Gifts

Can you be entitled to a gift from someone?

1. Gratuitousness Intuition: Gifts are gratuitous, and if you’re entitled to receive something from value, then it’s a payment or award rather than a gift.

But there is one kind of case where you are entitled to a gift: when the gift has been promised to you.

So how to reconcile the promise case with the Gratuitousness Intuition? Presumably something like this: while the gift is owed you, the promise wasn’t. So, how do we now formulate the principle that gifts are gratuitous? We could proceed disjunctively:

2. For any gift g, you are either not entitled to g or you are entitled to g in virtue of being promised it without having been entitled to the promise.

But that’s not quite right, either. For suppose Bob gratuitously promises to promise a gift to Alice, and then fulfills this promise by promising the gift, and then fulfills the last promise by giving the gift. The gift is still a gift, even though the gift is the fulfillment of a promise that was itself required. But note that the gift is not the fulfillment of the first, gratuitous promise, so it’s not a counterexample to (2). Of course, we rarely promise to promise, but sometimes we do: a marriage engagement is a promise to issue a vow.

Perhaps we can replace (2) with something messy:

3. For any gift g, you are either not entitled to g or you are entitled to g in virtue of a chain of promises the first of which you weren’t entitled to.

But that doesn’t fix the other problem with (2), namely that it doesn’t fully capture the idea of gratuitousness. For something can be a fulfillment of a promise you weren’t entitled to and yet not be gratuitous. For suppose out of the blue I promise to pay you $400 if you mow my lawn. You mow my lawn. And now my $400 is a payment, not a gift. But you weren’t entitled to the promise.

We might get out of this by restricting (2) or (3) to unconditional promises. But something can be a gift while being a fulfillment of a conditional promise. For instance, I may promise you a gift should you reach the age of 90. It seems that that’s still a gift.

This is turning into a mess.

One possible solution is to go back to (1) and simply insist on it and bite some bullets. If I promise you a gift on your birthday, then what I give you on your birthday is not really a gift. The true gift was the promise. (But what if I make the promise and don’t fulfill it? Then it seems right to say that you haven’t got anything of value from me. But that may just be because broken promises turn out not to have been of value!)

Maybe even better we should give an Aristotelian story. There is the focal sense of a gift, and it satisfies (1). It is the first unowed promise that is a gift in the focal sense. But then the fulfillment of the promise is a gift in a derivative sense.

But gratuitousness is not sufficient for being a gift.

While we talk of business gifts as gifts, I think that if they are given in the hope of future gain, they aren’t really a gift. Similarly, if I promise you $40 to mow my lawn, then my promise is gratuitous, but it is given in the hope of future gain, namely your mowing my lawn.

And something can be partly a gift. If I promise you a million dollars to mow my lawn, then my promise is mostly, but not entirely, a gift.

Gifts are really hard to analyze.

The DIY urge, Satan's sin and Pelagianism

I've got a big DIY urge. My motivations usually include being too cheap to buy something (typically because I'm saving up for something else--right now, a 3D printer). A fair amount of the time there is vanity--wanting to brag online, say. Sometimes perhaps there is a minor motivation (which really should be much stronger) to repair things rather than wastefully throwing them out. And sometimes the activity itself is very pleasant (I really enjoy using power tools like a sewing machine, a drill press or a stand mixer; I like the smell of solder rosin or freshly cut softwood wafting in the air). But I think often the strongest motivation is the intrinsic pull of doing things myself.

According to Aquinas, that motivation is why Satan sinned. He wanted the good things that God was going to give to him, but he didn't want them from God--he wanted getting them himself. In other words, the first sin is Pelagianism.

This makes me a bit worried about my DIY urge. Is it an echo of the Satanic pride that led to the downfall of the universe?

Not necessarily. Aquinas' discussion of the first sin is driven by two theses: (a) Satan was very smart and (b) Satan's motivations were good. So Aquinas needs needs to identify a good motivation that led him to sin, not simply by a stupid mistake. It is thus central to Aquinas' story that the DIY urge that Satan had was a good motivation: there is a genuine good in achieving good things by oneself. But in order to achieve that good, Satan refused God's gift of grace, settling for (lesser, presumably) goods that he could get by himself.

The fundamental motivation behind the DIY urge is good, thus. But there is a serious danger that it misses what St. John Paul II called our "nuptial nature": that it is our nature to give ourselves to others and to receive others' gift of themselves. Satan refused God's gift. The parallel danger in the DIY case is that it not turn into a refusal of the gift of others' creativity and labor, a refusal to acknowledge that (to use older language) we are social animals.

Of course, the products of commerce are not gifts personally directed to us. (After all, we have to pay for them!) But there is a sense in which they still have some gift-like nature. People have chosen not to be subsistence farmers, but to make stuff for others. There is an imperfect duty somewhere around here to participate in the back-and-forth of commerce, which bears some relevant resemblance to the back-and-forth of gift giving and reciprocation. And so, like all things, the DIY urge needs moderation, not just for reasons like not wasting time or avoiding vanity, but lest it become a denial of our social nature.