The Ethics of Gift Giving – is it what it used to be?

Bitesize Ethics Christmas special edition.
Speaker: Alberto Giubilini

As everyone rushes to buy Christmas gifts, there is a complaint we hear every Christmas: we have lost sight of the true meaning of exchanging gifts. “Human beings are forgetting how to give gifts”, as philosopher Theodor Adorno put it. Gifts are intended to be an act of generosity expressing our caring for someone, beyond the logic of economic exchanges. Is that true, though? A lot of philosophical and anthropological work on gift-giving challenges this view. Think of these scenarios that, most likely, most of us have experienced at some point in our lives. You give a friend a Christmas gift, but the friend didn’t buy you one. A family member gives you a jumper as a gift, but they are disappointed when you don’t wear it at family gatherings. You give your partner a book that you have loved and your partner doesn’t share your enthusiasm for it. All these examples display a failure to adequately reciprocate, in some form, the act of gift-giving, which suggests that gifts are not, after all, outside of economic dynamics. Not only that, but they also seem to raise issues around reciprocity, expectations, duties, possession, and power. This Christmas Bitesize Ethics will analyse the concept of gift and try to answer the question whether, after all, gifts ever were “what they used to be”.