What’s Owed?

I flew into Toronto recently on a smallish regional plane from Chicago. It was a wild landing, the plane flopping this way and that in a strong wind. At times, we seemed certain to land wing-first, not the kind of landing one dreams of. Even after we landed, we could feel the wind pushing the plane sideways. As soon as we were securely on the ground, we all clapped and everyone started chattering excitedly.

Do I owe the pilot – or United Airlines – my life? Perhaps. But, apart from a slightly heartier “thank you” to the stewardesses and pilot as I exited, I haven’t done anything to pay him back. Presumably, the pilot received his paycheck. I know I paid my fare. And we all went away thinking we were square. If I had done more to express my gratitude, I might eventually have had to answer to the TSA.

Suppose we had crashed, and the pilot had pulled me out of the burning wreckage? Would paying the ticket have sufficed? We all assume not, but what’s the difference?

Seneca muses on these questions in a section of On Benefits (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca) , happily released in a new translation last year. Whatever the truth of Maussian tribal exchanges, Seneca assumes throughout his treatise that there is a difference between buying and selling on the one hand and benefit-gratitude exchanges on the other. The pilot, he would have said, got his just compensation by being paid for his work:

“What fee do you propose for someone who crosses the seas and, when the land has receded from sight, cuts a clear course through the midst of the waves and foresees future storms and suddenly, when all on board are unaware of danger, orders the sails to be furled, the tackle to be lowered, and everyone to stand ready to face the sudden force of an onrushing storm? Yet this man receives, as his reward for such work, the passenger’s fare.” No further obligations of gratitude are required of the passengers, even though without the pilot’s foresight, they would have been at the bottom of the sea.

Yet Seneca recognizes exceptions, certain sorts of bought-and-paid-for exchanges that do put the recipient in debt to the benefactor. Tipping is a small scale example, but his major examples are medical care and teaching. We pay for medical care, and yet, Seneca says, there is a debt of gratitude owed to a doctor that is not owed to the pilot or to the merchant in the marketplace. We pay the teacher, and yet there’s something more than payment owed. Why?

There are several factors. First is the benefit conferred. Physicians give health, which is “priceless.” Teachers introduce students to the liberal arts and provide “the education of a gentleman and the cultivation of the mind,” which he regards as priceless as well.

Beyond that, there is the personal attention that good physicians and teachers give to their patients and students. Seneca says that the doctor “gave me more than is required of a doctor; it was for me, not for his professional reputation, that he feared; he was not satisfied with pointing out remedies: he administered them; he sat by me among my anxious friends; he came quickly at times of crisis; no service was too burdensome, none too distasteful for him; he did not hear my groanings unconcerned; in a crowd of patients invoking his aid, I was always his prime concern.”

Teachers likewise invest themselves in their students in a way that the merchant does not invest himself in patrons, or the pilot normally invest himself in his passengers. Seneca’s teacher “in teaching me, endured work and tedium; in addition to the things that are commonly said by teachers, there were other things he instilled in my and transmitted to me; by exhorting me he roused my good character; now he encouraged me with praise, now he dispelled my idleness with scoldings; then he extracted by hand, as it were, my hidden and inert intellect; nor did he dole out his knowledge grudgingly to prolong his usefulness, but he wanted, if he could, to pour the sum total into me; I am ungrateful if I do not love him as one to whom I am bound by the very closest obligations of gratitude.”

Seneca thus recognizes a spectrum of forms of exchange: Purely business arrangements, where goods are exchanged for money immediately and which are legally enforceable; loans, where money or goods are given to be repaid later, also legally enforceable; “professional” services, which are paid for but which involve personal attention and offer goods worth more than the exchanges set by the market; and, finally, pure benefactions, unmotivated generosity, to be repaid in gratitude, which are not legally enforceable.

A pilot who pulls me from the burning plane shows specific personal attention that he does not show me when he lands the plane safely in a strong wind. The safe landing benefited me, but it wasn’t the pilot’s aim to benefit me directly. He wanted everyone to get to Toronto safe and sound.