Emily Saunders

In this chapter, Emma Saunders-Hastings argues that some attempts to promote welfare through charitable giving can be objectionably paternalistic, and explores what avoiding such paternalism would require. She defends a view according to which our moral reason to avoid paternalistic behaviour is grounded in the importance of social and political relations, which in turn require respect for autonomous agents. This respect is potentially compromised when donors act as if they are entitled to maximally pursue their own conception of the good. Saunders-Hastings argues that we should at least take account of the instrumental importance of these relations, e.g. their importance to welfare. If they have intrinsic importance, then they have to be balanced against the independent importance of promoting welfare.

Both deafness and sign language experience impact the distribution of visual attention, and either factor could affect reading span size, the area around fixation from which useful information is obtained. In contrast to the typical asymmetrical span (smaller on the left), deaf signers have a larger leftward span than skill‐matched hearing readers. We investigated whether this enhanced span is due to changes in visual attention associated with early deafness or sign language experience (right‐handed signs fall in the left periphery). A gaze‐contingent moving‐window paradigm was used to assess the leftward reading span of hearing early signers, deaf early signers, and hearing nonsigners with similar reading abilities. The size of the leftward span for deaf and hearing signers was the same (10 characters) and was larger than that of hearing nonsigners (4 characters). Thus, sign language experience appears to be at least one source of the larger leftward span in deaf signers. However, deaf signers were more efficient readers than both hearing groups (faster reading rate, more skipped words, fewer regressions), suggesting that their greater reading efficiency does not stem solely from a larger leftward span.

Philanthropy involves the voluntary contribution of money or other goods and resources for broadly public purposes. Unlike taxation, contributions are not coerced: rather, their magnitude, their direction, and often their specific use is determined by the donor’s discretion. Unlike the case of ordinary market exchange, the giver does not ask or receive payment for what she offers, though she may receive psychological, reputational, or even material benefits from her gift (e.g., she may feel a “warm glow”, see her name above a building or on a wall honoring donors, receive perks from the organizations she supports, or enjoy tax benefits). What constitutes a “public purpose” is of course controversial, but for now we adopt a very broad definition (excluding, e.g., gifts to family and friends and politicians or electoral campaigns, but otherwise inclusive as to beneficiaries and purpose). It satisfies most ordinary understandings of philanthropy for a gift simply to be other-regarding. Note that the above definition focuses on philanthropy as a practice. Alternative definitions might attempt to specify the philanthropic motivation (i.e., love of humanity, altruism, or public-spiritedness) or philanthropic organizations as a legal category. While this entry engages with these other meanings of philanthropy, a practice-based definition provides the most appropriate lens through which to evaluate philosophical reflection on practices of voluntary giving and receiving. Motives of altruism or beneficence can animate many actions not ordinarily classed as cases of philanthropy (e.g., a decision to run for office), and the legal and tax treatment of philanthropy varies across time and jurisdictions. Additionally, we do not, for the purposes of this entry, draw a distinction between “charity” and “philanthropy”, or assume a necessary contrast between philanthropy and justice: the relationship of philanthropy to justice is a complicated matter that we discuss below. We begin with a historical survey of the role of gift-giving in philosophical traditions, followed by a discussion of the relationship between charity or philanthropy and justice. We then turn to a more detailed discussion of philosophical perspectives on the ethics of philanthropy (e.g., moral questions for prospective givers and recipients) and the politics of philanthropy (e.g., questions about philanthropy’s relationship to the state and to political values like democracy and freedom). Finally, we consider some more specific topics of contemporary philosophical controversy.

Informed by behavioral science research, recent defenses of paternalism point to people’s need for help in making and carrying out good decisions. Authors in this literature typically focus on defending paternalist policies against objections that frame them as threats to autonomy. But they often neglect a second category of objections to paternalism. Paternalism expresses disrespect not only for the target’s autonomy but also for her equal status. I argue that this second kind of wrong is more independent of autonomy-based objections than has been recognized. Therefore, we need to evaluate paternalism in two dimensions, rather than treating egalitarian objections as a mere supplement to autonomy concerns. This allows us to see why welfare paternalism can be objectionable even when choices are not significantly constrained or when the choices at stake are relatively trivial. The barrier to justifiable welfare paternalist policies has less to do with the specific techniques of influence adopted than with their asymmetrical distribution and the inegalitarian structures through which they are delivered.

Chiara Cordelli’s The Privatized State offers a powerful critique of privatization and an inspiring vision of the kind of democratic governance that could secure citizens’ equal freedom. This essay raises questions about how Cordelli’s arguments apply in non-ideal theory. It asks whether her arguments about the illegitimacy of privatization provide us with adequate reasons to reject ongoing processes of privatization. It also queries some of her recommendations for how philanthropy should be practiced by individuals and incentivized by the state.