Generosity

What Generosity means in shared life

The neighborhood tool exchange needs someone to sharpen the pencils and sort the returned washers. You had pictured unveiling the new cabinet. You take a small tray and begin sorting. When the cabinet opens, your contribution will be inside several working hinges.

Generosity gives…

There is more room for necessary work whose reward is shared. People can use what you offer without having to manage a continuing debt of gratitude.

Finding the balance

A freely chosen limit helps a gift stay free. Saying what you can offer is compatible with warmth; concealed expectations make acceptance difficult.

In ordinary life

A shared document

Contribute a correction that helps the next reader and credit the person who developed the idea.

An available skill

Offer a short piece of help without turning it into permanent responsibility for the whole project.

Nearby virtues, different work

Magnanimity

Magnanimity concerns rivalry and status; Generosity concerns readiness to give.

Compassion

Compassion attends to suffering, while generosity can also support shared enjoyment or learning.

Recognizing a counterfeit

A counterfeit of Generosity: A gift can arrive with an invisible invoice: access to your resources silently requires agreement, publicity or influence. Make important conditions clear before acceptance.

How to cultivate Generosity

• Find out what the project can actually use.
• Name the scale and limits of the offer.
• Let acknowledgment be welcome without making it a condition after the fact.

Try it today

Offer a small contribution the project needs to a project you freely support. Choose something within your means and make any necessary conditions clear. Reflect on whether the result would still satisfy you without public thanks.

Questions worth returning to

• What expectation travels with this offer?
• Have I asked whether the contribution is wanted?

Choose your practice

The situations on these pages are illustrative. These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Read these passages in their original settings through the source links.

1. A man who is affected to tears in dwelling on the generosity of his own sentiments makes me aware of several things not included under those terms.

   Theophrastus (fictional narrator), in George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such
   I. Looking Inward.

   The narrator doubts a giver’s admiration for his own generous feelings. The recipient and the gift can disappear behind the performance.

2. The charity visitor has broken through the natural rule of giving, which, in a primitive society, is bounded only by the need of the recipient and the resources of the giver; and she gets herself into untold trouble when she is judged by the ethics of that primitive society.

   Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics
   Chapter Ii — Charitable Effort

   Addams describes a mismatch between a visitor’s rules and recipients’ expectations. Her contrast makes the terms and limits of an offer worth explaining.

3. to her unflagging and most generous help the final form owes more than I can quite express.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   Acknowledgments

   In her acknowledgment, Follett credits her teacher Anna Boynton Thompson with sustained criticism and advice on the manuscript. The finished work carries help that is not apparent from its author’s name.

4. but to alleviate misfortunes is often within the most limited power

   Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume III: The Rambler
   No. 107

   Johnson locates a useful gift within limited power: one need not remedy all suffering to relieve some of it.

5. "It does not greatly concern me," said the Master, "that men do not know me; my great concern is, my not knowing them."

   Confucius, The Analects of Confucius
   Book I;
   Chinese; English translation by William Jennings

   Confucius turns attention from being recognized to understanding other people. It helps distinguish a contribution from a bargain for public acknowledgment.

6. Snatch not eagerly at every advantage offered by his unskilfulness or inattention; but point out to him kindly that by such a move he places or leaves a piece in danger and unsupported

   Benjamin Franklin, The Morals of Chess
   Final paragraph, expressly about play not conducted rigorously

   Franklin’s player gives an opponent useful attention instead of extracting every possible advantage.

7. Speaking of T'ai-pih the Master said that he might be pronounced a man of the highest moral excellence; for he allowed the empire to pass by him onwards to a third heir; while the people, in their ignorance of his motives, were unable to admire him for so doing.

   Confucius, The Analects of Confucius
   Book Viii;
   Chinese; English translation by William Jennings

   Confucius praises a renunciation whose motives the people did not know. Recognition is absent from the value of the act; the dynastic example is not advice to surrender one’s rights.

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