Ethics and Charity
Chris Sabolcik | Area II
GSW, West Forsyth HS 2015
Quickchat with a partner
●To what extent (if any)
should those who are not in
need help those who are in
need?
●Should we have a duty to
help others in need?
Definitions of Ethics
● Moral principles that govern
a person’s or group’s
behavior
●1.1The moral correctness of specified
conduct:
◾the ethics of euthanasia
Definitions of Charity
Essential Questions to
Consider
●What is the global (and local) picture
of poverty?
●What is the nature of charity?
●Are some people obligated to help
those in need? Who are these people?
●What, if any, considerations should we
give to nationality, geography, and other
identities?
World Wealth Levels
Population by Nation Living
Below UN Threshold for Poverty
Published in The Atlantic, May 2014
Global Hunger Picture
Life Expectancy
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN/countries?display=graph - World Bank Life Expectancy 2010-14
Has the global poverty
epidemic subsided?
World poverty: Share of population living for, World Bank, Thomson
Datastream, DNB Markets, viewed 24th April, 2013.
Gini Coefficient
●The Gini coefficient is a number
between 0 and 1, where 0 corresponds
with perfect equality (all citizens have
the same level of wealth). . . and 1
corresponds with perfect inequality
(where one person has all the income-and everyone else has zero income)
Current and Projected
World Wealth Distribution
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.NAHC/count
ries/VE?display=graph
How Different is American Poverty when Compared to
World Poverty?
A Few Facts
●
1 billion children worldwide are living in poverty.
According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each
day due to poverty.
●80% of the world population lives on less than $10
a day. 1.1B people live on less than $1 USD a day.
●Preventable diseases like diarrhea and
pneumonia take the lives of 2 million children a
year who are too poor to afford proper treatment.
●1/4 of all humans live without electricity —
approximately 1.6 billion people.
●http://www.unicef.org/socialpolicy/index_45357.html
What is the Nature of
Charity?
●Types of charity
◾Time, money, training programs
●How does motivation play a part in acts of
charity?
◾Obligation vs. Altruism
◾Religious duty vs. Intrinsic satisfaction
●Intersection of Government and Charity
Americans and Our Habits of
Charity
●Total
charitable contributions by individuals,
corporations, and foundations was an estimated
$298.42 billion in 2011, up 4 percent in current dollars
and 0.9 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars from a
revised total of $286.91 billion in 2010, according to a
report from the Giving USA Foundation and the Center
on Philanthropy at Indiana University.
●In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with
earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average
1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison,
Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in
the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their
income.
Normative vs. Positive
Analysis
●Normative:
how things ought to be, how we should
value them; which things are good and bad, which
actions are right and wrong
●Positive: how things are in the real world;
empirical, fact-based
●We
will be thinking about charity in a normative
manner.
Are We Obligated to Help
Those in Need?
YES!
●Abrahamic Religions
●Secular Morality - Peter
Singer
Jewish Perspectives on
Charity
●"Tzedakah"
is the Hebrew word for the acts that
we call "charity" in English: giving aid, assistance,
and money to the poor and needy or to other
worthy causes.
●Derived from the Hebrew for righteousness,
justice, or fairness.
●“In Judaism, giving to the poor is not viewed as a
generous, magnanimous act; it is simply an act of
justice and righteousness, the performance of a
duty, giving the poor their due.”
Jewish Perspectives
●Certain
kinds of tzedakah are considered more meritorious than
others. The Talmud describes these different levels of tzedakah,
and Maimonides organized them into a list. The levels of charity, from the
least meritorious to the most meritorious, are:
●Giving begrudgingly
●Giving less than you should, but giving it cheerfully.
●Giving after being asked
●Giving before being asked
●Giving when you do not know the recipient's identity, but
the recipient knows your identity
●Giving when you know the recipient's identity, but the
recipient does not know your identity
●Giving when neither party knows the other's identity
●Enabling the recipient to become self-reliant
Christian Perspectives
●“Sell
your possessions, and give to the needy. Provide
yourselves with moneybags that do not grow old, with a
treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no
thief approaches and no moth destroys.” Luke 12:33
●“Jesus looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts
into the offering box, and he saw a poor widow put in
two small copper coins. And he said, “Truly, I tell you,
this poor widow has put in more than all of them. For
they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out
of her poverty put in all she had to live on.” Luke 21:1-4
Christian Perspectives
●“Each
one must give as he has decided in his
heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God
loves a cheerful giver.” 2 Corinthians 9:7
●“But if anyone has the world's goods and sees his
brother in need, yet closes his heart against him,
how does God's love abide in him?” 1 John 3:17
Islamic Perspectives
●Pillar of Zakat (1 of the 5)
●“And be steadfast in prayer;
practice regular
charity; and bow down your heads with those who
bow down (in worship). ”
●“Those who (in charity) spend of their goods by
night and by day, in secret and in public, have their
reward with their Lord: on them shall be no fear,
nor shall they grieve.”
Further Religious Support
●Buddhism
and Hinduism = Daana, giving and
expecting nothing in return, regardless of recipient
of aid
Peter Singer
●Australian
philosopher
●Animal Rights
●Utilitarianism
●“The
Singer Solution
to World Poverty”
(1999)
Singer’s Basic Argument
●Premise
1. If we can prevent something bad from
happening without sacrificing anything of comparable
moral importance, then we ought to do so.
●Premise
2. Death by starvation is bad.
●Premise
3. We can prevent many people from dying of
starvation by sacrificing our luxuries, which are not as
important.
____________________________________
●Conclusion: We ought to prevent people from dying of
starvation by sacrificing our luxuries.
*outlined by James Rachels in The Right Thing To Do,
p.154
Thought Experiments
●Bob
and his Bugatti
Thought Experiments
●Child
Drowning in Pond
What We* All Can Do
●Obligation and Duty to Sacrifice Luxuries
●Give difference of (income – necessities) to
overseas aid organizations
◾Oxfam and UNICEF
●American household with income of $50,000
◾About $30,000 a year spent on necessities
◾Donate rest ($20,000) to charities
●American household with income of $100,000
◾About $30,000 a year spent on necessities
◾Donate rest ($70,000) to charities
◾*assuming you have more than you need
From Singer
●“We
seem to lack a sound basis for drawing a clear
moral line between Bob’s situation and that of any
reader of this article with $200 to spare who does not
donate it to an overseas aid agency. These readers
seem to be acting at least as badly as Bob was acting
when he chose to let the runaway train hurtle toward
the unsuspecting child.”
●“When Bob first grasped the dilemma that faced him
as he stood by that railway switch, he must have
thought how extraordinarily unlucky he was to be
placed in a situation in which he must choose between
the life of an innocent child and the sacrifice of most of
his savings. But he was not unlucky at all. We are all in
that situation.”
Doctrine of Negative
Responsibility
●People are responsible not only for
outcomes that they deliberately cause,
but also for outcomes that they
knowingly fail to prevent.
●Legitimate?
Fair argument?
=
Are We Obligated to Help
Those in Need?
NO
●Ayn Rand – “The Virtue of Selfishness”
●Oscar Wilde – “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”
Ayn Rand
●Philosopher,
novelist
●Atlas Shrugged,
The Fountainhead,
Anthem
●Objectivism
Altruism
●What
is the relationship between altruism and
charity?
●What is the relationship between altruism and selfinterest?
Some Premises
●The
ultimate moral value and obligation for an
individual is his/her own well-being.
●From this, we see the primary importance of selfinterestedness.
●Altruism is the obligation that people have to help
each other.*
●If helping each other conflicts with self-interest
(which often it does), then we reject altruism.
*Altruism =! kindness. Kind acts can be committed
in the service of self-interest
Against Compulsory
Altruism
●“The ethics of altruism has created the
image of the brute, as its answer, in order to
make men accept two inhuman tenets:
●(a) that any concern with one's own
interests is evil, regardless of what these
interests might be, and
●(b) that the brute's activities are in fact to
one's own interest (which altruism enjoins
man to renounce for the sake of his
neighbors). What concerns us here is
altruism's default in the field of ethical
The Objectivist Ethic
●“The Objectivist ethics holds that the actor
must always be the beneficiary of his action and
that man must act for his own rational selfinterest. But his right to do so is derived from his
nature as man and from the function of moral
values in human life-and, therefore, is
applicable only in the context of a rational,
objectively demonstrated and validated code of
moral principles which define and determine his
actual self-interest.”
“The Virtue of Selfishness”
●“The fact that a man has no claim on
others (i.e., that it is not their moral duty
to help him and that he cannot demand
their help as his right) does not preclude
or prohibit good will among men and
does not make it immoral to offer or to
accept voluntary, non-sacrificial
assistance.”
Against Compulsory
Altruism
●“Altruism
declares that any action taken for the
benefit of others is good, and any action taken for
one's own benefit is evil. Thus the beneficiary of an
action is the only criterion of moral value-and so
long as that beneficiary is anybody other than
oneself, anything goes. Hence the appalling
immorality, the chronic injustice, the grotesque
double standards, the insoluble conflicts and
contradictions that have characterized human
relationships and human societies throughout
history, under all the variants of the altruist ethics.”
“The Virtue of Selfishness”
●“My views on charity are very simple. I
do not consider it a major virtue and,
above all, I do not consider it a moral
duty. There is nothing wrong in helping
other people, if and when they are
worthy of the help and you can afford to
help them. I regard charity as a
marginal issue. What I am fighting is the
idea that charity is a moral duty and a
Rand’s Conclusions
●“The proper method of judging when
or whether one should help another
person is by reference to one’s own
rational self-interest and one’s own
hierarchy of values: the time, money or
effort one gives or the risk one takes
should be proportionate to the value of
the person in relation to one’s own
happiness.”
Rand Summary
●Libertarian
●Capitalist
●Egoist
●A
right to only our own bodies and its creations
gives us a right not to intervene in the affairs of
others out of respect to their autonomy.
●You can still give to charity, but you should not be
morally obligated to do so.
Oscar Wilde
●Novelist,
playwright,
poet, essayist,
socialite
●The Soul of Man
Under Socialism
(1891)
●Marxist views of
charity
“The Soul of Man Under Socialism”
“The wealthy try to solve the problem of
poverty, for instance, by keeping the
poor alive; or, in the case of a very
advanced school, by amusing the poor.”
“The Soul of Man Under
Socialism”
●But
this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the
difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct
society on such a basis that poverty will be
impossible. … Just as the worst slave-owners were
those who were kind to their slaves, and so
prevented the horror of the system being realised
by those who suffered from it, and understood by
those who contemplated it… They do so on the
ground that such charity degrades and
demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity
creates a multitude of sins.
Immorality of Charity in
Capitalism
“There is also this to be said. It is
immoral to use private property in order
to alleviate the horrible evils that result
from the institution of private property. It
is both immoral and unfair.”
Attitudes of the Poor
●…Charity
they feel to be a ridiculously inadequate
mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole,
usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt
on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over
their private lives. Why should they be grateful for
the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They
should be seated at the board, and are beginning
to know it.
Wilde Summary
●Charity
prevents the realization of an unjust
economic system
●It is immoral to assuage the problems that come
from private property with private property
●Charity “demoralizes and degrades”
●Cure the disease, don’t treat the symptoms
Where do you fall?
●If you do feel that you do
have a responsibility to help
those in need, then we have
a few more considerations.
Does Geography Matter?
●Do
we have obligations to help Americans before
those abroad?
●Dunbar’s number/Monkeysphere (150)
●Which social spheres should we consider when
we donate?
Do intentions matter?
●Does
the U.S. tax system and “write-offs” for
charitable donations skew the morality of giving?
◾Is the person who donates strictly for the write-off less ethical
than the person who wants to feel good about himself?
●Should
the person who donates to the arts be
considered less ethical than the person who
donates to charity relief?
●How do we prioritize the needs of others?
◾Genocide vs. Famine vs. Women’s Rights vs. Education vs.
The Arts
Is it ethical to give with strings
attached?
●Governments
and some charities sometimes attach
conditions to gifts of aid.
◾ “Let us remember that the main purpose of American aid is not to
help other nations but to help ourselves.”
President Richard Nixon, 1968
●Does it make a difference to the ethics of conditional
giving if the conditions are imposed to ensure that the
gift produces maximum benefit?
●Or if imposing the conditions on a chaotic or corrupt
country is the only way that the poor will receive any
benefit at all?
●Should we consider
◾ Autonomy?
◾ Self-Determinationof the recipient
◾ Human rights and/or politics?
Further Questions to Ask
●What
is the individual’s role in determining viable
philanthropic contributions?
●How can we shift or reconstruct social patterns in
order to make charity obsolete?
●Is it necessary to have poor people in order to
have rich people?