membership, as Michael Walzer and others
have observed, is an important social value because it meets a profound
human need.4 Options are variously available—for example, girls have dif-
ferent options than boys as they grow up.
The life chances presented to Mozart included his exploitation by his
father, Leopold, and participation in a rich and productive musical culture
in eighteenth-century Europe. The ligatures binding Mozart to his father,
like the musical conventions of the time, were strong enough to affect his
otherwise boundless creativity. Mozart’s life chances also included the
lifestyle of the court and the aristocracy, with the problematic assistance of
patrons and benefactors. (The problematic of philanthropy as patronage is
an important theme in the history of the arts.) An eight-year-old Nigerian
boy who was in the secessionist province of Biafra in 1968 may have suf-
fered brain damage as a result of severe malnutrition during the blockade
of his country; his modern counterparts in Rwanda and Burundi and the
Darfur region of Sudan number in the tens of thousands. Their life chanc-
es—the social conditions in which they realize their potential—are as re-
mote from us in the United States as Mozart’s.
The movement toward modernity may be seen as the world of options
being offered more and more to those bound by a world of ligatures. An
essential difference between the premodern world and the modern world
is that the former was dominated by ligatures and the latter by options.
The point here is that philanthropy is a response to the human reality of
life chances, and philanthropy is usually on the side of options. A familiar
principle of philanthropy is to help people help themselves. Very often peo-
ple want to help themselves by changing their life chances, by improving
their options, for example, by escaping prejudice and stereotyping and op-
pression in all its forms. Philanthropy is often in the middle of these efforts,
usually on the side of options and usually seeking to make things better.
Through the exercise of the moral imagination by some, the life
chances of others have been dramatically expanded: women can now aspire
to be political leaders; minorities can aspire to higher education; children
in wheelchairs can attend whichever school they want. Working conditions
for women, children, and the disabled have been improved to resemble the
circumstances of healthy adult males (that is, the population with, histori-
cally, the best life chances in the workplace).
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The test of the impact of the moral imagination on life chances is often
at the margins. The moral imagination has to expand to include those hith-
erto excluded, and it has to protect the valid claims of those included orig-
inally. In order to enhance the life chances of some individuals, rights read-
justments may require a painful reduction of the rights of others.
Taking this analysis further, though, we must acknowledge that, in
some cases, philanthropy is about strengthening ligatures rather than ex-
panding options. This is true for those repulsive associations we would
rather not have to include under the philanthropic umbrella, such as the
Ku Klux Klan. KKK members, unfortunately, believe they are engaging in
“voluntary action for the public good” by limiting the options of people
with certain ligatures such as membership in any race but white. But in
other cases, philanthropy is used in a positive way as a means of celebrat-
ing ligatures such as one’s racial heritage or hometown. However, when we
act philanthropically to celebrate our ties to a people, a place, or a cul-
ture—for example, by joining the National Association for the Advance-
ment of Colored People or giving money to our hometown library—we
are often simultaneously acting to increase options, to improve either our
life chances or those of someone who will soon grow up with ligatures sim-
ilar to ours.
In sum, we can see that “life is problematic” in another sense: people
have different life chances. This, too, is part of the human condition; this,
too, is a reality that calls philanthropy into existence. One way we often
talk about this part of the human condition is in terms of “fairness” and
“justice.” Some people are disadvantaged or suffer in ways that seem un-
fair. The popular way of ducking that harsh fact is to repeat the maxim
often attributed to John F. Kennedy: “No one said life has to be fair.” The
question for us is whether philanthropy would be necessary in a just soci-
ety. We will never know. Society is not just, and that is one reason why phi-
lanthropy exists.
Human Nature
At one point in Plato’s Republic, Socrates interrupts his dialogue with Ade-
imantus and his companions to observe:
I think we have neglected one thing in particular.
What?
We have not yet given a full accounting of human desires, nor have we suffi-
ciently described their nature. We must consider these matters; otherwise, our in-
quiry will remain incomplete.5
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Plato is talking about how the tyrannical man evolves from the demo-
cratic man, saying we must understand human nature to understand this
evolution. But today he might as well be talking about how someone like
Mother Teresa evolves. We say she is an exception just as we say the tyrant
is an exception (of the opposite kind, of course), but exceptions to what?
Perhaps they seem exceptional because they don’t fit our “on the average”
notion of human behavior, what we usually have in mind when we use the
term human nature. Humans have some traits in common, traits that define
humans and bring out their differences from other creatures. Understand-
ing philanthropic man requires understanding something of these com-
mon human traits.
But how do we decide what these traits are? In a twist on Plato’s ap-
proach, James Madison in the Federalist Papers, Number 51, suggests a
method for defining human nature when he asks, “What is government it-
self but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?”6 That is, behind
the words in the text of a constitution lie assumptions about what people
are like, how they will behave, and what their tendencies and preferences
are. Sometimes constitutions are useful as guides to human nature, and
sometimes they are not. Read the Soviet Constitution of 1936 for evidence
of the latter.
We think what Madison says of the ubiquitous human institution of
government can also be said of another such institution, philanthropy. Phi-
lanthropy, too, is a pretty good reflection on human nature. The philan-
thropic tradition is built on assumptions about human nature, but more
important, it reveals some of our shared human traits.
As many philosophers have argued, it is probably foolish to put too
much stock in comprehensive notions of human nature. Human nature is
increasingly under attack as a concept. Theories of human nature are quite
reasonably thought to be inadequate to capture the essential diversity of
humanity. And most scholars—us included—prefer to think about human
nature as providing basic capacities and the underlying “hardware” that are
then conditioned and directed into thought and action through the “soft-
ware” of socialization. So the universal “human desires” that Plato identi-
fies are always expressed in culturally specific ways that change over time;
we might all feel compassion or sadness naturally, but we must learn how
to be compassionate or to express our sadness in ways that others in our
world will understand and accept.
Human nature is a useful concept because most people believe there
are common traits that can be used to define humans—in fact, what these
common traits are is something we are taught by our culture. For instance,
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most of us think humans are capable of a range of emotions, but we are
also blessed with the capacity to reason and reflect on existence, meaning,
and life. Humans are clever and at a decisive comparative advantage in
most of their relations with other creatures. However, we should remem-
ber the idea from the introductory chapter that a concept is a “multiplic-
ity.” Human nature is a multiplicity.
Two thoughts about human nature—at least human nature as most of
us conceive it most of the time—are particularly important to understand-
ing philanthropy. The first and most important point has already been
mentioned: that concern for others is a defining characteristic of humans.
The second point is that human nature provides us with a capacity for both
good and evil, virtue and vice. (The emphasis on “capacity” here is impor-
tant, of course, when we remember the diversity of human variation and
differences in the expression or fulfillment of our capacity.)
To be human means to be in some way able to respond to the needs of
others, to have the ability to get beyond the self. Human nature includes a
capacity to love one’s neighbor, to follow the Golden Rule, to emulate the
Good Samaritan. Humans have the capacity to recognize need in the cir-
cumstances of others and to reach out to them, even strangers and ene-
mies, to offer assistance of some sort. If we learn of someone who seems
utterly indifferent to the pain or suffering of others, it is common to speak
of him as “inhuman.”
Whether the capacity of concern for others is the result of millions of
years of evolution, or the result of ethical evolution across human culture,
or perhaps a gift from God, is a disputed question. We know that what we
call “altruism” is practiced in some form in cultures around the globe—it
is what anthropologists would call a “cultural universal”—even though the
specific forms of showing concern for others vary by culture. For thou-
sands of years, millions have found happiness and meaning through allevi-
ating the suffering of others. Across languages and histories and wars and
plagues and triumph and tragedy, there is evidence of human effort to
lessen agony and to encourage happiness.7
When we think of concern for others as a fundamental human trait, we
are not surprised when it shows up in many aspects of human affairs, in-
cluding some aspects of life that are usually thought of only in nonphilan-
thropic or even antiphilanthropic terms. For example, the military some-
times engages in humanitarian relief efforts; governments admit refugees
because “it is the right thing to do”; business enterprises contribute to local
schools, etc. Hospitality to strangers, a form of philanthropy more widely
honored in the ancient world than in the modern, appears in societies that
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are not notably religious as well as those operating under a strict religious
edict to “help others.”
Most of us make a provisional choice and decide that human nature
permits altruistic behavior even though most human behavior seems to be
guided by self-interest. Sometimes we will recall sophomoric debates about
whether there can be anything other than self-interest. Some will even feel
they are being particularly clever in exposing someone else’s high-mind-
edness as simply another form of egoism: “You only help her because it
makes you feel good about yourself.” But sometimes we encounter exam-
ples of human behavior that simply cannot be explained as anything but
one human helping another out of concern for their well-being. Wesley
Autrey, a New York construction worker, was trying to help a college stu-
dent at the subway station who was suffering a seizure. The student sud-
denly fell down onto the subway tracks, and Autrey jumped to his aid and
covered him with his body just before the oncoming train screeched to a
halt over them. He later explained, “I just saw someone who needed help.
I did what I felt was right.”8
On the whole, we learn from experience that people are capable of
wonderful as well as appalling things. That there is abundant evidence of
misanthropic kinds of behavior is undeniable, but the presence of evil does
not imply the absence of good. This brings us to the second point: human
nature endows us with the capacity to behave in ways that are regarded as
good as well as ways that are called evil, to exhibit qualities considered
virtues as well as vices. If altruism is a humanizing capacity, it competes
with our other dehumanizing and inhumane capacities.
In western civilization, we have inherited a useful checklist for thinking
about the admirable and despicable qualities that seem to appear in most
of us—the seven “theological and cardinal virtues” and the seven “deadly
sins.” In the nineteenth century, most educated people, religious or not,
would have been able to tick those off. The seven virtues are faith, hope,
charity, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. The seven vices are
pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lust. The specific items on
the two lists have been debated in the West for a couple of thousand years,
but lately they seem to have passed from our cultural heritage; few young
people or adults can name more than a couple. (Modern Christians do a
little better remembering the Ten Commandments, but not much. As a fa-
ther once shouted after his son, “Obey the Ten Commandments! Any
two!”) We mock such devices these days, but variations on them are enor-
mously popular. Note the success of William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues
and Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.9
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Eastern religious traditions and cultures have comparable lists that
may have some specific differences but are largely similar in the qualities
identified as either good or bad—and the lists are also similar in consid-
ering all the qualities as “human.” Hope, justice, envy, avarice—all these
characteristics seem to be always within us as humans, struggling to con-
trol behavior.
Philanthropy is on the list of virtues under the name of charity, but
more broadly, philosophical thinking about virtues and vices can help us
understand philanthropy.10 For example, human nature considered as a ten-
sion between virtues and vices helps us to understand why we can know the
right thing to do and fail to do it. The Greeks called this “weakness of
will.” Aristotle discussed the virtues on a scale from excess to deficiency
and found true virtue in the middle.11 Others take exception, of course, be-
cause the pattern does not work out as neatly as it should: excessive cour-
age is what we call true heroism, for example. Finding the right place be-
tween generosity and avarice requires the ambiguous virtue of prudence.
But prudence can be a barrier when risk is called for. Philanthropic foun-
dations are frequently criticized for being unwilling to take risks on new
ideas or on people whose social credit ratings are low.
Virtue and vice as traits of human nature help us to understand the
problematic quality of philanthropy.12 We can use the assumptions under-
lying those lists to anticipate what we will do and what others will do when
we come together in some philanthropic enterprise. Pride can stand in the
way of charity. Pride can shift the focus from the recipient to the donor,
and it can prevent would-be recipients from accepting help from others,
because it is difficult to accept a position that implies inferiority. Again, this
is all part of the context for the philanthropic response to the human prob-
lematic.
The American philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy, well known and respect-
ed in the first half of the twentieth century for his important contribution
to the field known as the “history of ideas,” wrote a little book entitled Re-
flections on Human Nature.13 Lovejoy studied the writings of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century theologians and philosophers looking for their un-
derstandings of human nature, and he concluded that the most important
factor in human motivation was the need for praise. Often praise is all we
have to give in return for the good things that people do. However, as
Lovejoy noted, while the need for praise motivates people to higher levels
of performance and service, if they seem to need praise too much, we deny
it to them. They commit the sin of pride, if you will. Praise, like respect
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and honor, is a gift that must be earned but cannot be commanded or
claimed.
We praise Mother Teresa not because we ourselves have needed or felt
her healing and compassionate touch but because we admire what she did
for the poor and dying. In many ways she symbolizes some of the things
we value most, even though we don’t—or can’t—emulate her behavior. She
cultivated her capacity for virtue and suppressed her capacity for vice.
Mother Teresa said that her motivation was not to receive praise but to
serve God.14 If she did seek our praise, would we think less of her?
These things are of some consequence in a culture of philanthropy that
rarely has financial rewards to offer and is always on the edge of cheapen-
ing praise by giving it too readily. History finds ways to offer praise over
the centuries to people whose tarnished reputations might have left them
in neglected graves. Andrew Carnegie has managed to win a claim on us
despite the stories of his acceptance of brutality in conflicts with labor.
Much the same has been true of John D. Rockefeller. On the other hand,
it seems entirely proper to praise those caring for AIDS victims in Africa,
or volunteers at inner-city homeless shelters, as “heroes” or even as
“saints.” Sometimes we want to find reasons for praise when they aren’t re-
ally there, but other times praise is both needed and deserved. If heroes
need praise, we need heroes.
This discussion of human nature as part of the context for philanthropy
leads to a simple conclusion: Philanthropy is a means of getting closer to
our own humanness and the humanness of others. Philanthropy is a labo-
ratory of vice and virtue, a laboratory for the study of human nature at its
best—and sometimes at its most disappointing.
Responses to the Human Problematic
Our discussion so far has focused on the nature of the human problematic
to which philanthropy is a response. Things often go wrong; things could
always be better. And philanthropy is often how we go about making
things better—or at least making them less bad. But we still need to con-
sider why and when philanthropy is the best response, or at least a pre-
ferred or appropriate response.
We shouldn’t forget that philanthropy is only one particular sort of re-
sponse. There are other possible responses, including (although we don’t
discuss it here) ignoring the problems. To understand what is distinctive
about the philanthropic response and what its particular role is, we must
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think about the range of possible responses. In doing so, we will also de-
velop a way of thinking about the allocation of responsibility in society
more generally.
We start with the following scenario: Imagine that someone for whom
you have no formal responsibility comes asking for assistance, with no
promise of anything in return. Such a scenario—begging for help, asking
for alms—is as old as recorded history. This would plausibly be considered
a request for a philanthropic response, according to how we’ve defined
philanthropy. In fact, responding charitably to a direct request for assis-
tance could be considered the most fundamental, primal act of philan-
thropy. But remember that we want to use this scenario to think about the
range of possible responses, not merely philanthropy. Assume that your
response is up to you, and that if you give something, it will be voluntary,
not coerced, and that you will derive no financial benefit from your re-
sponse.
If it is helpful, you might make the scenario even more specific. Think
of being solicited by one of the panhandlers who are, sadly, present on the
streets of most every modern city. Few situations trouble our consciences
more directly, especially the consciences of young people, than being asked
for help by a panhandler—and this, in itself, should tell us something about
human nature. When confronted with such an appeal, how should one re-
spond? This familiar confrontation with the panhandler is an experience
that each will deal with according to his or her own moral conviction, but
our response is also influenced by social norms and expectations, cultural
conventions, and even by thoughtful consideration and reasoning using the
facts available to us. This makes the scenario a good one to use as a model.
It is an opportunity to reflect on how philanthropic choices are made by
individuals, but more important for us here, it is a way to think through the
much larger question of the role of philanthropy in society.
In such a situation it is reasonable to ask several questions (whether you
vocalize them or not) about what type of response to the request is called
for, and through this to decide whether to respond philanthropically.
These questions can apply whether the philanthropic request comes from
the proverbial beggar on the street or from an arts organization, a shelter
for battered women, or a liberal arts college raising money for scholar-
ships. The questions apply also to the “thinking” of organizations such as
foundation boards or nonprofit service providers, as well as to individual
reasoning. There are four questions relating to four responses, categorized
according to the source of possible assistance and the locus of control: self-
help, mutual aid, government assistance, or philanthropy.
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Self-Help
The first and most fundamental question is about self-help: What is the
person doing to help himself or herself? There is a deep and stubborn
moral conviction that each of us (allowing for obvious exceptions) must ac-
cept some responsibility for our own survival and well-being. One of the
great virtues of the philanthropic concern for the dignity of the individual
is respect for the ability of the individual to help himself or herself. In some
circumstances, the person might be totally helpless, in which case this
question is irrelevant. Most of us would agree that it is pointless to ask the
question of a two-year-old, for example, or to deny assistance to an
Alzheimer’s disease victim that we meet on the street because we think they
should just be working harder to help themselves. It is when the person ap-
pears to be able-bodied that doubts about deception come into play.
The question has to do with the notion of desert: is the person deserv-
ing of my help? This is the sort of question people ask of panhandlers who
seem to be physically and mentally capable of taking care of themselves. In
the nineteenth century, such people were referred to as the “undeserving
poor,” people who could work but chose not to, presumably preferring to
live on the work of others. There are, of course, also the “deserving poor,”
people who seem incapable of coping with, or are overmatched by, their
circumstances. It is possible to be deceived by the panhandler; it is possi-
ble to deceive oneself by dismissing the panhandler as undeserving.
The question takes on different nuances as the requests rise in value
and complexity. To what extent do we expect college students to pay for
their education? Should we subsidize graduate education for rocket scien-
tists? For neurosurgeons? There is also a strong cautionary note: It may
even be harmful to help people who don’t help themselves. Such assistance
may encourage dependency. What may be true of individuals may also be
true of organizations: organizations sometimes come to rely too heavily on
a single patron. They may become too lazy to make an effort to raise
money from other sources. If so, they are likely to give away their moral
integrity along with their economic independence.
Another way of thinking about the self-help response is to consider
whether it is best to intervene, but to intervene with the goal of “helping
them help themselves.” Sometimes this is the purpose of other sorts of re-
sponses, of course—governments providing training for the unemployed,
nonprofit groups offering small “microcredit” loans to poor people oper-
ating small businesses, enacting the mission of the classic proverb “Give a
man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime.”
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But sometimes as John D. Rockefeller once wrote, “The best philanthropy,
the help that does the most good and the least harm, . . . is not what is usu-
ally called charity. It is, in my judgment, the investment of effort or time
or money, carefully considered with relation to the power of employing
people at a remunerative wage. . . . If we can help people to help them-
selves, then there is a permanent blessed conferred.”15
Rockefeller echoes exactly the teaching of the twelfth-century Jewish
philosopher Maimonides, who ranked eight levels of giving (tzedakah) into
a hierarchy from the highest (best) to the lowest form. The lowest form is
to give with a heavy heart or a negative attitude (so long as you conceal
this, Maimonides said, this is still charity). But the “best” form of charity
was, as Rockefeller said, to do something so that people needing help can
become self-sufficient, such as giving them a loan or giving them a job in
your business.16 Enabling self-help becomes the highest form of philan-
thropy. One person who believes this is Muhammad Yunus, the Bang-
ladeshi economist who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for his idea of
microcredit financing as a strategy to alleviate poverty.17
This point of view, unfortunately, has been lost in the narrow insistence
on profit as the justification for pursuing the self-interest of business. It is
also lost when we assume that the only way business can help those in need
is through the other two sectors—through their taxes or through the rea-
sonable expectations we place on them to “give back” through corporate
giving or social responsibility programs. Creating jobs to allow for self-
help is a way to help as well.
Mutual Aid
The second question, after addressing the question of self-help, is about
mutual aid: What are the people who are considered formally responsible
for this person doing to help him or her? For individuals this usually means
family, close friends, maybe neighbors; for organizations this usually means
those parties who are most directly concerned or connected: the alumni
and parents of the college, for example, or the residents of the community
that might benefit from the organization. But it is generally agreed that be-
fore someone approaches a stranger for assistance, they should call on fam-
ily, friends, or significant others.
This second question arises because we know that no one is without
“significant others,” in the sense that we are all part of networks of rela-
tionships based on mutual aid. Each of us comes into the world in the midst
of what the sociologist Georg Simmel called a “web of group-affiliations.”18
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This web makes claims on others on our behalf. The family is the first and
most obvious resource, but mutual aid might come from co-workers,
neighbors (think of the classic American example of mutual aid: the barn-
raising), fraternity brothers and sorority sisters, members of benevolent so-
cieties, trade unions, business clubs, and a vast array of other associations
that follow what has been called a “norm of reciprocity.”19 This norm, when
generalized, means that we can expect assistance from others in these net-
works and are also expected to assist others, and if this norm is operating,
it helps build trust, which makes society work in many other ways as well.20
The importance of mutual aid is revealed most dramatically when we
encounter situations where it doesn’t exist. Many people are homeless be-
cause they have been evicted by their own families; others decided that life
on the streets is better than life at home. For whatever reason, they don’t
have working networks of mutual aid—unless they find a way to partner
with others in a similar situation, which we know sometimes happens.
When mutual aid fails like this, other responses—from government, from
philanthropy—may become the last resort.
Much of self-help and mutual aid have a private interest: we help our-
selves in all sorts of ways in which we benefit privately and directly; we as-
sociate with family and friends in business and other economic activity. For
instance, in some cases, we might well conclude that persons who want to
be physicians should pay part of the cost by working and that their families
should help if possible. The reason for helping individuals and groups to
help themselves goes beyond the benefit to them; if individuals and groups
become more capable of helping themselves, the community will benefit.
The benefit to the community is what carries assistance from the private
domain to the public. For many organizations, self-help and mutual aid are
often a matter of ingenuity, working overtime without being paid for it,
getting more help from volunteers, even getting clients to help.
Government Assistance
The third question is about government assistance: Is this person asking
for help with a need that government should meet? Or is their need one
that only government can adequately meet? Some requests reflect needs
that far exceed what we might expect of self-help and mutual aid. In some
cases it is unreasonable to expect either a panhandler, his relatives, or those
of us passing by to solve his problem. These cases are often seen—though
hotly debated—as one of the fundamental rationales for government in-
terventions.
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Many will argue that each of us has a right to food, shelter, clothing,
and other “basic needs,” such as health care, that might be far more ex-
pensive than an individual person, family, or philanthropist could be ex-
pected to provide. If basic needs are a matter of right, then they are a claim
on all of us, and they call for government assistance. In such cases we know
we must tax one another to generate the resources that are needed. Alms-
giving is supplanted by tax revenues; one gives whether one considers the
other deserving or not.
This third question, then, has to do with the responsibility of govern-
ment for the public good. And we can see the question arising in the his-
tory and debates about government’s responsibility in any major area of
public policy. Take the example of public education in the United States.
Before the mid-nineteenth century, education of our children—those few
who were privileged enough to be educated—was considered the respon-
sibility of private institutions, from the family to churches to elite private
schools. That is, it was provided through a mix of self-help, mutual aid, and
philanthropy. But then, along with industrialization and democratization,
the idea spread that children of all classes and circumstances should come
together in “public” schools; only the very rich and the very religious
would remain outside the new government system. Government assistance
in this case was actually based not on economic need but on the need to
create and maintain a democratic polity, to ensure the public good by pro-
ducing an educated citizenry. Of course, in recent years, we have revisited
this question of government’s role, and many reformers are claiming that
the public good is better served by returning—via vouchers or other pol-
icy tools—some responsibility for education to private (non-profit and
even for-profit) educators.
Some problems are just too large, like poverty in America or the spread
of AIDS in Africa, to be dealt with through self-help or mutual aid. In
other cases, solving a problem requires the unique qualities of government
intervention, such as its monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force,
which might be necessary to protect our lives or our property. And then
there are some things that the society needs from individuals that individ-
uals can rarely if ever be expected to pay for completely: advanced educa-
tion and training in medicine and astrophysics, for example. While many
would not hesitate to assert that government assistance is the answer in
these cases, and many others would strongly contradict this view, what is
certain is that these needs raise fundamental and constantly debated ques-
tions in any society: Which things should be paid for not by voluntary
gifts, or even private investment, but by taxation? Which things cost so
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much that it is unreasonable to expect individuals or their families to pay
for them by their own efforts? For instance, who should pay for the high
cost of medical technology? Daycare? Hospices for the terminally ill who
have no family or friends? Art museums? Parks? Philosophy?
Finally, at a broader level, government assistance can take on shades of
mutual aid, to the extent that we view helping members of our commu-
nity—perhaps only taxpaying members, or legal and documented citi-
zens—as taking priority over helping nonmembers. In just about every in-
stance when the United States is called upon to provide humanitarian
assistance, and nearly every time international aid is debated, someone of-
fers the argument that instead of sending more money overseas we should
spend that money helping Americans in need first. Government certainly
has a role in responding to requests for assistance, this argument goes, but
not all requests for assistance hold the same weight; the United States gov-
ernment is not as responsible for non-Americans as it is for Americans.
Last but Not Least: Philanthropy
After addressing these previous three questions, and especially when we are
dissatisfied with the answers we get and when we feel the initial request is
still not being dealt with, we come to the fourth question. Should I give?
How much assistance can be provided voluntarily, in gifts of service or
money, for the benefit of those in need, even if we have no formal respon-
sibility for them and if we are not promised anything material in return?
When is voluntary action the necessary or best path to achieve the public
good?
Sometimes philanthropy makes sense because all else has failed or be-
cause other responses will take too long or are incomplete. In some cases
self-help and mutual aid are insufficient to meet the needs, and govern-
mental resources are either inappropriate or unavailable, and so philan-
thropy is the human response we turn to. In other cases philanthropy fills
a complete void where the other responses are nonexistent. And in some
cases we decide that philanthropy is the best, most appropriate response
regardless of whether the other responses are failing or not. Often the an-
swers to the previous questions are uncertain, or we have doubts or a lack
of information, and we act for fear that otherwise help will fall through the
cracks of existing policies or programs. Sometimes we just decide philan-
thropy is called for because it seems the right thing to do.
So while philanthropy is sometimes a last resort, at other times it is a
complement to other forms of help. Sometimes philanthropy provides the
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Band-Aid immediate assistance, before family or government (or self-help)
takes over to provide long-term care; sometimes philanthropy works to
eliminate the cause of the injury, letting friends or government offer the
Band-Aid. Requests from strangers so often have a kind of immediacy to
them that we feel some sort of action is called for now, and so we act phil-
anthropically without really knowing the full answers to our other ques-
tions. Or perhaps the goad to action is a determination to take a different
kind of action: to join with others in a public protest against governmental
inaction in the face of homelessness. “I won’t help this person directly, but
I’ll set out to help others like him. I’ll work to prevent people like him
from falling into conditions like these.”
Deciding How to Respond
The Meaning of How We Respond
These four questions are central to the way we choose to live our lives as
individuals and as a society; how we answer them gives shape to our lives.
They are the sort of fundamental questions we confront as an inevitable
consequence of the human problematic. As individuals, we must figure out
how to respond to the requests for assistance that we know will come be-
cause we know that things often go wrong. As a society, considering the
different kinds of needs to be met, we have to decide how much weight we
want to assign to self-help, to mutual aid, to government assistance, and to
philanthropy.
The interaction among these four types of responses makes up the
agenda of political and social life in a society like the United States. Self-
help, mutual aid, government assistance, and philanthropy provide a check-
list for thinking about the ways that responsibility is allocated in our so-
ciety. Consider health care costs, for example, or debt relief in Africa, or
support of the arts, or education reform, or even disaster response. Are
families solely responsible for supporting young musicians, or should the
government provide scholarships to those children with the most promis-
ing talent? Should the United States forgive the debts owed by struggling
African nations, or should it focus on encouraging multinational corpora-
tions to help these countries nurture their own market economy? If some-
one in the United States smokes her entire life and gets lung cancer when
she is elderly, should Medicare pay for her treatment even if she (or her
children) have the means to pay for it themselves?
In a larger sense, every political or policy discussion of large public is-
sues involves a debate over these four possible contributions to the work of
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society, and our political conflicts are often over whether or not to change
the mixture of the four responses. These questions form the background
of every American presidential election campaign; they shape every party
platform. To what extent is each of us responsible for ourselves? To what
extent should we be expected to rely on others with whom we share formal
responsibility? To what extent must we agree to tax ourselves to deal with
our shared problems and needs? To what extent can we rely on voluntary
giving and voluntary service? How much will our concern for others affect
our answer? How much will we be guided by concern for our own self-in-
terest? Should we do more through faith-based nonprofits or private con-
tractors and less through government?
But we should not think of these four responses as starkly distinct and
assume that our answers to the questions just raised must always be placed
into one of these four categories. In fact, returning to the points from
Rockefeller and Maimonides discussed earlier, we can see how the long
history of efforts to “help people help themselves” illustrates how the var-
ious responses can become intertwined and can be hard to disentangle.
These efforts have philanthropic purposes as well as being about “self-
help.” For instance, in nineteenth-century London, young Octavia Hill
wanted to create decent housing for the poor.21 Lacking capital, she turned
to social philosopher and art critic John Ruskin for help. He loaned her
five thousand pounds, but with the requirement that she produce a return
of 5 percent if she hoped to persuade others to follow his example. Fol-
lowing Ruskin’s advice, Hill made payment of rent a first and unwavering
demand upon all her tenants. She also insisted on stern self-discipline; her
tenants not only paid their rent on time but they also stayed within her
range of acceptable social and moral behavior. Influenced by both Christ-
ian Socialism and (from the opposite political pole) the Charity Organisa-
tion Society approach, Hill was pragmatic. Commenting on Hill’s man-
agement style, Gertrude Himmelfarb observes: “Her aim was not only to
provide the decent housing that was a precondition of independence but
to promote the habits, abilities, and sensibilities that would sustain that in-
dependence. This meant treating the tenants as equals rather than depen-
dents, and helping them in the same spirit that one might help one’s
friends.”22 Hill’s work is clearly about promoting self-help, but there are
also elements of mutual aid involved, and this was all brought about by a
voluntary, philanthropic intervention. Hill’s response to need—the need
for adequate housing for the poor—reveals how it is often in the mix or in-
teraction of responses that we can see fully how society is responding to its
problems.
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Altruism and Egoism
Many factors influence how we respond to the proverbial request for as-
sistance and how we meet needs and assign responsibility. To start with, we
can see that our responses reflect both sides of the recurrent tension in
human nature that we identified earlier: the tension between altruism and
egoism. Because most of us have some concern about the well-being of
others and about the needs of our communities, we answer these questions
in terms of our altruistic values. But because we also have needs of our own
and a strong sense of fairness—if I work to help myself, others should do
the same—we have to recognize that we have egoistic values as well.
Our lives are spent balancing these two human tendencies while trying
to address the needs we see. Whether we are asking the self-help question
of the panhandler, wondering why we should be singled out for voluntary
giving when we already pay taxes to help the homeless, or pondering our
felt obligation to be compassionate to all fellow humans in need, our con-
cern for others and our concern for ourselves are in play. Both altruism and
egoism influence our judgments of how the four responses should be
weighted. The rhetoric of weighting ranges from appeals to pity to appeals
to greed, from acting on values to acting on calculations of potential ben-
efit returns, reflecting the influence of both poles. Every answer contains
both.
In addition to the decision of whether to give, we must also decide how
and how much to give. As we struggle with these decisions, too, we reveal
the tension between egoism and altruism. One philanthropic principle that
has been in use since antiquity is that one should give to others for whom
one has no formal responsibility only out of surplus. To have a surplus
means that one has enough for oneself (and presumably for those for
whom one does have formal responsibility). But what is “enough”? When
does a gift out of surplus begin to cut close to the quick? Often an assess-
ment of one’s own resources leads to the conclusion, “I can help, but not
enough; others will have to come along on this one.” Or “I will give you a
hundred dollars toward your scholarship, but you’ll have to work for part
of the rest, get help from your family, and perhaps get a grant or loan from
the college.” In other instances we may decide not to follow this principle
and instead to be munificent, to “give until it hurts.” When should a gift
be from income and when from savings? When is a commitment of five
hours a week too little, and when is it too much? And how should we give?
Should we give directly to individuals, so we can see that the help gets to
them? Is it acceptable egoism to want the personal connection with those
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we help? Is it more altruistic (and therefore better) to pool our help with
that of others by giving to an institution, so that more people can ulti-
mately be helped? The point here is that figuring out how to respond—
when to act philanthropically and how—requires that we accept the ten-
sion between egoism and altruism as a reality and not simply wish that it
were not so.
What Is Going On? Where Are We Coming From?
We have to answer the first ethical question, “What is going on?” before
deciding whether to act philanthropically, before deciding how to respond
to the appeals for help that arise as a consequence of the human problem-
atic. For example, we’ve seen people on the street holding signs that said,
“Homeless and Dying of AIDS” and “Disabled. Want to Work but Can’t.
Please Help.” Each passerby who reads these sorts of signs makes an in-
stantaneous assessment of the credibility of the statement. If what is going
on is that the young man holding the first sign is in fact homeless and
dying, or that the older man holding the second sign is in a wheelchair, an
immediate gift of alms might be called for (even if government assistance
is also called for). If one concludes this is simply another familiar decep-
tion of the kind newcomers to big cities are warned about, the response
may be ironic amusement for some, disgust and anger for others, but prob-
ably not sympathy and charity.
So one part of deciding how to respond is looking for information on
what is going on. Lacking concrete information, we search for subtle clues
or hints from which we can draw conclusions or make assumptions. But in
addition to this first question, we also decide how to respond based on fac-
tors related to a second, complementary question, “Where are we coming
from?” Our response is influenced by our own moral convictions (e.g.,
whether we believe helping strangers is a moral duty), our own perceptual
or ideological biases (e.g., should the government ever be involved in help-
ing the homeless?), the other cultural conventions and concepts we have
learned (e.g., is it normal for people in need to ask for help this way?), and
the larger social and economic situation we live in (e.g., whether we live in
a “social democracy” where the welfare state is responsible for helping the
disabled or those with AIDS, or in a neoliberal capitalist state).
Our response is “embedded” in our social and cultural life in these and
other ways, and this embeddedness is crucial to our theory of why philan-
thropy is a preferred response and why it takes the form or role it does in
any society. This is similar to what Lester Salamon and Helmut Anheier
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term the “social origins” theory of the nonprofit sector. They remind us
that the philanthropic tradition and nonprofit sector looks different and
plays different roles in different societies. What can explain this variation
is that—while what we call philanthropy is a response in all those soci-
eties—the path taken by the development of nonprofit activities in any so-
ciety is fundamentally influenced by the “cultural, religious, political, and
economic realities” of that society.23
A similar set of multiple influences on how we respond can be identi-
fied if it is an organization that must decide how to respond or when we
think of the choice as a society’s choice about how to allocate responsibil-
ity. For instance, think about how moral, cultural, and political changes
have affected our changing mixture of responses—individual, community,
governmental, and philanthropic responses—to poverty in the United
States. The idea that the state should care for the poor is almost as old as
western civilization and that individuals and religious institutions should
help is an ancient idea. But the critical change came when societies and cul-
tures realized that assistance should be regularized and not left to sponta-
neous expressions of charity, which led to government assistance taking a
more prominent role, although it is a role that is still different in different
cultural and national contexts.
Of course, despite the way we’ve been describing this “decision,” we
should acknowledge that the way we answer these questions, and the re-
sponses we offer, are not always the result of a conscious or rational choice.
In fact, our answers to the questions are rarely obvious or even simple.
Often we decide that more than one response is called for, or we change
the mix of responses over time, or we go forward with the response we
want and leave the decision about other responses to other people.
Reasons for a Philanthropic Response
The final step in developing a way of thinking about the role of philan-
thropy as a response to the human problematic—and about the larger
question of why philanthropy exists—is to summarize the reasons why, in
the context of multiple types of responses, a philanthropic response is war-
ranted, preferred, or perhaps even required and demanded. It helps con-
ceptually to distill these reasons down into three broad categories. Each
category relates to a scenario in which some response is needed; in each
scenario, the role of philanthropy is considered alongside the others. We
identify three categories of reasons:
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Philanthropy Is the Only, or the Only Effective, Response
Sometimes we turn to philanthropy when other responses are either non-
existent or not working; we turn to philanthropy because the other re-
sponses are nonexistent or not working. We give a panhandler a dollar be-
cause we figure that self-help and mutual aid and government assistance
are somehow not able to help him meet his basic needs. We volunteer as a
literacy tutor because we think that if we don’t help this person learn to
read and they can’t help themselves, who will? We donate to public televi-
sion because we worry about the decline in government funding for it.
Scholars have long offered this sort of “failure” argument as a way to
explain, theoretically, the existence of the nonprofit sector. The third sec-
tor exists, the theory goes, because of the inadequacy, defects, or failure of
the other two. The marketplace provides for the exercise of individual
choice but does not provide all the public goods—e.g., clean air—neces-
sary for an operational and healthy society, and it creates costly “external-
ities”—e.g., air pollution—that must somehow be dealt with. This sort of
“market failure” argument has long been a prominent and popular justifi-
cation for government action and public policy intervention. It helps us to
answer the tough question: why does government exist?
But while government provides important public goods, it sometimes
does not provide adequate public goods. Recall that this “government fail-
ure” is a key reason offered by economists for why the otherwise illogical
entity of “not-for-profit” organizations would exist. Further, government
is limited in how it can meet needs, both by what James Douglas calls the
“categorical constraint”—the requirement that everyone be treated the
same can lead government to avoid treating anybody—and by what Bur-
ton Weisbrod calls the “heterogeneity” of the population—the more di-
verse the needs and interests of the people (and, we would add, the more
diverse the interpretation of what the “public good” is), the less likely gov-
ernment is to step into the fray.24
In the face of this dual failure of the marketplace and of government re-
sponses, then, voluntary philanthropic action is needed to fill the void. Phi-
lanthropy provides for individual choice like the marketplace and provides
Because Things Go Wrong / 87
1. Philanthropy is the only, or the only effective, response.
2. Philanthropy is one response that complements other responses.
3. Philanthropy is the preferred or the most appropriate response.
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public goods like government, but it does so better than these other two
responses in conditions of great diversity and in situations when flexibility
is key. This theory could be used to explain philanthropic interventions
from nonprofit AIDS clinics in poor neighborhoods where the local pub-
lic hospital cannot handle the demand, to charter schools in suburbs where
parents are dissatisfied with their other choices. But we cannot forget the
more stark instances in which philanthropy is simply the “only game in
town.”
While most scholarship has used this sort of “dual failure” theory to ex-
plain the existence of the nonprofit (the third) sector, or to explain why
nonprofit organizations provide some good that other types of organiza-
tions might also provide, we would broaden this theory to fit our broader
conception of philanthropy and our conception of the three other re-
sponses that we have laid out: self-help, mutual aid, and government assis-
tance. (In a sense, we offer a “triple failure” theory, although the whole idea
of “failure” does not really work here, as explained in the next section.)
We would also go beyond much previous work in applying this expla-
nation for why philanthropy exists to the advocacy side of philanthropy as
well as to the service side. Philanthropy and the other responses we have
been discussing are responding to needs, but we can think of those “needs”
as including the need for voice or the need for representation of interests.
And philanthropic organizations that advocate for certain populations or
for certain ideals and values can be seen as doing so because those popula-
tions or values are not, or not effectively, being advocated by other ac-
tors—not by the affected or interested parties themselves (self-help), not
by their direct networks (mutual aid), and not by the government that is
often the target for their advocacy claims.
Philanthropy Is One Response That Complements Other Responses
Our explanation of why philanthropy exists, though, does not require the
failure of other responses or other forms of action. In fact, we know that in
many (perhaps most) cases, philanthropy exists as a response alongside
many other responses in a complex and confusing mix. Life is problematic,
and responding effectively (and morally) to the problems of life requires
the ability to draw upon all resources of the society—political, economic,
personal, familial, philanthropic. This combination of multiple responses
is, by most accounts, becoming more common today, particularly as we re-
think the roles of the three sectors and develop new cross-sectoral forms
of governance.25 More and more, we respond to things that go wrong, and
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craft ways of making things better, using “partnerships” between govern-
ment and philanthropy and the market. More and more we are seeing the
four responses described above as complementary, rather than simply
fighting the ideological battles over, for example, whether self-help or gov-
ernment or philanthropy is best.
Take the example of one of the most fundamental needs of any society:
taking care of children, particularly those that might be in trouble. Chil-
dren are an interesting case because in deciding how to respond to their
need, we quickly move beyond calling for self-help. Children can certainly
help themselves, but their ability to do this is more limited than almost any
other group in the society, and no one blames them (as we blame others)
for their inability to help themselves. So, moving beyond self-help, we note
that in any society the resources that are available to help children are var-
ied and important. The most important, of course, are the family and
sometimes close friends. These are the first line of support we expect all
children to have, even if many do not or are not well served by their fami-
lies or other mutual aid networks. Beyond this, there are plenty of others
whose careers are devoted to helping children: the pediatricians and other
medical specialists; the teachers and coaches and other school profession-
als; social workers and other therapists; counselors, guides, and mentors. A
great many of these are employed by government, and they are charged
with implementing a widely acknowledged mandate that the government,
if it helps no one else, should help this least vulnerable population.
But beyond these sources of support, there are volunteers and profes-
sionals in the vast array of philanthropic organizations that have programs
designed for children. Hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of peo-
ple in the United States alone are engaged as volunteers in trying to help
children by working for these philanthropic organizations: Boys Clubs and
Girls Clubs, the YMCA and YWCA, Police Athletic Leagues, 4-H clubs,
Catholic Youth Organizations, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and others more
recently established. It is important to note that these philanthropic orga-
nizations do not simply exist to help children in ways that (or because) gov-
ernment or families have failed to help, although this is sometimes an im-
portant reason why such children’s organizations exist; they also exist
because they believe helping children is for the public good, regardless of
what other parts of society do. And these philanthropic responses help
children in ways that complement the ways these children are helped by
other parts of society—e.g., Girls Clubs can serve at-risk girls better when
there is a supportive family involved as well. We should also acknowledge
that these philanthropic groups are not always effective and might them-
Because Things Go Wrong / 89
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selves fail in ways that force a government or family response. Many of the
organizations mentioned are now said to be less effective with children
than they were fifty or sixty years ago. In particular, they seem to be less ef-
fective in reaching ethnic and racial groups and the poor in the often dan-
gerous neighborhoods where the toughest problems always are. This is
further evidence for the need to spread the responsibility around and for
various actors in society—familial, governmental, and philanthropic—to
work together.
Philanthropy Is the Preferred or the Most Appropriate Response
Because we argue in this book that philanthropy is moral action, that it is
voluntary action driven by a vision of the public good, we must be sure to
remember this last—really the first—reason for philanthropy. Philan-
thropy is often how we prefer to do our good works. We respond philan-
thropically many times because philanthropy is deemed, in our culture, as
an appropriate way of making things better, an appropriate and normal and
expected way of trying to advance the public good. In other cases, we re-
spond philanthropically because the situation seems to call specifically for
philanthropy instead of other responses.
Much of what we cover in the next chapter will illustrate this reason for
why philanthropy exists, as we will be exploring how philanthropy is dis-
tinctively moral action and therefore has a melioristic purpose and philan-
thropic meaning that make it distinctive. And what we discussed in the pre-
vious chapter about the positive roles of philanthropy also demonstrates
this notion of philanthropy as the preferred or most appropriate response.
Philanthropy is most appropriate when, for example, our action is meant
to express or promote religious values and convictions that we want to
keep separate from government. Philanthropy is preferred when the goal
is to advocate for broad social change or to try out a new idea for achiev-
ing change in communities. Remember that philanthropy is in some ways
the first sector, that it is the place we prefer to express our vision of the
public good or to do our public work regardless of what the other sectors
are doing or whether self-help is possible. This fact partly underlies the
currently popular recognition of social entrepreneurship as a key role for
philanthropy.26
We can also imagine many situations in which a philanthropic response
is most appropriate. Sometimes we want or need to make a public state-
ment with our generosity (perhaps to leverage the generosity of others). At
other times we want to have a personal connection with the people we
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help, even if they are strangers to us at the start. Both of these somewhat
opposing situations are more possible through philanthropy than, say,
through mutual aid or government assistance. Sometimes we see a need,
like the face of a starving child on television, and we feel the need to do
something rather than let others take care of it. Sometimes we give phil-
anthropically specifically to pay back someone who helped us philan-
thropically in the past.27 And sometimes we simply do not have time to
think or learn about what other responses might be going on; the situation
is an emergency and voluntary intervention is clearly the right thing to do,
right now.
Philanthropic action is, in most places and times, culturally prescribed
and highly valued for its own sake. But, of course, when philanthropy is ap-
propriate versus when government or mutual aid is appropriate is a social
choice that is determined in part by cultural traditions, historical develop-
ments, and other aspects of our social origins—“where we are coming from.”
We also see this reasoning for why philanthropy is appropriate often in
the accounts and understandings that people offer to justify their giving.
When, for instance, someone says that helping children learn to read or
giving money to their local library is “the right thing to do” or “a way to
give back,” they are not merely expressing their motives but also justifying
their particular sort of action, their philanthropic action, in terms that
make sense to them given what they have learned from their culture. More
generally, social and historical patterns often deem philanthropy the most
appropriate way to solve certain problems or address certain needs in any
given society. It is “what we do.”
The Response to Hurricane Katrina
The fact that things often go wrong is an inevitable part of the human
problematic. But sometimes things go very wrong (and for many reasons),
and everyone can see clearly just how wrong. These cases, such as the dev-
astating crisis in the coastal areas of Louisiana and Mississippi caused by
Hurricane Katrina in 2005, starkly illustrate the points we have been mak-
ing. The response to the Katrina crisis illustrates the forces affecting our
decisions about how to respond and how absolutely vital philanthropy is as
one response among many.
Natural events disrupt our lives in dramatic ways, often calling for phil-
anthropic action to relieve the suffering that results. But responding to nat-
ural disasters like floods or wildfires or hurricanes far exceeds the capacity
of philanthropic assistance and exceeds its proper role as well. Families and
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relatives play a role in helping people deal with their loss and rebuild their
lives. And it is in such situations of utter devastation that we see perhaps
most clearly the necessity of government. So natural disasters—and the
human disasters or system failure that sometimes accompany natural dis-
asters—demonstrate the need for a full array of responses. Of course, this
is also true when the disaster is completely man-made. Think of the crucial
role played by all four responses—self-help, mutual aid, government assis-
tance, and philanthropy—in the response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
In the case of the Katrina crisis we can see how the massive philan-
thropic response—an unprecedented response that outpaced the relief giv-
ing that following either the attacks of 9/11 or the Indian Ocean tsunami—
fit with other responses such as self-help and government assistance.
Philanthropy here was clearly seen as filling a void where other responses
failed, but if we look closer we can see how philanthropy was also comple-
mented by other responses, and how philanthropy was for many the pre-
ferred response regardless of what else was being done.
The failure of the government response to the aftermath of Katrina has
been well documented. Seeing this failure portrayed so vividly and horri-
bly on television led many people to reach for their checkbooks and some
people to pack their bags to go be a volunteer; that is, the failure of other
responses was part of the reason why we turned to philanthropy to deal
with the obvious need for help. Government officials acknowledged their
failure publicly, in fact, making press statements in the midst of the crisis
in which they told those in need to seek out the Salvation Army or the Red
Cross for help rather than turning to the overwhelmed Federal Emergency
Management Agency (FEMA). But it was not simply government that
failed; self-help and mutual aid failed as well. For many residents of New
Orleans, self-help was either not an option because of their infirmities or
lack of supplies or because they could not return to their homes to get what
they would need to survive on their own. And while mutual aid clearly
saved many lives in this crisis, as family members stayed together to help
each other, many other people lost their lives while their family and friends
sat helplessly on the other side of washed-out bridges and roads, and many
people (including children) got separated from their families and had to
rely on relief workers to care for them until they could be reunited. These
are instances in which philanthropy—symbolized by a lone Salvation Army
van that for a few days was the only source of aid to reach some of the most
rural Mississippi towns—was the only way to help.
Within the philanthropic community itself, we can note similar dy-
namics that blur the lines between types of responses. While the interna-
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tional relief organizations like Red Cross were clearly responding, local or-
ganizations like churches and community groups in Louisiana and Missis-
sippi did what they could amid the rubble in their own backyards. Local
foundations such as the Greater New Orleans Foundation and the Foun-
dation for the Mid South helped set up relief funds and coordinate com-
munity organizing, even though, in some cases, their own offices had to be
temporarily closed. And existing nonprofits in the area were forced to re-
examine their missions in light of a changed set of needs in the communi-
ties they served. For example, Louisiana Environmental Action Network,
an advocacy group that normally focused on toxics issues in communities
around the state—many of which were hit by both Hurricanes Katrina and
Rita—transformed itself into a relief group providing supplies for home-
owners and volunteers who now had to deal with the toxic hazard of re-
turning to their homes.
But while these local groups engaged in this sort of mutual aid/phi-
lanthropy hybrid, plenty of grantmakers from outside the region backed
them up with a more traditional philanthropic response to the crisis—”tra-
ditional” here meaning voluntary interventions, sometimes from far away,
in the lives of strangers for whom they have no formal responsibility. For
instance, the McCormick Tribune Foundation in Chicago—not usually a
foundation that gives to local causes in the Gulf Coast region—set up a
special relief fund soon after Katrina hit, and pledged to use foundation
funds to match all individual donations and to cover all administrative costs
so that the issue of “how much of my check is going to help those in need”
would not arise.
However, philanthropy was not simply a response to fill the void left by
the failure of others. Despite the struggles we noted, there was clearly a lot
of self-help and mutual aid going on, especially in areas (and in early
stages) where neither FEMA nor that Salvation Army truck had arrived.
Family and friends were in some cases both the “first responders” and the
only effective response for days at a time. In the first few days, the people
stranded in the Superdome and those waiting for help in flattened towns
in Mississippi relied on each other for medical care, supplies, and emo-
tional support. But the point is that while these sorts of responses were ul-
timately inadequate—the task before them was just too great—we can see
the government and philanthropic responses as complementary to this
self-help and mutual aid.
And this reliance on multiple responses will continue as the efforts to
help move from relief to recovery. After the first anniversary of Katrina,
much attention turned to what government can and must do, and this is
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appropriate. Neither philanthropy nor individuals and families nor even
the marketplace have the capacity or organization required to deal with
such a problem when it is on such a scale. Government agencies at many
levels (including the military) must help provide emergency aid, but they
must also provide long-term help of many kinds, from rebuilding infra-
structure to providing tax incentives for businesses to return to decimated
places. Ultimately, however, recovery from such a calamity depends not on
government but on people getting back to their economic work, helping
themselves, cooperating in their networks, competing in the marketplace,
and only secondarily depending on government subsidies and continued
charitable contributions. Mutual aid and self-help—perhaps microcredit
loans would work—are essential to long-term recovery.
But we should not overlook the fact that philanthropy was for many the
preferred or most appropriate response to the Katrina disaster. Americans
saw the crisis and wanted to “do something,” and in such cases “doing
something” meant donating clothing, or volunteering at a crisis switch-
board, or donating money online, or traveling to the region to volunteer,
or any number of other philanthropic responses. We would have done this
even if the government response had been swift and well-coordinated.
Finally, the response to Katrina also illustrates what we have discussed
in this chapter about the multiple influences and considerations that affect
our decision about how to respond, such as our assessments of “what is
going on” and “where we are coming from.” The charitable giving in this
crisis was very likely much larger and swifter than others because when we
assessed what is going on, we decided such a massive charitable response
was needed. Something clearly was going wrong, and the people were
clearly in need, so there was no question that philanthropy was called for.
But how people responded philanthropically was influenced by factors
about who they are and how they could best help. Vietnamese neighbor-
hoods in Orange County, California, held fund-raising drives to assist the
Vietnamese fishing communities on the Gulf Coast. Veterinarians and an-
imal lovers rushed to New Orleans in a highly coordinated effort to rescue
abandoned and stranded animals. And corporations donated useful in-kind
supplies, from satellite phones, to Web services for victim registries, to
temporary relief from car payments.
But despite these patterns, it is heartening to note in the end that the
massive philanthropic response to Katrina often came from people who
live outside the Deep South and who look very different from those they
reached out to help. This should come as no surprise to those who know
how philanthropy works.
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Cultural Patterns in a Universal Response
This chapter has outlined certain fundamental features of the human con-
dition and human nature that call philanthropy into being, in a sense, as a
response to the inevitable human problematic. However, it is helpful at the
end to remember a point we made at the start: This seemingly universal re-
sponse is always influenced by cultural and historical context. The response
might be impelled by human nature, but the expressions of human nature
are culturally prescribed. Some “life chances” circumstances should be
considered universally unacceptable, but many times what is considered
unacceptable and deserving of philanthropic intervention depends on so-
cial definitions or disputed claims of different moral imaginations. And as
noted, our choices about how to respond, and what role philanthropy will
play, are also influenced by “where we are coming from,” which can be
seen in the significant variations in the way that different countries con-
ceive of the role of the nonprofit sector. This cultural distinctiveness is
what led Tocqueville to focus so much attention on the use of associations
in public life by Americans. It was not that they did not have such associa-
tions in France, but in France citizens turned first to government to meet
human needs or to express the general will, while in America, Tocqueville
perceived, citizens turned first to voluntary associations. If Hurricane Ka-
trina had struck New Zealand instead of New Orleans, there would have
been a philanthropic response, of course, but it would have looked a bit
different.
The distinctive philanthropic tradition in any culture is the history of
this response as it took shape in that culture. America’s tradition is vibrant
and prominent, but the Russian people have a philanthropic tradition, too:
even during the time of the Soviet Union there were secret voluntary as-
sociations to publish samizdat literature. This recognition of distinctive tra-
ditions is a point we will explore in the next two chapters as well, as we dis-
cuss philanthropy as a difficult moral action that reflects and determines
the moral agenda of a society and as the “social history of the moral imag-
ination.”
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EBSCO : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) – printed on 9/25/2018 11:32 AM via JOHNSON & WALES UNIV
AN: 232232 ; Payton, Robert L., Moody, Michael P..; Understanding Philanthropy : Its Meaning and Mission
Account: s9006562.main.ehost