The Ancient Lineage of Effective Compassion
Aristotle on the virtue of liberality
Earlier this year, FVI’s president, Ismael Hernandez, published Rethinking Charity, a reflection on how best to go about putting our charitable impulses into practice. One of Ismael’s catchphrases is “effective compassion,” meaning directing our efforts toward the poor in a way that actually helps them rather than merely virtue signaling or assuaging our own guilt or desire for affirmation.
The concept of effective compassion has a long history. Ismael borrows it from, among others, Marvin Olasky, who brought the idea to prominence when his book The Tragedy of American Compassion was touted by Newt Gingrich and became embroiled in the 1990s welfare reform debate.
One of the purposes of Olasky’s book was to point to a long tradition of effective compassion within American society—a tradition that was to a large extent neglected in the second half of the twentieth century in favor of indiscriminate assistance to “the poor”—a category increasingly ill-defined—and the not-unrelated centralization of that assistance in the agencies of the national government.
Olasky advocated returning to an earlier ethic of compassion, one which was more local, more personal, and made more distinctions between kinds of giving and the kinds of needs that different kinds of people had. As one charitable society put it in 1899, “Intelligent giving and intelligent withholding are alike true charity.”
This approach to charity is not uniquely American, of course, nor is it uniquely modern. It is but one manifestation of a timeless, commonsense approach to aiding others that has pervaded Christianity throughout its 2,000-year history. And it predates Christianity, as is evident from the writings of Aristotle (384–322 BC).
In book 4 of his Nicomachean Ethics (which was featured on an episode of FVI’s podcast), Aristotle discussed liberality, which in typically Aristotelian fashion could be discerned by examining the “liberal man.” Aristotle said that “the liberal man, like other virtuous men, will give for the sake of the noble, and rightly; for he will give to the right people, the right amounts, and at the right time, with all the other qualifications that accompany right giving.”
The virtue of the liberal man consists not merely in his giving generously of his resources, Aristotle insisted; it depends on his giving “rightly”—that is, with discernment. Sometimes, this will mean withholding his goods, as the philosopher explicitly stated: “And he will refrain from giving to anybody and everybody, that he may have something to give to the right people, at the right time, and where it is noble to do so.”
Aristotle didn’t use the words exactly, but this approach aligns closely with the saying “Good intentions are not enough.” For Aristotle, liberality involved care and discernment, not the indiscriminate distribution of money. The generous person must harbor his resources, must refrain from giving to those are undeserving, so that he will have resources on hand when the situation calls for it: so that “he may have something to give to the right people.”
The Greek philosopher also recognized that liberality does not depend on scale but on a virtuous disposition. “Liberality resides not in the multitude of the gifts but in the state of character of the giver, and this is relative to the giver's substance,” he observed. “There is therefore nothing to prevent the man who gives less from being the more liberal man, if he has less to give.”
This sounds much like Jesus’s lesson of the widow’s mite, which again points to the perennial character of the wisdom contained in Aristotle’s reflections. The greatest thinkers on virtue in Ancient Greece taught principles very similar to those taught by Christ, which were in turn incorporated into the preaching of the Fathers of the Church, the tomes of the medieval scholastics, and the modern social teaching of Catholic and other Christian authorities. It suffused the ethic of charity in the predominantly Christian United States throughout the early decades of the nation’s history—as Marvin Olasky has recounted.
This wisdom is often forgotten, neglected, or suppressed, but it never disappears completely, because it is the truth. Human nature has not changed, and so guidance that is consistent with that nature will always be germane. For Christians, the imperative to help those in need is nonnegotiable, but the means and methods will always require discernment. Aristotle’s meditation on “the liberal man” is but one early instance of the principle of “effective compassion” that remains as vital and necessary in the America of today as it was in the Mediterranean world of twenty-five hundred years ago.