Beneficence is the act of doing good, while benevolence is being willing to do good. Walmart is cited as a case where, despite its founder’s belief that businesses do sufficient good simply by fueling wealth through commerce and employment, the company is nevertheless highly involved in community projects. Corporate philanthropy may be used strategically to increase future profits, while many corporations see themselves as morally responsible for stakeholders – employees, communities, consumers, and the wider environment – without requiring a clear return on investment. Corporate intervention is discussed historically in terms of apartheid, where some companies applied pressure for social change whereas others felt firms should abide by local norms despite violating human rights. Corporate intervention in the political affairs of Central America are discussed, as well as businesses that supply biased educational materials. The final case describes the sponsorship of an artistic production that becomes politically embroiled and asks what an appropriate level of corporate involvement in the community should be.

One consequence of the increased enumeration of disabled people and their constitution as pitiable, was the imperative to ‘save’ them from physical destitution and spiritual damnation. Co-currently, from the late eighteenth century onwards a series of intellectual and pedagogical developments meant that helping or ‘civilising’ certain disabled populations, started to be seen as possible. Philanthropists, educationalists, religious figures and, later, government officials, declared they could ‘save’ disabled people and advocated new techniques and instruments to do so. Like the racialised others of empire, disabled people were deemed incapable of helping themselves and dependent on white, non-disabled people. Taking different geographical frames, this chapter tracks these developments in thinking about the development of ‘special’ education, the development of philanthropic work and the increasing role of the state. I make several arguments. First that developments in education were linked to the wider ‘civilising project’. Secondly, that the opening of schools and institutions, whilst uneven and sporadic were based on networks of knowledge that facilitated the transcolonial exchange of information. And thirdly that the discrepant development of institutions across different colonial locations also reflected racialised forms of knowledge about the people who lived there.

This chapter examines Edith Maude Eaton’s (Sui Sin Far’s) two Caribbean tales, “Away Down in Jamaica” (1898) and “The Sugar Cane Baby” (1910), particularly the ways that the tropes of marriage and family illuminate the author’s evolving racial consciousness. By reading the stories in relation to the transnational history of Euro-American imperial and capitalist dominance, this chapter analyzes how these two stories bring to the fore the problems of colonial intrusion and imposition, both violent and benevolent, economic and moral. In this way, they call for “undoing whiteness” and “complicating Chineseness” through critical reframing of the conditions of slavery, forced migrations, and (neo)colonialisms that link the racialization of the Chinese in North America and Africans in the Caribbean that undergird imperial narratives of marriage and family. As such, Eaton’s use of these tropes in these two Caribbean tales enables her to extend her sympathy to both white imperialists and Afro-Creoles and also to carve out space for critiquing Euro-American colonial and imperial violence even as she negotiates her conflicting affinities to and distance from both the white elites and racialized peoples.

In his Treatise, Hume devotes significant attention to examining the passions and psychological mechanisms that support them before turning to discussion of virtue. Within the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (EPM), Hume drops his focus on moral psychology yet seems to maintain the views of virtue he develops within the Treatise. In this chapter I critically examine whether or not the abbreviated discussions of moral psychology within EPM can support its conception of virtue. I argue that certain aspects of Hume’s analysis of virtue within EPM depend upon features of his moral psychology, and in particular the more robust form of sympathy, that are found within the Treatise.

The seventh section of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals is full of interesting puzzles. Why is courage treated here, among the virtues immediately agreeable to self, when it is useful to both its possessor and others? Why do so many of the virtues listed here seem like vices? And why does Hume linger on those virtues of which he seems the most suspicious? This chapter attempts to answer these questions. First, I outline the structure of the section and explain its oddities in more detail. These oddities reflect Hume’s ambivalence about some of the virtues immediately agreeable to self. Second, I argue for the importance of the aesthetic concept of the sublime for his treatment of these virtues. Appreciating this importance can illuminate some of the oddities. Finally, I argue that, although Hume believes that our attraction to these virtues needs correction, this correction cannot consist merely in judging these virtues against the standard of useful virtues. Instead, the correction requires another virtue immediately agreeable to self – delicacy of taste.

In this chapter, I analyze the connections that Hume draws between utility as a source of merit, the principle of humanity as that which elicits our approval of useful mental qualities and blame for pernicious ones, and the role of reason, both in determining usefulness and in reaching just evaluations of merit or demerit. I contrast this set of connections with another set of moral sentiments that have as their object the immediately agreeable or disagreeable qualities. I reconstruct the argument meant to establish the principle of humanity as the foundation of morality, in part with the aim of showing that the sentiment of humanity gains force through our collective participation in the common point of view from which we form a general standard of virtue.

While moral philosophers have traditionally distinguished between moral virtues like benevolence and talents like wit and eloquence, Hume blurred the line between the two, arguing that such talents indeed count as genuine moral virtues. His position was inspired by Cicero, and he defended it by arguing that there is no adequate criterion to distinguish talents from virtues. I argue that Hume’s view of talents is misguided, and the source of the problem is his conception of publicly agreeable qualities. Hume devised a four-pronged test designating that a moral actor’s mental quality is a genuine virtue if it proves either (1) useful to others, (2) useful to oneself, (3) agreeable to oneself, or (4) agreeable to others. Talents like wit and eloquence fall into the fourth category. The problem is that all of the agreeable mental qualities that Hume lists are also useful ones, and it is more reasonable to see utility as the sole source of a quality’s morality, and agreeableness as only an extra feeling of nonmoral admiration experienced by the spectator. I suggest that Hume could have avoided the problem of grouping talents with virtues if he dropped down to a two-pronged test.

This chapter evaluates Hume’s positive account of benevolence in Section 2 and his critique of the selfish theories in Appendix 2 of the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. The chapter’s first part elucidates Hume’s definition of the concepts of benevolence and self-love and explains the difference between the sentiments of benevolence and humanity. In Hume’s view, this first part further highlights, the virtue of benevolence belongs to a class of social virtues distinct from justice. A second part focuses on the example of Pericles on his deathbed in Section 2 to illustrate Hume’s positive account of benevolence as well as the reductionist and skeptical suspicion of the selfish theories concerning benevolence and the social virtues. A third part offers a critical examination of Hume’s critique of the selfish theories and shows how Appendix 2 gives further evidence in favor of Hume’s nonreductionist account of benevolence and the social virtues. In the last part, focusing on the intriguing Section 9, some concluding reflections are offered on Hume’s avowal of the unorthodox character of his own benevolence-based moral theory and his appraisal of a modified self-love as constitutive of the flourishing of the sentiment of humanity.

The expansion of trade and colonial conquest in the early modern era propelled the potato around the world, but the processes that made it a global staple reflect not only these forces but also the varied circumstances that it encountered on its travels. European colonisers congratulated themselves on bringing the nutritious potato to the supposedly backward inhabitants of Bengal and Botany Bay, and viewed its adoption as an index of the overall level of civilisation attained by locals. For gardeners in Tehran, Māori entrepreneurs in New Zealand, and Bengali villagers, potatoes served other purposes. The transformation of eating habits that followed the global dissemination of American foodstuffs after 1492 reveals the complex interactions between local environments, patterns of agriculture and landholding, commercial structures and existing foodways. The potato’s changing status in China demonstrates this well. For centuries the potato provided an important resource for villagers in peripheral regions, yet was almost invisible to the state. Now it is part of a state strategy to increase food security. This transformation in the potato’s political role coincides with the Chinese state’s embrace of the market economy; vigorous state promotion of potatoes has accordingly emphasised individual choice and personal benefit. In China, as in Europe, capitalism, individualism and personal eating practices are closely intertwined with modern forms of statecraft.