Charitable Giving Philosophies
LIFE STUFF
“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”
- Winston Churchill -
There are various giving philosophies that motivate people to try to use their money to better the world and offer resources to others who are "less fortunate." Giving appears to be a timeless human instinct, as the desire to better communities, elevate social standing, and show sympathy for people who are suffering has existed for as long as records can be found. Compassionate giving has been urged by major religions and philosophers, and the testimonies of the formerly underprivileged who have fashioned a better life thanks to the helping hand of a generous soul, inspires even greater giving. We will examine at five giving ideologies and how they affect our world today.
Giving from the Heart: This is probably the most common charitable giving philosophy. Compassionate philanthropy entails selecting an organization because you care about its mission and believe it does good work. This give-from-the-heart belief implies that determining the "right" organization to donate to is highly personal. Compassionate philanthropists may donate to their local animal shelter because they adopted their family pet from there, or their alma mater's scholarship fund because they want to help current students, just as they were assisted in their day. While these organizations and causes may not have the greatest impact on people or animals, the compassionate philanthropist feels good knowing that their donation is going to a cause near and dear to their heart. While simple and adaptable, this charitable philosophy ignores factors such as a cause's moral urgency and suggests that the only thing that matters when being charitable is what is on the giver's mind.
Traditional Charity: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have more traditional giving philosophies. Rather than telling donors to simply follow their own passions, traditional charity emphasizes the importance of providing immediate assistance to those in need. It considers relieving that pain and meeting those needs to be the most important charitable priority, and assisting those in extreme poverty is often considered the most urgent of these priorities. Often times these organizations attempt to directly address the problems of the poor, providing immediate food and shelter to the homeless, (or longer term housing solutions such as Habitat for Humanity), and medical services to those in need. There may be an element of proselytizing, such as “missions” organized to other countries, and a focus on holiday or annual organizing, such as Toys for Tots. Often times people are encouraged to give directly to their religious organization, which then organizes and dispenses the funds to various projects.
Effective Altruism: Effective altruists reject the advice of transparency organizations such as Charity Navigator, which rates nonprofits based on the percentage of funds spent on doing good versus running their organizations. Instead, they follow the advice of organizations such as GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators, which use scientific evidence and statistical reasoning to select charities that they believe will have the greatest impact per donated dollar. Having the most direct significant impact, such as saving lives with cheap malaria nets vs investing in expensive and long-term cancer research is a hallmark of effective altruism.
Reparative Philanthropy: Another way to consider making charitable contributions more responsible is to consider them a form of reparation. Social injustices are on the rise as economic inequality rises, government spending on public education falls, and budget cuts wreak havoc on social services. Chiara Cordelli, a political philosopher, developed this viewpoint. She argues that the wealthy are not entitled to all of their wealth under current conditions. After all, under more equitable conditions, they would most likely earn less and be taxed more. Instead, she sees excess wealth as a debt that must be repaid unconditionally in order to repair crumbling public services. Donors can engage in reparative philanthropy by supplementing the budgets of cash-strapped public schools, supporting needle exchange programs or other forms of drug rehabilitation and treatment, and building housing for the homeless.
Reparative philanthropy directly addresses systemic failings within the existing power structures. Take the opioid epidemic for example. Members of the Sackler family, who are at the heart of the country's deadly opioid crisis, have won broad immunity from opioid lawsuits involving their privately held company Purdue Pharma and its OxyContin medication. The Sacklers, who admit no wrongdoing and estimate they earned more than $10 billion from opioid sales, will remain one of the world's wealthiest families. Since there is no reliable structure for corporations or wealthy individuals to face justice and directly pay for their crimes against the nation’s most vulnerable, the individual can donate directly to repair some of the damage done by a failed system.
Giving for Social Change: A fifth major school of thought advises donors to support organizations that challenge unjust institutions. This viewpoint may appear to be radical or novel, but it is not. Both John Stuart Mill, a 19th-century luminary, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. embraced it. Its followers recognize that addressing the structural causes of poverty and discrimination is difficult and can take decades or longer. However, they observe that even minor policy changes can benefit a greater number of people than even the most generous charitable initiatives.
Contemporary proponents of this viewpoint, such as Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka, advocate for funding political parties, advocacy groups, and community organizers. Gifts to political parties and lobbyists may not seem like a traditional way to be charitable, and they are currently not tax-deductible. However, many advocacy nonprofits, voter education initiatives, and community empowerment groups are recognized as charities under US law and are eligible for tax-deductible donations. The main argument made by this charitable philosophy is that changing the fundamental formalized structures that keep people locked in a cycle of poverty and despair will, over time, do the most good.
A one-person household in the United States earning more than $58,000 is in the top 1% of the world, even after accounting for global cost differences. Because a dollar means far more to the less fortunate than it does to those who live in such luxury, effective altruists usually donate a large portion of their income. And, in order to maximize the value of that dollar, they look for causes that can save the most lives in the shortest amount of time - a theme that is central to the philosophy. To maximize the efficacy of our dollars effective altruists argue we must more often aim them overseas, where the value of the dollar goes further. EA’s also focus on causes that aim at preventing human extinction. Saving the most lives - even non-human lives, and saving humanity from complete annihilation are the focuses of the hard-core effective altruist.
Effective altruism is a modern phenomenon, however its roots trace back to a influential 1972 article presented by Peter Singer, an Australian philosopher, entitled "Famine, Affluence, and Morality." Singer posed an argument that is now the movement’s equivalent of a biblical story: Pretend that you’re walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning, with no one else around. Most people would agree that you should save the child, even it if means ruining your clothes. Children, he points out, are “drowning in ponds” all over the world — 5.3 million people younger than 5 died in 2018, most from tragically preventable causes.
The essential argument is that as long as saving a person does not put your life or health at risk, you are under a moral obligation to do it - regardless of that person’s relationship to you. He points out that there may be some minor inconveniences, such as getting wet and muddy and having to change your clothes, but the disparity between inconvenience and the magnitude of a life saved should make the plunge into the pond a no-brainer. Requiring that the child have some connection to you in some way in order to trigger your compassion, is the moral failing in this scenario.
Singer contends that if it does not cost too much to "prevent something very bad from happening" — regardless of where it occurs in the world — you are obligated to do so. "It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away," he writes. Singer is widely admired and occasionally despised. He is a bioethics professor at Princeton University and the founder of The Life You Can Save, an organization that helps vet the most effective global charities. He is well-known for his writings on animal rights and global poverty eradication, as well as his controversial views on the sanctity of life.
The criteria for EA is that the causes should address large-scale suffering that is being ignored and is avoidable with money and effort. However, this can come across as condescending to other types of giving philosophies. Consider someone who donates $40,000 to train a guide dog for a blind person. Very generous and altruistic, you might say. True, but an Effective Altruist will point out for that amount, you could help several hundred blind people in a developing country receive trachoma surgery, a low-cost procedure that allows them to see. An effective altruist gives to what has the most effect - they might even point out the positive ripple effect sponsoring several hundred trachoma surgeries would serve - people who can see again can go to work, enhancing their families lives and raising more people out of poverty.
Global poverty is the movement's bread and butter. GiveWell, the movement’s main charity evaluator, crunches the numbers and makes a very rough estimate that, for instance, a donation of $2,300 to the Malaria Consortium’s seasonal malaria chemoprevention program — which gives antimalarial drugs to children younger than 5 during peak malaria transmission season in Africa — will save one life. GiveWell recommends charities such as the Against Malaria Foundation, which provides bed nets to protect against mosquitoes in African countries, and GiveDirectly, which sends money to poor people in Africa to use however they see fit.
Many of EA's arguments appear to be based on the idea that need and suffering can be reduced to an algorithm. It comes as no surprise that the majority of EAers are white males working in scientific or engineering fields. While it is true that most people sympathize with the needy, the White Savior Complex is the other side of the coin - the helping hand is simply a condescending and paternalistic extension of colonial victimization. Charitable aid can cripple local economies from competitively offering the product or service directly - and so the cycle of poverty and the foreign savior continues. The destructive nature of “forced giving” has been well documented, an example being the excess of donated clothing that pours into Africa each year. This excess (unasked for and unwanted) clothing is essentially just shoveled into landfills, and completely suppresses local textile industry.
Also, charitable giving dollars often strongly correlate to the news coverage that is being received on the subject, or the most recent and immediate disaster. Yet many issues are ongoing, and rebuilding happens for years after natural disasters or catastrophes. It is natural to respond to an urgent need, yet the unpredictable and waning public support as the media moves on to the next big tragedy means that charities always seem to be reacting to new situations, with less attention focused on underlying causes and prevention methods.
Spending more money seems to be the only solution proposed - yet wealth inequality and extreme poverty is the true problem. Broken systems, debt, imperialism, corruption, and power inequality are not directly addressed by Effective Altruism, most often because of the “Effective” part of the philosophy. It takes enormous amounts of money, time and political pressure to change a system or government, and the argument is that technically the most effective use of your dollars in terms immediate effect on a life would be to save a life from imminent destruction.
In the end, effective altruism does not change the status quo and does not advocate for radical change in the world. It simply improves an otherwise broken system. It is arrogant to assume that charity is the solution and that we can 'give' our way out of problems that we have contributed to. It is also sometimes impossible to predict how significant any given donation will be. Systemic change in order to improve the most number of lives overall, seems dizzyingly complicated, with people naturally shying away from appearing “too political” in order not to offend or alienate a wide circle of friends, family, and coworkers. However, enacting systemic changes to alleviate poverty and provide educational, medical, and economic opportunities to low-income people remains arguably the most effective action that could really “do the most good” long-term.
Almost all charitable organizations admit that it’s the horrifying consequences of extreme poverty that they seek to address, and that many problems could be prevented by addressing the root cause of human suffering such famine, disease, war, and corruption. Poverty breeds the vicious predation of humankind against each other, as those who have little in the way of resources and support fight an existential battle for survival amongst themselves - while the wealthy are sheltered from the evil consequences of their resource-hoarding and greed. The limitations poverty imposes on a populace breeds violence, ignorance, and the inability to significantly improve living conditions for the poor (which are the majority), due to the corruption of government and charitable organizations for their own ends by the wealthy.
Wealth-inequality seems to breed an ever-growing gap between what is possible for the poor compared to what is possible for the rich. The rich seek to give, but the poor might be gratified if more people heeded the words of Maimonides, a medieval Torah philosopher, as he said: “Anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellow man, either by a considerable gift or a sum of money or by teaching him a trade or by putting him in the way of business so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is the highest step and summit of charity's golden ladder.”
Arguments Against Effective Altruism
“When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.”
- Unknown -
