How Much Should We Each Give to Charity?

An eloquent case for giving nothing being an act of kindness is made in The Road to Hell by Michael Maren.

But feel free to carry out this following experiment on your own:

1) Have children.

2) Buy them *everything* for which they ever express a desire.

3) Reassure them that you will continue to do so indefinitely.

4) Teach them that they needn't study, they needn't work hard; because to do so has no effect on their standard of living.

5) Teach them that they need never save, because to do so just delays gratification.

I have a good idea what kind of people this regime will produce, but if you disagree, please feel free to try it with your own children.

This is what charity does. It subsidises exactly the behaviours that cause the problems it claims to combat. Whether its welfare or international welfare, subsidising incompetence and indolence is the surest guarantee that they will persist for ever.

The idea of eradicating poverty is also quite relative. Take a look at the United States Department of Health & Human Services definition of poverty and results from census information. I'm pretty sure that if you compared this standard of poverty against the impoverished of Africa ... well, you get the picture. So does a group receive MORE aid to compensate dollar for dollar? Or will remedy be considered on a relative basis?

And what of the people that are just above qualifying as impoverished? Say you've got a single mother, Geraldine, that has been busting her ass to make it in the world and provide for her child, but she's still just eeking by. Now Tanequa and Jamaal get a free handout from charity for nothing ... bam, they achieve what Geraldine works hard to do. So by nature of comparison, wouldn't Geraldine be motivated to quit trying?

And furthermore, as a non-impoverished person (say Geraldine is impoverished + $1000), if there was a mandate for donation by percentage ... how ironic would it be that Geraldine would have to donate some of her hard earned money to support Tanequa and Jamaal?

And while it's easy to judge "the slightest decrease in their standard of living" for the wealthy ... who are we to say that just because somebody has made a fantastic living for themself that they shouldn't enjoy all the perks of that luxury? Start scaling it back and think about how an extra 10-20% charity tax would impact your life.

In my case, I would have to quit my job because losing an extra 10-20% would make it economically unfeasible for me to even live in this area because I come out just a hint ahead of even on my salary. Having to sell a car or not being able to save for cool vacations (because of a charity tax) would mean that there is no reason to continue working at this job ... the effort wouldn't be worth the return. It would make sense for me to decrease my responsibility, take a pay cut and move to someplace ridiculously cheap. If this cycle were repeated by the middle class, all that charity money would start drying up pretty quick as the incentive to earn would be diminished.

Now am I saying charity is wrong? No. I have no problem with donating to causes of my own choosing. But there shouldn't be anybody standing over my shoulder telling me:

1. that I am required to
2. that it must match a particular quota of my income
3. that I should feel guilty that I have X while somebody else doesn't even have Y.

I remember this from my Ethics class in school as a hypothetical discussion on the line between morality and immorality. The logic went something like this:

1. Morality/immorality (Right & Wrong) exist, as defined by [insert moral system of your choice here].
2. Under that system, certain acts of commission are clearly Wrong (e.g., murder).
3. Likewise, certain acts of omission are also Wrong, such as not saving a child drowning in a shallow puddle (assuming you have the ability, you would not be endangering your own life to do so, etc).
4. Using the same logic as the drowning child example, it is also immoral for the wealthy to not attempt to save the impoverished around the world by charitable donation: they have the ability & the means to do so, it wouldn't endanger their own life (up to a point), etc.

Basically, it advocates redistribution of wealth as a moral imperative. I think the logic breaks down after #3 - while you could probably argue that a able-bodied passer-by that failed to save the drowning child was the (or at least a) proximate cause of said child's death, the same cannot be said of the non-charitable rich person when speaking of starving people in India or Sudan (or the U.S., for that matter). In these cases, there are likely to be a great many people who have a responsibility to care for the impoverished that is more immediate than, say, Bill Gates. For example: family/relatives, local government, and in some cases the poor person himself (that is, the responsibility to make better choices regarding one's own life).

In other words, I think the "drowning child" example holds up on its own, but the analogy bystander:drowning child doesn't equal rich person:poor person. The former makes a couple key assumptions, first that the child is in the puddle through no fault of their own and is unable to extract himself, and second that the bystander is the one with the greatest responsibility to help (there are no other bystanders that are closer to the puddle, or physically stronger, etc). Applying those same assumptions to the latter analogy, and you will find that they are not necessarily true, thus invalidating the argument.

As stated in Philosophy 101 by mikeforbes, the drowning child accusation is a bad analogy because there is a big difference between the immediate mental image of you alone on the road with no one else but the drowning child, and perhaps hearing about a drowning child on the news far away. Do you jump in the car and try to find the child? What if there are millions in all different locations?

The difference between me and Bill Gates and Warren Buffet is also quite vast. Bill and Warren have the means of creating there own foundation where I bet they know where every penny is going and how it will be spent. The fact that they wanted to do this is commendable, but at the same time I’m sure that there was no plan of them someday possibly starving or not having a place to live.

Someone once figured out that if you evenly distributed all the worlds’ wealth, each of us would get a check for about $20,000. Someone else hypothesized that in about 20 years (or less) it would more or less all be back in the same hands it once was. (They’re not getting mine! Oh yeah, I need groceries.) The point though is that if a mandatory charity tax was ever enforced they would have to keep raising it and raising it and people would still be poor and starving, including me and my own eventually.

A more constructive use of the money has to be found rather than just giving (or throwing) it away, whether it means relocating people to more fertile areas, or teaching them to subsist on their own, or some other ‘teach a man to fish’ scenario. I know some like Muhammad Yunus are doing that sort of thing with ‘micro loans’ that allow people to get an initial break without having to depend on charity for continual sustenance.

Global mandated charity begins to echo one of the doctrines of Marxism; “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Unfortunately we’ve all seen how that works, as human psychology drags down the abilities and ramps up the needs.

Soon, nothing gets done and everybody is still hungry.

It is interesting to me to note that Mr. Singer fails to live by the ethical standards he proclaims.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/27886.html

I would think a primary requirement of an ethical system would be that a person who thinks it is true would be willing to practice it. Apparently Singer's ethics fails that standard. He lives on far more than he recommends others do, pays for his mother's life support and generally publicly admits he fails his own ethical standards. Perhaps one ought to have a moral system that is able to be practiced?