In The Montréal Review (December 2025), Laurent Marbacher and I published a long-form essay titled “Doing Good Face-to-Face or Through Philanthropy?”, based on — and adapted from — a chapter of The Caring Company.
The essay explores a fundamental question at the intersection of business, morality, and human nature: why do large-scale philanthropic ambitions so often fail to generate genuine care, while face-to-face, local forms of responsibility prove far more effective?
Drawing on evolutionary psychology, moral philosophy, literature, and history — from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky to Levinas, Murdoch, and contemporary evolutionary science — the piece challenges utilitarian and “effective altruism” approaches to doing good. It argues instead that humans are wired for local, concrete, relational care, and that attempts to abstract care into distant, anonymous causes often weaken, rather than strengthen, moral responsibility.
This reflection directly informs the book’s core argument: that companies contribute most powerfully to society — and perform best in the long run — when they orient their core activities toward caring unconditionally for the people and communities they interact with directly, rather than outsourcing “doing good” to philanthropy.
👉 Read the full essay here.