The Samaritan's Dilemma is a book that demands to be taken on its own terms. Though informed by previous scholarship and some original research, its intention is to discredit what the author regards as a systematic conservative war against the moral legitimacy of helping the disadvantaged. Deborah Stone decries conservative economism—the reduction of human motivation to naked self-interest. Altruism is real, she suggests, and surprisingly pervasive. We fail to notice it because we have been socialized to believe that it doesn't exist: “Finding altruism is simply a matter of believing in it and looking for it” (p. 287). Because altruism is so widespread in everyday life, we can and should create a new “politics of altruism” that talks frankly about the ubiquity of vulnerability and dependence, and about the deep satisfaction of rendering assistance without expectation of immediate return (p. 281).

Stone urges her readers to suspend their disbelief and to look at American society with fresh eyes, and she offers her book as an example of what happens when we do. “Instead of aiming for a census,” she says, “I sought to compile a photo album” (p. 101). This method, which focuses on stories, has several strengths. It can alert us to phenomena that a higher-altitude approach might miss, convey a sense of lived experience, and cut through evasive cant with a direct moral message—as did the original parable of the Good Samaritan around which this book revolves.

But there are weaknesses as well. I begin with the most familiar: it is difficult to move from individual narratives to structural conclusions. Yes, altruism exists, and it may well be more pervasive than most of us think. Can we conclude, as Stone suggests, that James Madison was wrong to design a constitution that assumed virtue to be in short supply relative to self-interest and the libido dominandi? While it is to some extent true that political institutions can be morally formative, can we conclude that “[p]olitics shapes motives as much as motives shape politics” (p. 177)? Stone would need an entirely different mode of analysis to support her thesis that there would be less self-interested behavior if only economists were not so prominent in our public discourse.

A second risk is mistaking pronouncements for facts. Yes, some conservative theoreticians did argue that help (especially government help) hurts, but they had at most a modest impact on government policies and budgets. According to the Congressional Budget Office, for example, inflation-adjusted support for working families increased nearly tenfold between 1984 and 1999, and a follow-up study by the Urban Institute showed a further inflation-adjusted increase of almost 50 percent between 1999 and 2005, to $165 billion. In the decade between 1996 and 2006, during which conservative Republicans dominated the House of Representatives, per capita federal and state spending on work-support programs for low-income families with children rose from $2,088 to $3,107.

One might object, however, that these figures do not call Stone's thesis into question, because the very concept of work support rests tacitly on the distinction between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. So look instead at the nine largest means-tested programs, almost all of which take income but not employment status into account. Between 1980 and 1992, a period dominated by two conservative presidents, inflation-adjusted spending on these programs rose from under $90 billion to nearly $150 billion. Although programs for job training and social services were cut, all other programs—Medicaid, food stamps, SSI, Head Start, WIC, the EITC, even AFDC—rose at a compound annual rate of 7 percent. These trends do not support the thesis that government had turned its back on low-income families. If there was a “coup against the Great Society,” it failed.

With a single exception, of course: legislation in 1996 transformed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC, aka “welfare”) into a system of time-limited support designed both to require work and to make work pay. Some liberals did regard this shift as a deathblow to social provision, and a handful of Clinton administration officials resigned in protest. Others believed that the status quo was indefensible, as did an overwhelming majority of the American people. A majority of Democrats in both the House and Senate supported the version of the bill that President Clinton signed after two prior vetoes. Despite the dire prediction of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan that welfare reform would create “scenes of social trauma such as we haven't known since the cholera epidemics,” follow-up studies by scholars with unimpeachable liberal credentials found a connection between the new legislation and gains for both women and their dependent children, a link that persisted even when favorable economic circumstances were taken into account. Labor force participation and incomes increased, while the poverty rate of children living with single mothers plunged. Not everyone gained, of course, but most did.

Yes, welfare reform rested on a distinction between more and less worthy recipients of assistance. But this outlook is deeply embedded in our public culture, and it is unlikely to go away anytime soon. Many observers were astonished recently when a majority of the public objected to helping hard-pressed homeowners avoid foreclosure. These objectors took the position that most people in danger of losing their homes had made shortsighted, ill-founded decisions and should bear the consequences. “Let them sink” may well be bad social policy, but the empirical and moral premises that lead to it are not manifestly false.

Although this book is directed against contemporary conservatism, one may wonder whether Stone accurately depicts it. To be sure, some conservatives have adopted libertarian or moralistic anti-help stances. But others (“compassionate conservatives”), if anything, advocate more rather than less help. Their view is that help tends to be more effective when delivered through civil society institutions rather than government bureaucracies, which may not be true but is certainly not the same as the claim that help hurts.

This distinction affects Stone's own argument. While she shows how altruism suffuses and enriches everyday life in families, neighborhoods, and communities, she is less persuasive in arguing that altruism can frame politics. It may be fair and in the public interest to require wealthy Americans to pay higher taxes so that working-class families can enjoy more well-being and opportunities. But those who advocate this position without themselves being exposed to higher taxation are hardly acting altruistically. If people are doing the right thing, how much should we care about why they are doing it? If we are lucky, majority coalitions of people doing the right thing for self-interested reasons will predominate. The best we can expect is Madisonian politics with a human face.