Editors’ introduction

Many writers and donors say that philanthropy is much harder than it looks. Seneca and Maimonides said this long ago, and the same conversation continues feverishly in contemporary debates about philanthropy. This sixth and final section is focused on the question of doing philanthropy well: what that might look like, how we can recognise it, whether contemporary philanthropists are ‘better’ than their predecessors, and what ‘better’ actually means in practice.