= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on Efficient Charity: Do Unto Others... - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (318)
I find I run into a conundrum on this question, because there is a bias I fear overcompensating for. I know as a human that I am biased to care more about the one person standing in front of me than those ten thousand people starving in India that I'll never meet, but I find it difficult to apply that information. I know that donating money to, say, those malaria nets, will probably save more lives than donating to, say, my local food pantry. By these arguments, it seems that that fact should trump all, and I should donate to those malaria nets.
However, I know that my local food pantry is an organization that feeds people who really need food, that it has virtually no overhead, and that there are children who would be malnourished without it. I also know that there are people all over the world who will contribute to malaria nets, but it is highly unlikely that anyone outside my community will contribute to my local food pantry.
I agree that it is vitally important to think carefully about how we spend our charity money, and I understand that the difficulty I am having with this topic is an indication that I need to think more deeply on it, but I keep coming up against two basic issues.
There is no simple metric for "most good done." What if one disease costs little to prevent death, but leaves survivors crippled, while another costs much more to prevent death but leaves people healthy? Should I donate to the first, and burden the communities with many cripples, or to the second, and let people die? With food and medical care costing more in the developed world, should I only donate to help those in the undeveloped world, where my dollar will go farther?
Should I feel guilty for donating money to public radio because it doesn't save children? No. My purpose in donating money to public radio is to keep my favorite shows on the air, and my donations do that very efficiently. Yes, the money could go to save children, but so could the money I use to pay my cable bill. I should perhaps not consider it as charity the way I do a donation that saves children, but I should not feel guilty. If I have $500 allocated for entertainment and $500 allocated for charity, perhaps it should come out of the former. However, it would be disingenuous to say that donations for more frivolous causes, such as saving artwork, could be donated to better causes, such as malaria nets, unless we also point out that what we spent on our fancy dinner or our new dress or going to the movies could also be thus allocated.
I agree and would go even further. Guilt is a terrible motivator and one that I would does not apply to anything involving charitable contributions. Well except for, say, mugging the aid workers to steal other's contributions. In such cases guilt serves an entirely different and somewhat useful role.
This is a simple question of "What do you want?" If you want to reduce malaria infections buy nets (probably). If you want to save a radio station save a radio station. If you have multiple things you want to prioritize them and do multiplications or approximations thereof.
Never let anyone make you feel guilty for doing things that achieve your goals. Even yourself.
Really? Suppose I want to murder my old primary-school teacher, in a final revenge for all that arithmetic homework. Should I not feel guilty?
If there's any part of that you should feel guilty about, it's having the goal in the first place, not what you do to achieve it. Feeling guilty about buying poison or sharpening a knife doesn't make much difference if you keep thinking that the murder itself is a good idea.
Well if you get right down to it, feeling guilty only makes it worse. You should just not have the goal in the first place.
The point is that listening to a radio station should be significantly below saving lives on your list of goals.
My point was that it is not any more wrong to spend money on public radio than to spend money on cable tv or a new iPod. Yes, in theory all my money not spent on food and shelter could go to saving children, but you are not going to do that, I am not going to do that, and no one either of us knows is going to do that.
Hence the 'if' at the beginning of my comment, though in practice I do see how guilt can be useful at that stage: Most people don't have complete control over their emotions or what they want, and given the choice between someone wanting to murder someone, feeling guilty about wanting that, and not doing it because they feel guilty about even considering it, and someone wanting to murder someone, deciding that that's a perfectly reasonable thing to want, and actually going through with it, the former is pretty clearly preferable. Not wanting to murder someone at all is preferable to either of those, but humans are pretty lousy at wanting what we want to want.