Written by James Buchanan in the early 1970s, “The Samaritan's Dilemma” is a pessimistic essay, marked by his author's negative views about the situation in Western societies at that time. Yet, the situation described in this essay also fits into Buchanan’s approach of cooperation and...

In this paper, we analyze the role of ethics and self-interest in Buchanan's explanation for pro-social behaviors. Our main argument is that, to Buchanan, ethics matters and is even necessary to explain pro-social behaviors — narrowly self-interested individuals do not behave pro-socially. We...

The goal of this paper is to study the consequences of non-reciprocal or unilateral altruism, that is, of altruism between individuals who have different concern for others. By contrast to what the literature usually shows — that unilateral altruists lead egoists to cooperate, that...