In Defense of Generosity

What is generosity? Perhaps generosity’s most authoritative treatment in the history of philosophical ethics is found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which states that generous people give the appropriate things in the appropriate amounts to the appropriate people at the appropriate times in the appropriate ways and for the appropriate reasons, doing so for the sake of what is fine and beautiful. Generosity, in other words, is a human excellence, and those who have developed and practice it are excelling as human beings. Generosity cannot tyrannize.