Abstract
It is common to find moral fault for doing less than one should, but not for doing more. A detailed investigation of some examples of “doing too much” reveals an important sphere of wrong-doing related to abuses of authority and discretion.
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Notes
If the car case does not do it for you, up the ante until you feel the constraint; the conjecture is that at some point, the gift is not just excessive or in bad taste, but, for reasons we will explore, it is wrong to have given it. This is a good point to note that the norms of too much that I am assuming may well be parochial. I am trading on shared intuitions. I hazard, though cannot prove, that the phenomenon I am interested in will show up wherever there are norms about appropriate exchange.
There are curious cases in the vicinity. We are out for dinner and I have forgotten to bring my wallet. I ask to borrow $10, but instead of loaning me the money you say, “Let me pay for this.” I later send you the $2 that I would have added to my repayment had you lent me the money. This is surely weird; maybe a bit nasty.
It would be a different relationship if usurious, in the sense of money for hire.
One might want to say that one simply cannot repay too much—$10 did all the repaying there was to do since that was all the debt there was. I agree. The example of repaying too much is meant to explore the moral effects of that limit.
There are cases on the other side as well. I ask to borrow $10, you give me $12. Was your thought that I did not know what I needed? Eccentric generosity? A lesser wrong than our $2 case, but absent more to the story, still something you should not do.
Debt default is a material not a status loss.
This may be one reason why any acts of gratitude in such cases are typically separate in kind and time from the repayment of the debt. I repay the money and later invite you out for a drink. The repayment manages the debt; the drink acknowledges your good will. Separate goods and separate responses. (Suppose I did not have time to go out with you and instead gave you money for the drink when I repaid the debt; that would not be okay).
These are moments when we may be inclined to psychologize: were there problems in the family about debt, or legacies of religious scruples?
It may take some doing to get on board with this. It certainly goes against the grain of television fantasy where extravagant giving is the essence of the drama (The Millionaire, if you are my age; extreme makeover shows nowadays). But it is a telling feature of the genre that the giving is anonymous, as if manna from heaven, with or without an exhortation to use the gift wisely, or from some entity with whom the recipient had no connection and will have no future contact. It is important to the case being discussed that the giving is not of this sort.
I will stay with gifts between persons, but there is much to be said about gifts to animals, possibly gifts between animals, and gifts to gods. I leave aside charitable giving to institutions as a different topic.
17th century Dutch fascination with exotic flowers and fruits in both gifts and paintings signaled wealth and imperial reach. Cf. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, Reaktion Books, 2013.
In the O. Henry short story, “The Gift of the Magi,” the material cost of giving (his watch for hair combs for her, her hair for a watch fob for him) would produce tragic failure were it not for the simultaneous nonmaterial gift of sacrifice that, in the same acts, confirm and celebrate the relationship. Nothing here is simple.
The extreme is Jacques Derrida’s investigation of the gift as “the impossible”. See his contribution in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999).
As we will see in a moment, making the transfer complete and making the gift complete are not the same thing.
Some will recall the wince factor when the Obamas gave Queen Elizabeth II an iPod loaded with American music (and not, e.g., a museum quality piece of early American silver). It was also sort of thrilling.
The U.S. Postal Service permits mail delivery employees to accept baked goods, but not money or purchased gifts.
In many kinds of relationship, small gifts are part normal life: I give a friend a DVD or a book I think he would like. Consent is an issue where a gift appears to challenge authority, where it might signal a change in relationship, or is a burden to the recipient.
There is an additional conveyance in small gifts too, but it is often realized as affection or good will. I do not mean to say that one cannot make a psychological separation between gift and giver—as in refusing to acknowledge from whom a gift comes. But the refusal is just another way of dealing with the connection. Lest one think this is all too much to be credible, there is a comparable moral minefield in helping (and its response in gratitude).
Competitive gift-giving, like the potlatch, is an interesting case: its role can be redistributive; but it can also establish relative rank by displaying a willingness to disperse wealth. For this to work, all parties must know the script.
I give you a a magazine subscription and want to know how you like it; you may have many reasons not to respond, but I think your desire for privacy has less claim once you accept the gift. Gifts are (usually welcome) intrusions.
Though of course the sound of this is instructive: Yes, thank you for giving me X, but I accept it only on condition that you not ask about whether I enjoy having it.
Think of Lear’s fateful division of his kingdom. It was not just an expression of weakness of character or an old man’s desire to control the sexuality of his daughter, or… That is, it was all of those things, but as a doing, though done by kingly right, it was wrong: wrong to do. (That there may be reason to think the kingly right itself is impugned by the case would be a welcome step.)
This can include deferral to someone else’s expertise, as when, on the occasion of my burgundy-loving friend’s birthday, I consult with her favorite wine store about her preferences.
This is a place to acknowledge the divergence of this account from T. M. Scanlon’s treatment of similar terrain in Moral Dimensions (Harvard University Press, 2008). Because Scanlon holds that if an action is not impermissible it cannot be wrong, he develops a separate domain of moral criticism that belongs to what he calls an action’s meaning.
Where the wrong is embedded in this way, an action (a doing) that might in other locales be fine is here wrong. Paradoxically, it is the sphere of permission that creates the space for the wrongful action. Other cases share this form: to value autonomy is to give agents discretion over decisions they may make poorly; to value speech involves accepting and protecting foolish or hurtful speech. The justification for protection does not inoculate the actions protected from being wrong to do.
This resists the idea that a gift is complete in the giving. It is like the throw in playing catch. Anonymous gifts are a special case: someone has reasons to block the normal narrative arc of giving and receiving.
It is action over which the agent has discretion, though I am less confident than most that one is always free not to make the sacrifice.
Here the note of proportionality sounds clearly.
One can imagine friends of unequal wealth whose gifts to each other are never comparable. They know and accept this. Part of the work in maintaining such a friendship is to insure that economic inequality does not distort the relationship. Giving unequally is not as such a problem. But giving too much might be.
Anthropological accounts of elaborate ceremonies of competitive giving have rich detail about this sort of thing.
This connects giving too much with other areas where doing too much turns a good thing into something we ought not do. Help is a good thing; too much help undermines initiative. Praise and criticism are good; too much of either creates damaging confusion about merit. And so on about food or exercise, though not about health or wisdom, as Aristotle reminds us.
I should emphasize that I do not mean to be making claims about how people must feel in these circumstances. If you turn out to be someone who is untroubled by the receipt of exaggerated benefits out of sense of entitlement or obliviousness, the status problem is already in present.
Clearly this discussion does no more than peel back the cover on the topic of gifts. Just below the surface there are fascinating issues about anonymous gifts, charitable giving, bequests, public and state giving. There are gifts that deplete the giver, and those that do not (artistic production is sometimes regarded this way). The gift and the gift-exchange are of enormous concern in anthropology, economics, feminist thought, and continental philosophy (mainly French). I have no definite idea why this is not a larger topic in the analytical tradition in philosophy. It would surely be of great interest if it were.
In this spirit we might say that the balance of reasons speaks against breaking a promise for a small benefit, but if the benefit is large or significant enough, the balance of reasons is recalculated and the promise-breaking may not be wrong.
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Herman, B. Doing Too Much. J Ethics 22, 147–162 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-018-9266-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-018-9266-4