Another book that I picked up the other day is Rosalyn Diprose's, Corporeal Generosity: on giving with nietzsche, merleau-ponty, and levinas. She says the underlying claim of this book is that:

...generosity is not only an individual virtue that contributes to human well-being, but that it is an openess to others that is fundamental to human existence, sociality and social formation. Usually the the former understanding of generosity, as a socially benefical virtue, is said to exhaust its definition.

On this Aristotlean account generosity is taken to be a habituated and cultivated character trait---(a virtue)---that guides a person towards giving to others beyond the call of duty. Diprose says this is spelt in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which she interprets as follows:

Provided that the person gives by "deliberate choice" according to "right reason", that is appropriately according to his or her means and the circumstances and without self-serving motives so that the act is neither wasteful or mean, not only do the recipients benefit through the enhancement of their well being, but so does the one who gives through the pleasure that this brings .

However, what Diprose does is interpret Aristotle through modern accounts of generosity articulated in a capitaliist economy. Tibor Machan's Politics and Generosity is the text referred to here, and this argues that Aristotle's model of virtue can only flourish, or indeed can only be possible, in a polity of sovereign propoerty owners; and more specifically within a libertarian political system as opposed to a welfare state. Diprose's critique is that in a modern capitalist economy the emphasis on utility in social relations tends to reduce the gift to a calculable commodity and generosity to the logical of an exchange economy with its 'I will give you this in exchange for that.'

It is not clear that Aristotle's account of generosity-- -as distinct from Machan's---remains trapped within the logic of exhange and contract whereby the gift functions as a commodity. Hence Diprose's critique is targeted at Machan's reworking of Aristotle's account of generosity, not Aristotle's account per se.

I would argue that it is the economy of contract and exchange between self-present sovereign individuals deploying instrumental reason that makes generosity impossible. The gift needs to be uncommodified, and this implies a different set of social relationships to those of contact and exchange. If generosity is expressed as altruism in society that is smanifest in voluntary blood supply systems, then what is highlighted by the characteristics of voluntary blood donation is that this form of conduct is distinct from other forms of exchange in a market-oriented society.

The generosity displayed by blood donors, to unnamed strangers is, like other virtues, in that it is learned over time. That is, one becomes generous or otherwise virtuous by repeatedly performing generous or virtuous acts. Virtues, as attitudes, dispositions, or character traits, enable us to be and to act in ways that develop the potential to become different to what we are. The self is transformed by performing generous actions of giving to others without reciprocation.

Diprose says that her account of generosity:

... is an openness to others that not only precedes and establishes communal relationss but constitutes the self as open to others. Primordially, generosity is not the expenditure of one's possessions but the dispossession of one-self, the being-given to others that undercuts any self-contained ego, that undercuts self-possession. Moreover, generosity so understood, happens at a prereflective level, at the level of corporeality and sensibility, and so eschews the calculation characterstic of an economy of exchange.

Generosity is being given to others without deliberation in a field of intercorporeality, a being given that constitutes the self as affective and being affected, that constitutes social relations and that which is given in relation. On the model of generosity in this book, generosity is not one virtue among others but the primordial condition of personal, interpersonal, and communal existence.