Philanthropy plays an increasingly large role in contemporary societies, and controversies abound regarding the proper scope, extent, and manner of private giving for public purposes. Straddling the border between public and private life, philanthropy also provides a useful case for testing and refining leading perspectives in moral and political thought, and it has exercised several philosophers and political theorists in recent years. Emma Saunders-Hastings’s new book, Private Virtues, Public Vices, treats readers to the most systematic and penetrating investigation yet of the political theory of philanthropy, and simultaneously represents a major advance in our understanding of democracy.

Focusing mainly on the United States, the book begins by noting the considerable privileges accorded to philanthropic giving by American law and political culture. Although Saunders-Hastings finds numerous reasons for valuing philanthropy in some form or another, many privileges that donors enjoy do not track these reasons. How should philanthropy be justified and appraised? And what do different answers to this question entail for how philanthropy should be regulated and practiced? Recent attention to these questions has been preoccupied with whether or how philanthropy can assist in the realization of principles of distributive justice. According to this way of thinking, we should assess the practice against its success in meeting independent distributive criteria. Drawing inspiration from John Stuart Mill and Jane Addams, the author seeks to construct an alternative political theory of philanthropy, one focused not only on distributive shares but also on the relationships of power that philanthropy creates and reproduces.

For Saunders-Hastings, democracy is valuable when and because it upholds relationships of social and political equality. Democracy requires that we relate to one another as social and political equals; practices are undemocratic when they create or consecrate arbitrary inequalities in power or status. Philanthropy can thus subvert democratic relationships in two main ways, first by usurping control over matters of common concern, and second by enabling donors to exercise paternalistic control over beneficiaries.

The remainder of the book focuses on elaborating and applying this account of philanthropy’s problematic relationship to democratic equality. In addition to chapters exploring the respective challenges of plutocracy and paternalism, which are generally connected to economic elites, the author also covers challenges of mass-based giving and donating across borders.

Although the account finds many faults with contemporary philanthropic practice, it is sensitive to the many virtues of philanthropic giving and the difficulties of navigating the pull of different values in different contexts. Its aim is not to impugn donors or banish philanthropy from contemporary democracies but to encourage more thoughtful reflection and identify possibilities for greater harmony.

Since the author is concerned especially with the kinds of power relationships philanthropy can create or reproduce, the book goes deeper and broader than its peers in engaging with the anthropology and sociology of philanthropy. This both enriches the quality of the theory and also opens up numerous opportunities for conversation with social scientists.

A particular strength of the approach is its handling of the distinction between ideal and nonideal theory. Since Rawls, political theories generally start by assuming just background conditions and asking how the phenomenon of interest should look in such an ideally just society. Since we do not live in such a society, however, it is not obvious how such an approach can provide practical guidance. But the opposite approach fares no better, as theories that claim to operate squarely within nonideal conditions struggle to explain which current injustices should be taken as fixed and which should be overcome. A virtue of Private Virtues, Public Vices is that its arguments apply across multiple levels of idealization. Ultimately, Saunders-Hastings is not interested in the question of what role philanthropy should play or the demandingness of duties to donate (questions well covered by others), but rather with how philanthropy can be democratically practiced regardless of background conditions. Of course, these questions are difficult to completely separate, but the space between them still leaves the author with much room to maneuver.

The book’s brightest achievement is Saunders-Hastings’s analysis of philanthropic paternalism in Chapter 4, which not only helps to elucidate objectionable features of certain forms of philanthropic giving but also constitutes a major advance in our understanding of paternalism itself. Philanthropy definitionally aims at benefitting others, but it also involves restrictions on the direction and terms of these benefits. Can gift-giving ever be objectionable on grounds of paternalism? An initial obstacle is that paternalism is typically thought to manifest only in cases of coercively imposed decisions. Since philanthropic gifts are voluntarily accepted, charges of paternalism may seem guilty of a category mistake. Relatedly, many accept that paternalism can occur when it supplants one’s judgments about one’s own good but not in cases regarding one’s judgments about the common good. Saunders-Hastings shows why these hurdles create artificial barriers to a fuller understanding of paternalism and its challenges for democracy. Her view is attractive in part because it can account for the strength and limits of antipaternalist objections in various situations.

While other chapters highlight the author’s skills as a social theorist and intellectual historian, Chapter 4 establishes Saunders-Hastings as an analytic philosopher of the first rate. The chapter takes no prisoners, neither in pointing out the limitations of other theories of paternalism nor in assessing philanthropic acts that fall into the trap that Saunders-Hastings lays for them. A minor downside is that the unexpected thrill of this chapter makes other chapters feel less exciting by contrast, and some may wish that Saunders-Hastings had taken the gloves off much earlier.

The emphasis on paternalism can give the mistaken impression that objections to donor control generally reduce to objections to paternalism. Although Saunders-Hastings denies this, explicitly distinguishing paternalist objections from other sources of objectionable power relationships in philanthropic giving, such as domination, subordination, and technocracy, would help to clarify the significance of her view.

One of many other striking findings in the book is its critique of various attempts to democratize philanthropy. Saunders-Hastings rejects the idea that philanthropy can be democratized simply by involving more donors of modest means. As she rightly notes, broadly funded nonprofits are no democratic panacea. They may themselves exercise undemocratic power over other citizens, a situation that the author demonstrates with religiously affiliated service delivery nonprofits, which are popular objects of mass donations in the United States. Nor can a practice call itself democratic simply because its participants deliberate with each other on equal terms. Provocatively, Saunders-Hastings charges that “giving circles”—communities of middle-class donors who pool resources and decide collectively on causes to fund—“are not democratic bodies but highly deliberative aristocratic ones” (p. 130). The point is instructive partly because it seems to generalize to other settings. Advocacy for workplace democracy, for instance, can fail to appreciate that the internal democratization of firms may leave in place firms’ outsized influence over social conditions and political decision-making. Recent calls to democratize artificial intelligence reflect a similar confusion. Making the benefits of AI more widely accessible and increasing popular input in decisions regarding AI may be valuable independently. But both may be consistent with, or help to reinforce, fundamentally undemocratic social and political conditions more generally.

An important question the author leaves hanging is how to demarcate the line between public and private. As Saunders-Hastings maintains, democracy requires that citizens enjoy shared control over matters of common concern, and democratic requirements persist even when control over those matters is privatized. This is absolutely right, in my view. But to know when and where democratic scrutiny is appropriate, we need some way of distinguishing matters of common concern from other matters. And Saunders-Hastings has little to say on this question. She writes that what constitutes a matter of common concern is contested and must be resolved through democratic processes (p. 80). But this position needs more elaboration and defense to fully ground the book’s arguments. One could claim that the extent of privatization in places like the United States is indeed the result of democratic decisions, however imperfect. If American citizens preferred a greater state role in education, health care, or cultural preservation, they would express this at the ballot box. By declining to do so, they are expressing that these matters (or significant aspects of them) are not in fact matters of common concern. Since voters affirm a large role for philanthropy, this reasoning holds, philanthropists cannot be charged with usurping democratic control.

Readers may wonder in what ways Saunders-Hastings believes the public vices that she diagnoses are unique to philanthropy and how her theory might extend to help appraise other phenomena. Philanthropy is merely one way of usurping collective control over collective matters and exercising paternalistic control over one another. Saunders-Hastings acknowledges as much in the book’s conclusion, even hinting that philanthropy may not even be the most significant vessel of these vices in democratic societies. What, then, are some other vessels, and how might Saunders-Hastings’s theory help us make sense of them? A natural area for further exploration is the world of business. In recent decades, many business firms have been experimenting with various ways of building philanthropic elements into their business models, such as screening their suppliers against various ethical criteria, developing products that purport to address social problems, taking pains to make products accessible to disadvantaged regions or groups, applying novel forms of affirmative action in hiring, and speaking out on controversial social issues. Relatedly, founders of new organizations increasingly label themselves as social entrepreneurs, focused on solving social problems with commercial tools and tactics—not with donations of profits. In what ways do these developments threaten or promote democratic equality?

Although Private Virtues, Public Vices reads well and delights with flickers of wry wit, there is no mistaking that it is a work of serious scholarship. To her credit, Saunders-Hastings urges readers to join her in appreciation of the intricacies of political morality, and she resists the pressure to reduce complex considerations to tidy practical upshots. Nonetheless, given the public interest in the topic, non-specialists may reasonably wish for an easier entry into these debates and more determinate guidance about policy and practice. Fortunately, the author still has ample after-market opportunities to distill the book’s insights for popular discussion. To allow this book the impact it so dearly deserves, I hope she embraces them.