From the book, Philanthropy: Voluntary Action for the Public Good, by Robert L. Payton. Originally published in America in Theory edited by Leslie Berlowitz, Denis Donoghue and Louis Menard. Copyright 1988 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

This essay explores the making of the philanthropic agenda and some of the ways voluntary initiatives influence public policy as well as social values.

If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment. The mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed. Yet we can see that with the perception of truth is joined the desire that it shall prevail. That affection is essential to will. Moreover, when a strong will appears, it usually results from a certain unity of organization, as if the whole energy of the body and mind flowed in one direction.... Whoever has had experience of the moral sentiment cannot choose but believe in its unlimited power....

But insight is not will, nor is affection will. Perception is cold, and goodness dies in wishes; as Voltaire said, 'tis the misfortune of worthy people that they are cowards; "un des plus grands malheurs des honnętes gens c'est qu'ils sont des lâches." There must be a fusion of these two to generate the energy of will....

The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will. Society is servile from want of will, and therefore the world wants saviors and religions. One way is right to go: the hero sees it, and moves on that aim, and has the world under him for root and support. He is to others as the world. His appropriation is honor; his dissent, infamy. The glance of his eye has the force of sunbeams. A personal influence towers up in memory only worthy, and we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, gravitation, and the rest of Fate.[1]

Emerson understood that benevolence is not enough. For kindly feeling to become beneficent, for good will to become action, requires a coalescence of insight and affection—of recognition of a problem and a concern for those affected—fused "to generate the energy of will." Emerson argues that ordinary people are immobilized by cowardice: they are brought to action by persons of will and purpose. Those of strong will are the catalyst of the spiritual chemistry that makes up the moral sentiment. Without leaders, without direction and focused purpose, most of us would remain stuck in our doubt and confusion in the face of the great moral demands of life.

The organization of efforts to make things better, or to make them less bad, is philanthropy. It begins with perception: someone has to see suffering and to recognize it for what it is. That requires imagination—not simply the sensitivity of the observing novelist or anthropologist, but imagination linked to moral sentiment, moral sentiment linked to action. To these is added organization. The Good Samaritan, coming to the aid of a stranger in need at some risk to himself, is acting as an individual. It is the transformation of moral sentiment and imagination into collective action that has shaped the core of the philanthropic tradition.

The thesis of this essay is that it is within the philanthropic tradition that the moral agenda of society is put forward. Philanthropy's contribution to moral discourse is as critic of the other institutions of society—even, on occasion, as critic of itself.

Robert H. Walker, in Reform in America, describes a cycle of reform. The first phase is a time of discovery, of recognition that something is wrong, marked by competing definitions of what the problem is. A second phase is completed by competing proposals for change. The first cycle takes place as voluntary initiatives of private citizens; the second is marked by movement of those new insights into public policy. To cite one of Walker's paradigm cases: slavery becomes an indigestible knot in the stomach, and abolition brings temporary relief; the negative achievement of abolition eventually inspires hope that there is a fuller pattern of citizenship not yet achieved; legislation begins to redefine the qualifications of citizenship. Voluntary initiatives lead eventually to reform of the law.[2]

The moral sentiment is not, of course, confined to the philanthropic sector. Politicians and government officials sometimes interpret their roles and responsibilities in order to enhance the social consequences of their actions—as happened so often during the 18th and 19th centuries, when merchants aligned themselves with religious leaders to create communities, to build schools and hospitals, churches and markets.

Notions of enlightened and humane government are based on empirical evidence as well as on theory; notions of socially responsible business corporations are supported by fact as well as by ideology. But the case has been well made by James Douglas in Why Charity? that the operations of the marketplace are theoretically indifferent to public goods and that the acts of government must be categorical rather than responsive to individual needs. These inherent constraints on the first two sectors create opportunities for the third—indeed, require the third.[3] The rhetorical role of philanthropy is to point out the deficiencies of social institutions—whether those deficiencies occur by design or by default. What is different about the philanthropic tradition of the West, then, most extensively manifest in the United States, is that the genius of organization has amplified the sporadic actions of individuals into a loose system, a tradition of moral sentiment in action, a moral sector parallel to that of the political and economic. Law protects these private initiatives for the public good; tax policy encourages them.

Within the third sector are two kinds of activity: initiatives that respond to recognition that things have gone wrong and people are suffering, and initiatives that propose opportunities to enhance the quality of life. The definition of philanthropy that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries links the two: it defines the purposes of philanthropy as those of identifying the causes of human suffering and social misery and developing strategies to eliminate them, Philanthropy as moral discourse has since deferred somewhat to the demands of social science. Moral claims are validated or rejected by survey research, on the one hand, or reduced to echoes of ideology by analysis, on the other. Skepticism has been brought to bear systematically on the claims and methods of beneficence.

The case against philanthropy is not necessarily misanthropic, but it often exhibits harshness. Emerson himself, in "Self-Reliance," complained

... do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I begrudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong ... your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies;—though I confess with shame that I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.[4]

There is a widely held point of view that true social betterment on a large scale cannot come about by voluntary action. "Charity must be coerced," as economist Barbara Bergmann once put it. Voluntary action must be superseded by the obligations of citizenship. Benevolence requires beneficence to have meaning; privileges dependent on voluntary action must be followed by rights, by enforceable claims.

Voluntary action is too often undermined by free riders; free riders will contribute their share only when compelled to do so. This point of view also contends that in a democracy the resources for social good should be gathered by the state through taxation and allocated through established processes by representatives and agents of the commonweal.

Recent political developments in the United States, how­ever, have given weight to contrary arguments. It is complained that dependence on public solutions to social problems—as reflected in the programs of the New Deal and the Great Society—leads to state interventions that imperil freedom and drain a diminished treasury. Western European welfare states have begun to back away from social commitments taken for granted in the recent past. The compe­tition of the new international marketplace has encouraged philosophies of public welfare that identify enlightened charity with job creation. As Maimonides declared 750 years ago, the highest form of charity is to help a person become self-supporting. It is still a beguiling notion: public welfare drains the treasury; job creation fills it up. Welfare increases taxes; job creation increases profits. George Gilder has even argued that it is altruism that inspires the marketplace: those who take economic risks do so not out of self-interest only, but out of an understanding that their actions will benefit others as well.