Reciprocity in David Schmidtz’s Elements of Justice

Reciprocity is the second element of justice on David Schmidtz’s map in Elements of Justice. As with desert, reciprocity involves what people are due in terms of what they have done or may do, but in this case the doing focuses on favors they have directed at specific people. The thought is that, when we can, we should return good in proportion to the good we receive. And we should be delighted, not begrudging, at chances to balance the scales by returning good. We should want to reciprocate when we are done favors, and returning favors is a good thing—in the proper context. So, a judge can’t lighten the sentence for a serious crime because he owes the defendant a favor. That would be unjust in part because it violates what the plaintiff is due.

“What would be unjust is repaying favors with favors that are not mine to give,”¹ as in the case of a hiring manager who gives a job to a candidate (deserving or otherwise) because he owes the candidate a favor. Applicants are owed consideration pertinent to the relevant skills and experience they may bring to the job, not because of some special relationship they may have with the manager. “Sometimes I have a duty to play a role substantially in service of purposes other than my own.”²

Successfully returning a favor involves responding to the favor’s spirit as well as the magnitude. For instance, “dollars are typically the wrong kind of response to favors done by a friend.”³ While it’s appropriate for me to tip my Uber driver for a ride to the airport, it would be odd to tip my friend because our relationship is more than economic or transactional. (It would also be odd, and likely unappreciated, if I sent my Uber driver a thank you note in lieu of a tip.) Merely paying my friend signals a willingness to eschew the effort of giving thanks by reducing my appreciation to an easy cash transfer. But reciprocity is the art of graciously returning favors, not merely wanting to get out of debt. As a feature of self-respect, it should matter to you that your friend treated you well when perhaps another friend chose not to.

As an aside: I once as a young child placed a dollar in a thank you card for my grandmother. After all, she sent me money and a football for my birthday, so shouldn’t I return that favor with cash too? My parents explained that the thank you note was the point, not money. They were teaching me how to channel reciprocity properly by responding to the spirit of my grandmother’s gift.

Schmidtz illustrates the forward-looking social benefits of reciprocity: “When people reciprocate, they teach people around them to cooperate. In the process, they not only respect justice, but foster it. Specifically, they foster a form of justice that enables people to live together in mutually respectful peace.”⁴ But the cousin of reciprocity needn’t be retribution: “Returning good for good is something we generally can celebrate, whereas returning bad for bad is a dangerous and complex practice that no society simply can celebrate.”⁵ History teaches us that returning bad for bad may only unleash an endless cycle of violence, since most people convince themselves the other party “started it.” Reciprocity fosters peace, not war.

Paradigmatic instances of reciprocity are what Schmidtz calls symmetrical: returning favors to our original benefactors. But sometimes repayment is impossible (because the benefactor is gone or unknown) or inappropriate (because trying to repay a gift risks dishonoring it). So, honoring a favor is sometimes about passing it on, or what he calls transitive reciprocity. We also sometimes call this “paying it forward.” For instance, we may identify with those facing similar obstacles as we once faced, such as grad school in my case. One of the nicest things about being a mentor to students is the chance to help them navigate challenges and moments of doubt, just as my own academic mentors helped my intellectual and professional development.

Sometimes paying it forward can involve helping a stranger. Schmidtz relates the story of a fellow bus passenger, a foreign woman, who was trying to find her destination but was on the wrong route. Sensing her frustration at being in a world that didn’t speak her language, he helped find out where she was trying to head and got her on the correct bus. Later, he reflected on why he felt grateful to help her: “[I was] grateful, I suppose, to be living in a mostly benevolent world, and grateful for the opportunity to thank the world for its benevolence by being a small part of what makes it benevolent.”⁶ Perhaps this woman would face equivalent opportunities to pay her gratitude forward by helping strangers.

Schmidtz asks us to think about reciprocity as a value more than a duty. Fostering a disposition to pay back or forward also helps us aspire to be people who reward prosocial behavior. “We may consider ourselves obliged not to repay a debt but to promote a value. Specifically, we promote a capacity to repay debts, and we nurture the kind of character that takes joy in putting that capacity to use.”⁷ Reciprocity reflects an acknowledgement that you should earn your rewards. Sometimes you benefit from your own efforts and sometimes you benefit because someone helps you. Joyfully seeking to balance the scales for that help illustrates a commitment to earning your happiness rather than thinking, from a sense of entitlement, that happiness is something that merely happens to you.

We might return a favor as a way of acknowledging and celebrating our common humanity.⁸ Society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage. This mutual advantage can include fraternity and fellowship in efforts to make each other’s lives better.

On a personal scale, failing to reciprocate is one of the most alienating things we can do. “When we fail to respond, we cut ourselves off not only from mundane benefits of mutual support but also from relations that make us feel visible and valuable.”⁹ Reciprocity concerns “what we need to do to sustain a vivid picture of ourselves as rightly esteemed agents in a world of rightly esteemed agents.” I read Schmidtz as implying that failure to respond means treating others as if they were just forces of nature rather than agents. This implies viewing oneself as just a natural event, a confluence of historical forces. By contrast, “honoring those who treat us as ends shows that we value ourselves as ends.”¹⁰

Should we reward only heroic efforts and achievements that go above and beyond? Not at all. “Normal competence is an achievement, not an effortless default. Rising to the call of duty is an achievement; it is not a mistake to give people credit for doing so.”¹¹ Some jobs are dirty and difficult, and not everyone is cut out for them. Acknowledging this reflects that, in seeing reciprocity as a value to be promoted, we aren’t Scrooges or cheap tippers. “Reciprocators do not avoid giving credit; they seek not to pay as little as possible for maximally valuable favors but rather to acknowledge gladly the roles they and their partners play in cooperative ventures.”¹² It’s nice being told one is doing a great job, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that one of the more rewarding experiences is to look someone in the eye and tell them they’re doing a great job.

Classical liberalism is sometimes accused of being “atomistic” because it holds that individuals, not communities or nations, are the fundamental units of moral evaluation, and associations exist for the sake of helping individuals live well. If this be atomism, then classical liberalism is guilty as charged, but its stress on the individual is not a celebration of anti-sociality or self-centeredness. Reciprocity is “antithetical to the ‘atomism’ that liberalism’s critics inaccurately say is characteristic of a liberal society” because transitive reciprocity, in particular, “is a way of rejoicing in our common humanity.”¹³ Some critics maintain that liberalism encourages us to ignore supposed residual debts we may owe to society, such as taxes and military (or other) service, beyond what we have already contributed as productive members of the cooperative venture for mutual advantage. That is, we may always be in debt to the society that benefits us. Schmidtz disagrees: “It may be foolish to see ourselves in ‘atomistic’ terms, but it is neither ‘atomistic’ nor foolish to think it is possible to have done our share.”¹⁴ We owe reciprocity to specific people without thereby owing it to “society.” We benefit from society, but it doesn’t follow that we owe society any more than we owe the Sun for sustaining us.

Such “perpetual debt” views reflect a zero-sum mentality. The mistake lies in thinking that if Jane is better off, she must not yet have done her share. Now, if society would be better off without Jane, then we have some reason to say Jane has an unpaid debt. “That Jane is that much better off for participating in society is not what determines whether she is in debt. Whether she is in debt depends on whether society is that much better off in turn.”¹⁵ Schmidtz counsels us to avoid the risk of double counting what we owe to each other. If we’ve made the world a better place, we may not owe anything beyond what we’re already doing. Opposition to high taxes or military conscription, for example, is consistent with the love of our fellow humans, not a sign of “atomism” or a rejection of reciprocity.

Such thinking also tempts us to overlook the most transformative achievements in human history: “There is no amount of money that [Thomas] Edison could have paid in taxes that would have begun to compare to what Edison contributed to society when he gave us the light bulb.”¹⁶