When Should We Give To Charity?

To help think through our moral obligations around charitable giving, you can step through the somewhat-famous "drowning child" thought experiment here. It starts with a simple scenario: you pass by a pond where you see a child is drowning - do you have a moral obligation to try to save the child? And then it expands from there to the conclusion that we should give more to charity. I just have one issue... The final part of the thought experiment (on that site, at least) implies that we have an obligation not just to give but to do so "within the next few days". Why? Suppose I make $1 every day that I can give to charity. Why would it be better to give $1 every day than to give $365 once a year?

The timing is different than in the drowning child scenario because saving a drowning child today does not in any way prevent me from saving a different child tomorrow. But with donating money, a dollar I donate today is a dollar I cannot donate tomorrow. And since not all charitable opportunities are equal, we should be picky about where we donate our money. So IMO the thought experiment should encourage people to at least take the time needed to choose the right charity.

But even if you have figured out which charities to support (shout out), what is the best frequency for giving? I don't know. I'm torn between a few options:

Once a year. AFAIK, this is most common. The main benefit is that you can give in larger amounts at a time, and this page by Against Malaria Foundation (rated #1 most effective charity by GiveWell, Giving What We Can, and The Life You Can Save) helps explain why that matters. Basically, you can minimize transaction/overhead costs and therefore can do more good per dollar given.

Once a month. For the same overall amount, this may not be as efficient as annual giving. However, if you just plan on giving annually, there's a good chance you will find an excuse to spend some of that before the year is up or keep more of it for yourself when the time comes to write that check. So, when considering the human element rather than just financial efficiency, you may end up giving much more overall if you give more frequently.

Right before you die. Yep. Just save/invest everything you can and only give to charity at the end of your life. This suggestion shocked me at first, but there's a pretty good case for it. Robin Hanson makes this argument, and you can read a summary here. Basically, if you invest X dollars throughout your life and then donate it just before you die, you will have given much more overall than if you gave it sooner. And the only reason he suggests giving it before you die is because giving after you die is "legally complicated".

That idea hurts my brain; I can't decide what my opinion should be. By the same logic, if it weren't for the "legal complications", should nobody currently give anything to charity as long as "the real rate of return on investment (is) higher than the growth rate"? That seems absurd, but yet is it really that different from the reason why giving annually is better than giving daily? AGH! I think this also points to one of the most difficult problems with utilitarianism in general: how to value the long-run versus the short-run.

The most convincing argument I've seen against Robin Hanson's viewpoint is this post by GiveWell. Basically, there are good reasons to think that world poverty is currently shrinking at an incredibly fast pace. So although we may be able to give more money overall by investing everything now, the current charitable opportunities actually provide much more bang-per-buck than will likely exist at the end of our life. You can find Robin Hanson's take on that here.

I'm beginning to wonder if I should just accept the uncertainty of all this and split my approach equally between the three giving-intervals I listed above. I'm interested in anyone else's thoughts.

Torture vs. Dust Specks

I really like hypothetical moral dilemmas. One of my favorites is the "torture vs. dust specks" scenario from here. I'll try to give a simpler explanation:

We can agree that suffering is bad, and less suffering is preferable to more suffering. So think of the worst possible amount of suffering: torture. And think of the smallest possible amount of suffering: in this scenario it's a single dust speck getting into your eye. And then answer this question: should you prefer for one person to be tortured for 50 years, or a bazillion people get a single dust speck in their eye? If "bazillion" is not high enough, then just keep increasing the number. Should there be a point where one person's torture becomes preferable?

Almost everyone, myself included, intuitively prefer dust specks; most people in the comments of the blog I linked above did. But the author thinks it should be obvious that torture is better, and that anyone who disagrees just isn't being rational. After all, if we compare less extreme differences in pain, we usually would say there's a point where a smaller amount of pain on an extremely high number of people would be worse than higher pain on one person. So why would there be an arbitrary pain difference where that arithmetic no longer applies?

Because people are so uncomfortable with accepting this, I've seen this used as an argument against utilitarianism, but I think there's a utilitarian case to be made for choosing dust specks. If you are a hedonistic utilitarian, then there must be a point where torture is preferable because you simply "add up" the pain and choose the lesser value. But you can justify dust specks as a preference utilitarian, where what's best is what maximizes people's preferences. In that case, you don't have to assign a single value to all amounts of pain and add them up. You could think of it instead in terms of what one person would prefer: to be tortured for 50 years or have dust specks in your eye for a bazillion-or-more years. Human preferences are not necessarily "rational" or "mathematical". So if people would prefer a bazillion dust specks to 50 years of torture, then the dust specks are the right answer.

Flexitarianism

People often act funny when you mix morality and food. I'm sure almost everyone knows people who have become vegans or vegetarians for a while and then given up on it. And I'm sure almost everyone has noticed how people can get weird when discussing the ethics of it (I've noticed many carnivorous folks seem to get mad just when thinking about it). My own views lead me to be a flexitarian (to varying degrees), which basically just means to go somewhere in between vegetarianism and the typical American diet of eating as much meat as we want.

I think almost anyone will agree that, to some extent, the suffering of animals matters. Most don't think the life of an ant is of any moral significance, but we do agree that it's horrible for someone to torture a dog. This is easy to justify: we believe suffering is bad, and we also believe that, when a dog is suffering, that sensation is similar to our sensation of suffering, so we can empathize with a dog. But we don't believe an ant really experiences "suffering" as we know it. However, people rarely come to a completely consistent moral view of animal suffering. I can't think of any good reason why we should care to reduce the suffering of a dog but not care at all about the suffering animals in factory farms.

But there are reasons to be skeptical of veganism/vegetarianism as a moral necessity:

• In many times and places, people have no other choice but to eat animals.
• There are potential health concerns with eating no animal products.
• Nature is more cruel than people often realize, and death is inevitable. If we kill an animal quickly, that is likely better than their inevitable natural death (disease, starvation, eaten by a predator that won't care about ending their life quickly, etc.). That's why people euthanize their pets.
• Even if you're a vegan, the very act of farming vegetables leads to a lot of animal suffering and deaths.

However, with the rise of factory farming, where animals sometimes live their whole life unable to even walk around, have to be pumped full of antibiotics everyday to stay alive, and are made so heavy that their legs can snap, there's plenty of reason to be concerned with the impact of our food choices even if you don't think there's anything intrinsically wrong with eating meat.

But I think people have a strange tendency to take an all-or-none approach to moralizing our consumption of animal products. When they seriously think about what it must be like to be a pig in a factory farm, they feel bad for the pig. But they also have reasons to think not eating any animal products isn't necessary or practical, so they just give up on the entire idea of ethical eating. And some people just instantly reject the idea, and I think that's usually for reasons along the lines of something that 80000hours recently posted: "we mostly have a strong desire, arguably a need, to believe that we are good, moral people. This means that if you present someone with a piece of information which seems to contradict that belief, they’re not going to like it very much."

But defensiveness, and our strange tendency to think in an all-or-none way, are not good ways to base our decisions. Even if we don't think vegetarianism is necessary, people should at least be able to agree that we should make some effort to eat less animal products for one or more of the following reasons:

• If animal suffering matters at all, then an act that leads to less suffering is morally preferable to an act that leads to more suffering.
• Most medical institutions that study healthy eating recommend a plant-based diet along the lines of a flexitarian/Mediterranean diet.
• Eating plants is a more efficient use of the world's resources than eating animals. We can use land/water/resources to grow plants and eat directly. But for eating animals, we do that plus more land/water/resources to raise the animals, feed them those plants, then eat the animals. The fact that we don't see this reflected more in the price of meat is largely due to weird policies and subsidies from our government.
• Eating meat leads to more pollution than eating plants (largely for the reasons above). Ruminants in particular (like cows and goats) are basically methane factories.

So, combining everything above, maybe it'd be most helpful to think of our consumption of animals more along the lines that we think about giving to charity. Most agree that, if you are well-off, you should give some of your money to charity. We admire, not criticize for not doing more, someone who gives 10% of their money to charity. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be more admirable to give 20%. Similarly, we should admit that our choices of what to eat have a variety of effects on the well-being of others. We should try to make choices to reduce suffering rather than increase it, whether by just eating less animal products, choosing chicken over beef more often out of environmental concerns, or choosing to buy free-range meat more often than factory-farmed meat. And like varying degrees of giving to charity, we can view eating no meat as more admirable than eating some meat without implying that people who eat some meat are evil. We are instinctive meat eaters, and it's admirable to resist our impulses to any degree out of concern for the consequences of our actions.

However, also similar to charity, if I'm being honest I have to say the main reason I'm a flexitarian rather than a vegetarian is selfishness. Eating good food is my favorite thing ever, and I really like many types of meat and dairy products. But the fact is that all of our actions are a result of an awkward compromise between the extent of our concern for others and the extent of our selfishness. I'm too selfish to only make eating decisions based off concern for others, but it's not hard to usually order tofu instead of meat if I want Thai food, paneer if I want Indian, falafel if I want Greek, or black beans & guacamole when I go to Chipotle. When buying food to make at home, it's not hard to usually have PB&J over turkey sandwiches, or marinara sauce over meat sauce, or eggs from free-range chickens over factory-farmed chickens. And I think everyone can, and should, take those things into consideration.

Working vs. Volunteering

I think, as tools for altruism, work (compared to volunteering) is very underrated. Our main criteria for judging the "goodness" of a deed should be its impact; if you can choose between saving 1 life or 2 lives, generally saving 2 lives is better. But we have preconceived notions that cloud that judgment when comparing "work" and "volunteering". We generally look down on "workaholics", but it may be that, if you decide to devote a couple of hours of your free time per week toward a good cause, it would be best to just spend that time at your job.

That may seem counter-intuitive at first, but consider the hypothetical person "Bob". At Bob's job, he makes pills that cure cancer. It takes him an hour to make a single pill. He has decided he wants to be a better person, so he considers spending an hour a week volunteering for a good cause. In his area, he could clean dishes at a soup kitchen or organize donated canned foods. Clearly, he would do the most good by spending that hour making another pill that will cure someone's cancer. He shouldn't believe there's something special about "volunteering" in and of itself that would make it more virtuous than curing someone's cancer.

Nobody's job is quite as good for the world as "Bob's" (I don't think?). But in general, people tend to forget that your job does good for society. The fact that someone is willing to pay you for what you do shows that it's valuable. And most of your necessities, entertainment, and luxuries come through the time someone else puts in at their job. It's good to volunteer at a place that gives canned food to hungry families. But it's also good to be the farmer or manufacturer that are just as (if not more) essential in making that happen. It would be sad for them to feel like what they are doing isn't important just because we don't value the impact of working the way we value the impact of volunteering.

Another overlooked aspect is, in addition to judging the impact of what you are doing, you have to consider how effectively you would do it. And we are usually relatively good at what we do for a living. Plus, the fact that we already spend a lot of time at our job can make it such that it's more clear how to spend an extra hour in an efficient way. I imagine many charities have a hard time figuring out how to put people who only volunteer for an hour every now and then to good use. I know my first hour of work after a vacation is not very productive.

A common objection to the idea of "altruistic over-working" is probably that you can benefit financially from working an extra hour. First, for many on a salary, that's not necessarily the case, though it may lead to better raises/bonuses in the future. But making money does not cancel whatever impact is done by the work itself (think of hypothetical Bob making cancer-curing pills). Additionally, having more money gives you even more opportunities for altruism by putting that money toward a good cause. And even if you just spend the money on something for yourself, one person's spending is another person's income. Self-sacrificing deeds are definitely admirable, but that doesn't mean we should look down on win-win situations.

I'm not suggesting volunteering is not good, and there are definitely many cases where a person does more good from volunteering than working. It just depends on your job, your talents, and your volunteering opportunities. But... if you want to spend some of your free time doing some good for the world, deciding which activity to choose should largely be based on what you expect to have the most positive impact. For some people that will be their job, and hopefully that doesn't get missed when thinking about the options just because it doesn't "sound" as good at first glance.

Choosing a Charity

(if you don't feel like reading all this, basically I'm just recommending GiveDirectly as a good starting point for being more picky when choosing how to give to charity)...

There's lots of stuff out there aimed at motivating us to give more of our money to others. That's good, but I really believe there's not *nearly* enough emphasis on HOW to give charitably. If the goal is just to pat yourself on the back for making a sacrifice, then maybe it's not necessary to be picky about choosing a charity. But if the goal is to make the world a better place and help people, intentions aren't the only thing that matters.

Likewise, it's good to invest some of your money for retirement. But that doesn't mean you should just buy a random stock and then pat yourself on the back. You're saving/investing money for a goal (retirement), and to actually reach that goal you don't just need the intention to invest. You also need to invest in something that will make money rather than lose money. It's the same thing with charities; if our goal is to help people, we shouldn't just give to a random charity. If you generously give money to Komen's Race for the Cure, but they use it to shut down other charities, you may have actually done more harm than good. If you're at the grocery store, and they ask if you want to give a dollar to some random charity at the cash register, the best response to that feeling of pressure and guilt isn't to give to that charity you know nothing about. The best thing to do is to use that as motivation to carefully select the best charity.

GiveWell, a great (IMO) charity evaluator, puts it best on the problems of not putting enough emphasis on results:

Fundraising often involves social and emotional manipulation, and almost never involves fact-based demonstrations of programs' effectiveness. This means that lots of charities raise money and run programs without ever demonstrating that their programs actually work.

Just like investing money, giving charitably has risk. Someone who receives money may just use it to fuel a drug addiction. A lot of aid to poor countries tries to work through their government, but then corrupt bureaucrats keep it for themselves. If you give a bunch of food to a poor village, the farmers will suffer because the people will need to buy less food from their local markets. Then less people will farm, which leaves that village more vulnerable to food shortages once the aid decreases. That itself is one big problem people often don't consider; when something becomes available for free, it distorts that market and hurts the people who sell that item to make a living, which can end up with much wider consequences.

I've come to believe that the best starting point for giving more effectively is with cash transfer programs like GiveDirectly. It basically makes one-time payments to a random person in poverty. I was very skeptical of that approach at first. The first major concern I had was that the money would be spent poorly. And of course, that can and will happen in some cases. But what I've come to realize is: the only alternative is for someone else to decide what the poor need even though each person is in a unique situation, and so we have that same problem either way. And how much more overhead does it cost in the charity to have employees/volunteers make more decisions for the people we are trying to help? In general, a person in need knows what they need more than some rich person half-way around the world from them.

As an example, let's say you don't trust giving money to a person in need far away, so you give them shoes instead. If they already have shoes that work fine, that was a waste. And if they did want or need new shoes, you may have just made their local shoe seller lose a customer. Imagine being the poor person trying to make a living selling shoes, but then you lose your business because of foreign shoe donations. Each person will have unique needs that we won't be able to guess. With money, regardless of what they spend it on, it will help business in their area instead of hurting it. And that money will continue to circulate among people there through a series of new purchases. There will be some cases where the money is spent on a harmful addiction. But if you give them food or clothes instead, what's to stop them from selling or trading it for drugs? There's no way to guarantee that won't happen no matter what you give someone.

GiveDirectly also avoids the problem of creating dependency. One-time payments made in a random fashion can provide overall help without any person thinking they can rely on it.

Another benefit to cash transfers is scalability; the charity will be less likely to run out of things to do with more money. Many charities just put your money in the bank for a while because their funding needs are already currently met; GiveWell has more on this consideration with charities here.

The other major benefit to GiveDirectly, which every charity should do, is that they are very transparent and are doing careful studies in the areas where they've provided help to evaluate how much good it really does. They are actually making and altering their decisions (such as how much is the optimal amount to give an individual person) based on methodology and facts they are making public. Many charities don't do this; largely because people don't seem too interested in the actual results of a charity.

That being said, the best charity in the world is likely one that is providing something a poor area really needs that its markets aren't providing. For instance, GiveWell's top pick is Against Malaria, which distributes bed nets and teaches people how to use them to stop malaria. I'm not arguing that cash transfers like GiveDirectly are the best possible charity. But I do think they are the best starting point for people looking to give more effectively. We should give money to those in need and let them decide how to spend it unless we're REALLY sure we've found a better alternative. A poor, uneducated person in Kenya may not know the BEST way to spend new money they come across, but you should start off assuming they know what they need better than YOU do. And if they buy something in their own markets with extra money they get a hold of, that doesn't have the same potential for harm and distortion to their local economy like a bad charity does.

Moral Dilemmas

I'm currently reading Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do?, and it starts with a couple of hypothetical situations that has really bothered me because it demonstrates a big inconsistency in our conscience.

Scenario #1: You are on a trolley heading down a track, and you notice that there are 5 people tied to the rails ahead. The brakes are out, but you can turn onto a different track where there is only 1 person tied down. So your only choices are to do nothing and let the trolley kill 5 people, or change course and kill 1 person that would have otherwise lived. What's the right thing to do? For most people (including myself), your conscience tells you that the best thing is to change course and save the greatest number of lives.

Scenario #2: Same case, but there's nobody in the trolley. You and a very heavy person are on a bridge overlooking the track. If you do nothing, the 5 people on the track will die. But you happen to know that if you push the heavy person off the bridge and onto the track, he will die when the train hits him, but it will cause the train to stop. It would do no good for you to jump down. What is the right thing to do? For most people (including myself), your conscience tells you that you should not push the innocent bystander off the bridge.

The problem is that these 2 scenarios are effectively the same moral dilemma. In both cases you can do nothing and let 5 people die, or make a choice where the trolley hits and kills only 1 person that would have lived otherwise. So what really is the right thing to do, and why does our conscience contradict itself? I don't know. But I assume our different gut reactions have a lot to do with how directly responsible we'd feel for the 1 person that died in each case. Pushing someone off a bridge feels like you're directly killing someone whereas you feel more removed from the situation if you just turn a train. Like how people can be complete jerks when driving but you know they'd be nice to your face.