Reflection for week of September 1

An interesting question came up in class on Friday. That question was, Is generosity towards other countries only done in the giving country’s own self interest? I believe that the answer is usually yes but sometimes. In this case I am referring to one country offering a generous act to another. Some countries such as the United States sometimes offer generosity to other countries in order to advance their own self interest and sometimes seem to be generous with no other motive. Countries offering generous acts do this in many ways, including stimulating a faltering country, providing military support for a country under attack or threat of attack and providing humanitarian support after a disaster. Before getting to a concrete example, let me begin with class. On Friday, our professor split us up into 5 different groups. There were 5 different areas to sit in the room, each area had a different configuration of table and chairs, ranging from a table with four nice chairs to a group who had to sit on the floor. Group one was the first that went in and they got to choose their location. Once the group went in, they allocated extra resources, chairs, that they had to the other group areas, with the purpose that hopefully everybody would get a chair. Did the first group or “country” do this out of generosity to advance their own self interest? I believe that yes, the other groups would have been angry with group one, who had the nicest table, if they didn’t have any chairs. So, the idea of allocating the extra chairs was to make the other groups less hostile towards group one. This is a small, simulated example that is supposed to be just like one country offering a generous act to another.

I believe a real world example of one country offering generosity to another comes from Iraq. When the Iraq war started, one of the ways the leaders of the United States talked about it was that the US was being kind and liberating Iraq from a ruthless and cruel dictator. Initially we thought that we would be viewed as liberators; we for the most part are not. Some theories have been suggested that our so called generosity in Iraq is actually advancing our own self interest. One theory suggests that we are putting Iraqi oil in the hands of a government that’s friendly to the US, so that we can have more control over it. I don’t agree with this theory that we went in for oil, but we did go in to Iraq for our own self interest to topple an unfriendly dictator.

Just as in my previous post about more powerful countries looking after less powerful, where I said that they only look after less powerful countries if they have a vested interest. I don’t believe that a country should only be generous to benefit itself. I think that countries should be generous to other countries because it’s the right thing to do. Countries like the US tend to vary between providing self interest generosity, what the theory about Iraq suggests, and true generosity, like the supplying of aid after the Tsunami in South Asia in 2005. So yes, maybe in class, group one was being generous in their own self-interest, but in the real world it’s very hard to say that a country either only provides self interest generosity or provides generosity for common good. This is because most countries are apt to do both.