Beneficence, Benevolence and Benefaction: Social Virtues in the History of Political Thought

A workshop organized with Peter Stacey (UCLA) on December 2026 as part of the AI B4 AI project.

On December 14 and 15, 2026, Pete Stacey (UCLA) and Daniel Lee (Berkeley) will convene a two-day workshop at UCLA, entitled “Beneficence, Benevolence and Benefaction: Social Virtues in the History of Political Thought.” This is the second such event dedicated to pursuing various aspects of the history of human sociality under the umbrella of a broader Livescu-sponsored initiative called “AI Before AI”. The two days will consist in round-table presentations and discussions conducted by a core group of 8 UCLA faculty, together with approximately the same number of graduates, postdocs, and faculty from UC Berkeley, Stanford, and University College, London (UCL). Participating members will provide local, national and international scholarly perspectives on the topics in question: they will be drawn from various departments at UCLA (History, PoliSci, English, SocGen), Berkeley, Stanford, and University College London (UCL); and their combined contributions will ensure a firmly interdisciplinary and transhistorical orientation to the direction of the group’s enquiry. The event is also designed to provide and strengthen academic relationships, offering graduates a chance to engage with the research of faculty at various stages of their career – and vice-versa – in a sustained, focused and friendly environment. Such forms of interaction are currently facing erosion from under-funding; and all too often placed under duress when they do occur in the form of demands for quick “deliverables”. The Livescu initiative is committed to reversing these tendencies.

In our first workshop – “Natural Sociability and Political Association: Grounding Contemporary Responses to AI in an Intellectual History of Human Sociality” –  we brought a group together to consider to what extent, if any, should we regard the kind of rationality required to ensure the successful government of states – and to guarantee the healthy operation of society within their individual and collective embrace – as the product of a distinctively and irreducibly human nature which is necessarily social. We thought this line of enquiry worth reprising in the face of a welter of claims about the potential for AI technology to supplant the place of human agents in the provision of some crucial political, social and cultural services – in the conduct of war, in the administration of healthcare, in the education of citizens, in the regulation of finance, in the generation of forms of art, and so on.

The second iteration of the workshop will continue to subject to serious and sustained scrutiny various parts of the conceptual framework which currently underpins contemporary responses to the social and political challenges posed by the introduction of AI into contemporary social life. And, furthermore, we continue to do so by searching through the intellectual history of a succession of political societies, from ancient Rome to modern Ireland, to illuminate various moral values which demonstrably continue to structure the way in which we currently construe those challenges. In particular, we are setting out to consider a distinctive set of human qualities which have been persistently linked to the provision of social and political goods within the setting of the state – qualities specifically signifying what it means to do good to others (beneficence); what such acts require in terms of wishing others well (benevolence), and what subset of those acts come at any one time to be particularly associated with the practice of public and private gift-giving (benefaction).

We are thus concerned with the intellectual history of what are often termed the “social virtues” Are these characteristic dispositions intrinsic and quintessentially human, or are they rather more the product of artifice than nature? And what about their vicious counterparts? We are necessarily concerned at the same time with malevolence in all its forms – and not only the kind embedded in a social agent’s sense of gratification. For, as Bernard Williams reminded us, we also need to reckon with that “pure and selfless malevolence… a malice transcending even the agent’s need to be around to enjoy the harm that it wills”.  Is this a distinctively human achievement, too? If we are to navigate our way around the ethics of AI – or assess the place of an “ethics of technology” – in contemporary social life, it makes sense to review with an historically critical eye some of the elements in our current answers to the question of what it takes to do good and evil – elements which we have inherited and which appear now to be under some duress.