CLICK BELOW TO REDISCOVER HUMANITY
A DECADE+ OF STORYTELLING POWERED BY THE BEST WRITERS ON THE PLANET

Responsible Giving – An Ethical Guide

File 20171128 28888 1b7k6wp.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1
Chancelor Bennett, better known as Chance The Rapper, is donating millions of dollars through his SocialWorks charity to shore up Chicago’s public schools.
AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast

Ted Lechterman, Stanford University McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society

Every holiday season, Americans find themselves showered with mailed appeals, beseeching phone calls and emotional pleas from Facebook friends seeking support for pet causes.

How should they sift through all these calls to give?

The conventional guidance, parroted as if it were gospel, goes something like: Be generous, follow your passions and do enough research to verify that a chosen charity won’t squander your money.

As a political philosopher who studies the ethics of philanthropy, I know it’s not that simple. In fact, there are at least five leading theories regarding the ethics of giving.

Scholars who study philanthropy and ponder why people should give to charity disagree on which is best. But they all agree that some critical reflection on how to give well is essential for making responsible decisions.

Sometimes the questions are clearer than the answers.
pathdoc/Shutterstock.com

Giving from the heart

I call the aforementioned common position, promulgated by the likes of financial pundit Ron Lieber, glamorous humanitarian Jean Shafiroff and Vanguard Charitable, a donor-advised fund managing US$7 billion slated for future gifts to charities, “compassionate philanthropy.”

It urges donors to give from the heart and posits that no one can tell you what makes one cause better than another.

Compassionate philanthropists see choosing a cause as a two-step process. First, ask yourself what you are most passionate about – be it your religious faith, hunger, the arts, your alma mater or cancer research.

Then, verify that it follows sound accounting and management practices.

While simple and flexible, this philosophy of giving ignores considerations like a cause’s moral urgency and suggests that the only thing that matters when being charitable is what’s on the giver’s mind. It also implies that a charity’s effectiveness is measured only by management or finances, which is arguably untrue.

There are at least four other schools of thought worth considering in light of the conventional approach’s shortcomings: traditional charity, effective altruism, reparative philanthropy and giving for social change.

This Vanguard Charitable video emphasizes a theory that donors should follow their passions when they choose causes to support.

Giving to the neediest

A more traditional giving philosophy stems from Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Rather than telling donors to simply follow their own passions, traditional charity stresses that suffering people demand urgent attention. It treats relieving that pain and meeting those needs as the highest charitable priority.

People who think this way, for example, might have trouble seeing how donors can justify supporting their local community theaters when so many Americans are experiencing hunger or homelessness and could use a free meal from a charity like the Salvation Army.

They might be most concerned with meeting the needs of the 769 million people on Earth who live on less than what Americans can purchase for $2 a day.

The Salvation Army, a Christian charity that assists people in need with free Thanksgiving turkeys and other support, quotes the Bible to illustrate its mission.

Giving mindfully

A more modern, introspective approach, advanced by the philosopher Peter Singer and embraced by young Silicon Valley billionaires like Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna, is known as “effective altruism.”

This school of thought instructs donors to do the most good they can in terms of global well-being based on verifiable cost effectiveness.

These givers argue that it’s better to give $40,000 to a carefully vetted charity in sub-Saharan Africa that can cure as many as 2,000 people of blindness than to give that same sum to a group that will spend it training a single guide dog for a blind person in the U.S.

Effective altruists reject the advice of transparency groups like Charity Navigator, which rates nonprofits according to the percentage of funds they spend conducting their work versus running their organizations. Instead, they heed organizations like GiveWell and Animal Charity Evaluators, which draw from scientific evidence and use statistical reasoning to select charities they believe will achieve the maximum impact per donated dollar.

The philosopher Peter Singer explained what effective altruism is in a TED talk.

Giving to heal and address injustices

Another way to think about making charitable donations more responsible is to see them as a form of reparations.

With economic inequality growing, government spending on public education declining and cutbacks taking a toll on social services, social injustices are proliferating.

The political philosopher Chiara Cordelli developed this perspective. She reasons that under current conditions, the rich are not entitled to all of their wealth.

After all, under more just circumstances, they would likely be earning less and taxed more. Therefore, the rich should not think of what they spend on charity as a matter of personal discretion, nor simply as something to make lives better, Cordelli argues.

Instead, she sees excessive wealth as a debt to be repaid unconditionally to repair crumbling public services. One way that donors can engage in reparative philanthropy is by supplementing the budgets of cash-strapped public schools, as Chancelor Bennett – the Grammy-winning Chance the Rapper – is doing in Chicago.

Chance the Rapper’s SocialWorks organization had raised $2.2 million for the Chicago public schools’ arts programs by September 2017.

Giving to overcome unjust policies

A fifth major school of thought advises donors to support groups challenging unjust institutions.

This perspective may sound radical or new but it isn’t. The 19th-century luminary John Stuart Mill and the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
both embraced it.

Its adherents acknowledge that dismantling the structural causes of poverty and discrimination is hard and can take decades or longer. But they observe that even small policy changes can do more for large numbers of people than even the biggest charitable initiatives.

Contemporary advocates of this view like Canadian philosopher Will Kymlicka suggest giving money to political parties, advocacy groups and community organizers.

Gifts to political parties and lobbyists may not sound like a conventional way to be charitable and are not currently tax-deductible. But many advocacy nonprofits, voter education initiatives and community empowerment groups are considered charities by U.S. law and eligible for tax-deductible donations.

An animated lecture of controversial philosopher Slavoj Zizek discusses the irony of giving to charity amid unjust policies.

Mixing and matching

Perhaps no single school of thought offers a perfect guide to responsible giving.

But the scholars who espouse these different positions all agree on one key point: Donors should reflect more on their giving decisions.

The ConversationWhether you settle on one school of thought or draw from several of them, thinking more about what it means to be charitable will help you give more responsibly.

Ted Lechterman, Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

THE CONVERSATION
THE CONVERSATIONhttps://theconversation.com/us
THE CONVERSATION US launched as a pilot project in October 2014. It is an independent source of news and views from the academic and research community, delivered direct to the public. Our team of professional editors work with university and research institute experts to unlock their knowledge for use by the wider public. We aim to help rebuild trust in journalism. All authors and editors sign up to our Editorial Charter. All contributors must abide by our Community Standards policy. We only allow authors to write on a subject on which they have proven expertise, which they must disclose alongside their article. Authors’ funding and potential conflicts of interest must also be disclosed. Failure to do so carries a risk of being banned from contributing to the site. The Conversation started in Melbourne Victoria and the innovative technology platform and development team is based in the university and research precinct of Carlton. Our newsroom is based in Boston but our team is part of a global newsroom able to share content across sites and around the world. The Conversation US is a non-profit educational entity.​

DO YOU HAVE THE "WRITE" STUFF? If you’re ready to share your wisdom of experience, we’re ready to share it with our massive global audience – by giving you the opportunity to become a published Contributor on our award-winning Site with (your own byline). And who knows? – it may be your first step in discovering your “hidden Hemmingway”. LEARN MORE HERE


TAKE STROLL INSIDE 360° NATION

TIME FOR A "JUST BE." MOMENT?

ENJOY OUR FREE EVENTS

BECAUSE WE'RE BETTER TOGETHER