BOOK REVIEWS nod to Edward Said, whose Orientalism is a provocation to Habib, since it 'overlooks Hegel's [orientalist] treatment of Islam. . . ' (p. 116); while the previous three chapters call our attention to Hegel's Eurocentrism, the tenth chapter gestures in the direction of Hegel's Islamophobia (p. 136). At the end of the penultimate chapter and throughout the epilogue, Habib doubles down both on the main argument and on the subtext of his book. The author's main argument is, again, following Andrew Buchwalter, that the Hegelian dialectic can be effectively understood 'as a response to the phenomenon of modern capitalism' (p. 17), or, to put it more precisely, Habib argues that Hegel's dialectic 'expresses' and/or 'embodies' the global 'nature' and/or 'movement' of capitalism (pp. viii, 1–2, 4, 17, 59, 78, 136, 141, 154). At the same time, however, Habib maintains that 'Hegel's dialectic equally embodies a critique of capitalism' (p. 141). The subtext of the author's book concerns what Habib sees as the irony with which postcolonial thinkers have drawn, implicitly or otherwise, upon fundamental aspects of Hegel's dialectic in order to '[undermine]' its Eurocentrism (p. 136). In the end, then, despite all the ink which has been spilled in the 'Hegel "war"' already cited, the author asks his readers to discern between the dialectical form of Hegel's thought and its Eurocentric content (pp. 136, 145), an approach which this book successfully models for us. In addition to his textual analysis of Robert Young's White Mythologies, a specific gloss on what Habib calls the 'dialectic of appropriation' (pp. 139–140, 148, 154) would have been useful here and elsewhere, not least against the backdrop of the Introduction (pp. 1, 7, 17). Still, Hegel and Empire is well organized, clearly written, and thoughtfully reasoned. Together with his thorough command of the history of philosophy, Habib's capacious knowledge of antiand postcolonial theories and literatures beggars the interdisciplinary imagination. Alongside recent works such as George Ciccariello-Maher's Decolonizing Dialectics, Habib's Hegel and Empire is obligatory reading for those of us 'working toward a more global vision' (p. viii). Duke University, USA Advance Access Publication 21st June 2019 Garry Bertholf doi: 10.1093/pq/pqz034 C© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com The Ethics of Giving: Philosophers' Perspectives on Philanthropy. Edited by Paul Woodruff. (New York: OUP, 2018. Pp. x + 224. Price £25.49.) This volume advances the ethics of charitable giving in a variety of interesting and significant ways. It is comprised of six chapters by contributors, as well as an introduction and afterword by the editor. D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /pq/article-abstract/70/279/426/5536080 by U niversity of St Andrew s Library user on 03 April 2020 BOOK REVIEWS 427 A recurring question throughout the volume concerns the extent to which non-consequentialist ethical theories can support effective altruism (3–4). Though it is difficult to answer this question without a shared definition of effective altruism, it seems a key philosophical issue here is whether, when, and how non-consequentialist theories would support the impartial maximization of well-being (assuming no constraints are violated). Paul Woodruff, the volume's editor, provides handy summaries of each of the chapters in his introduction (4–11). Rather than reproduce these summaries, I will briefly highlight some points I found particularly noteworthy. Thomas E. Hill Jr. explores the implications of Kantian ethics for philanthropy. Many are aware that, on a Kantian view, our duty to help others is imperfect in that it does not determine how, when, or how much to help (22). I suspect far fewer are aware of the passages Hill cites suggesting that Kant-in my view rightly-invokes a strict and determinate duty to help in emergency rescue cases, as when you can save a drowning child at little cost to yourself (27). This is striking, especially since some suitably specified cases of charitable giving are arguably (relevantly like) emergency rescue cases. At least, it is difficult to see how one could fail to help in such cases if one truly made the happiness of others an end of one's own, which, according to Kant, one has a strict duty of virtue to do (22). Christine Swanton presents a version of virtue ethics which, she argues, can resolve a number of paradoxes of beneficence. The latter include the paradox that arises when a number of individual contributions together have a good effect and yet none of them makes any difference to securing the good effect (67). According to Swanton, when the details of such cases are spelled out, we can determine whether a given failure to contribute is subsumed under a relevant vice concept, such as 'parasitical', 'callous', or 'unfair'; if it is, that counts against failing to contribute (68). I am not fully convinced of this 'Thick Concept Solution', but it is certainly worthy of attention. Jeff McMahan works through a series of hypothetical rescue cases in order to assess the plausibility of the view-which Horton (2017) and I (2016) have defended-that it can be impermissible to give to a less effective charity rather than a more effective charity, even when it is permissible not to give at all. In one sort of case, one can first either incur a personal cost to do some good, or not; if one incurs the cost, one can then choose whether to do more good at no additional personal cost. Here McMahan finds that even if it is permissible not to incur the personal cost, if one does, it is impermissible to do less rather than more good. However, cases of this sort are structurally unlike charitable giving (90–93). In another sort of case, one faces a single choice in which one can either incur a personal cost to do some good, incur the same personal cost to do more good, or incur no personal cost by doing no good at all. Many cases of charitable giving are of this sort. However, McMahan finds this latter sort of case more puzzling, ultimately suggesting that it may be wrong D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /pq/article-abstract/70/279/426/5536080 by U niversity of St Andrew s Library user on 03 April 2020 428 BOOK REVIEWS yet not impermissible to incur the personal cost to do the lesser good (99–101). In the chapter he concedes that he is not confident his suggestion is coherent. Thinking about it, as well as about the proposals of Horton and others, has led me more recently (2019) to propose a different solution, according to which it is wrong (and impermissible) yet conditionally permissible to incur the personal cost to do the lesser good. That is, it is permissible conditional on not doing the greater good. McMahan has asked me to say in this review that he now thinks this solution is the best way to understand the type of view he was groping toward in his own undeveloped suggestion. Elizabeth Ashford puts forward a view that brings into harmony two seemingly conflicting ways of thinking about our duties to those in severe poverty. According to one approach, we have a duty to give to effective aid agencies to save or transform the lives of people in severe poverty. According to the other, we have a duty to combat structural injustices that cause and sustain severe poverty. Ashford argues convincingly that we are under both of these duties, and that proponents of each approach should embrace the other (141–145). There remains the difficult question of what, in practice, to prioritize, as resources spent on saving lives often could have been used to combat structural injustices instead, and vice versa. But we should not allow the difficulty of this question to result in inaction. Brandon Boesch argues, in the spirit of Bernard Williams's 'integrity objection' to utilitarianism, that reasons constituting one's moral commitments and identities should factor into one's decisions about where to donate (alongside impartial considerations of utility). In the penultimate section of his chapter, Boesch discusses fundraising strategies, such as the Ice Bucket Challenge, in which one is 'challenged' by someone else via social media to contribute to a particular cause (170–173). Here he makes what seems to me an underappreciated point, namely that contributions made in response to such challenges are very often done neither on the basis of one's own moral commitments nor on the basis of impartial cost-effectiveness. William MacAskill, Andreas Mogensen, and Toby Ord claim that giving to charity results in far less loss of well-being than we intuitively believe and that giving to charity can do much more good than we intuitively believe (180). They support these claims with empirical evidence from psychology and economics. If our beliefs about giving were revised to match this evidence, many of us would, I wager, give more and give better. Woodruff 's afterword discusses various duties of justice to give to charity. With Hill (33–34) and Ashford (107, 111), Woodruff claims that, insofar as the rich have benefited from unjust economic structures, they have a duty of restitution to transfer some of their wealth to the poor (205–208). The suggestion is not merely that the rich are not morally entitled to all of the resources in their de facto possession, for that is consistent with it being the D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /pq/article-abstract/70/279/426/5536080 by U niversity of St Andrew s Library user on 03 April 2020 BOOK REVIEWS 429 case that no one is morally entitled to these resources-and one might then argue, as McMahan notes (80–81), that these resources ought to be used to do the most good, impartially considered. The suggestion is also that the poor are morally entitled to a portion of the resources in the de facto possession of the rich. Transferring to people what they are owed may or may not coincide with producing the impartially best outcome. What to do when duties of justice and duties of beneficence conflict is in many cases a difficult question. Whether and how considerations of moral entitlement interact with prerogatives not to incur substantial personal costs is a further difficult question. Woodruff and other contributors to this volume have here put their fingers on an important and underexplored set of issues in the ethics of giving. Indeed, the volume as a whole is highly thought-provoking. REFERENCES Horton, J. (2017) 'The All or Nothing Problem', The Journal of Philosophy, 114: 94–104. Pummer, T. (2016) 'Whether and Where to Give', Philosophy & Public Affairs, 44: 77–95. Pummer, T. (2019) 'All or Nothing, but If Not All, Next Best or Nothing', The Journal of Philosophy, 116: 278–91. University of St Andrews, UK Advance Access Publication 19th July 2019 Theron Pummer doi: 10.1093/pq/pqz032 C© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com Determined by Reasons: A Competence Account of Acting for a Normative Reason. By Susanne Mantel. (New York: Routledge, 2018. Pp. 204. Price £140.00 (cloth).) Some facts favour us acting in certain ways. Such facts are normative reasons– a familiar kind of entity in contemporary normative theory. Sometimes, we act in a way that a given normative reason favours. Cassidy, who has promised to meet her friend for lunch, goes to meet her friend for lunch. She thereby acts as her normative reason: I promised to meet my friend favours. But (hopefully) we often do something more demanding: we perform the action our normative reason favours, but where its presence and normative status is operative with respect to our doing it. Let us label this phenomenon 'acting in response to a normative reason'. Acting as one's normative reason favours and acting in response to it are different phenomena. Cassidy goes to meet her friend, but she might not do so in response to the reason that she promised-she might go simply because she's hungry. If she does go in response to the reason that she promised, she is subject to praise for acting as that reason favours. If she acts merely in accordance with it, she is subject to no such praise. D ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /pq/article-abstract/70/279/426/5536080 by U niversity of St Andrew s Library user on 03 April