How should we Choose a Charity? - Philosophy Tube

There are lots of charities in the world, so how can you choose which one to support?

Our comment music this week is 'YMCA' by the Village People.

[brendanfletcher]

I would fund the charity which can solve the structural problems which necessitate charity as a salve. In other words, I would donate to the revolutionary anarchist and communist struggles like the IWW. Kant would surely have agreed.

[evelienheerens]

There is a whole can of worms underneath this issue.

The assumption here is that charities, "do good". This is far from always the case. Many charities actually harm the people they supposedly try to help. From a shoe company that gives free shoes to africa for every pair that you buy, killing local business there and making villagers there dependent on these giveaways. From organisations buying medicine that then gets picked up by local warlords and sold to the locals at cut throat prices and financing the suffering he inflicts. From grants for medical research being handed over to pharmaceutical companies that use that money not to cure diseases but instead treat it with drugs that get sold at crazy profit margins.

And then off course there is the whole infrastructure itself. A charity does not make profit, however it does pay salaries. If you are the chairman of a huge successful charity you can expect to make a salary comparable to any CEO in the business world. Then off course a large portion of what was donated has to be reinvested into marketing in order to acquire more donations, so the portion of the money that gets spent on the actual progression of the cause is a lot smaller. Then off course the money is not given to the cause directly, that is done in the form of goods and services.

Now as a chairman of a charity you have a lot of power in deciding how these funds are allocated. You decide which marketing firm to spend your fundraising budget on, you decide which company to contract for the tractors you want to send, the medicine you want to send, the wells you want dug, the schools you want built, etc. As you are such a chairman, You are probably really wealthy and thus have wealthy and powerful friends that you in this way can do favors, in exchange for other favors. It can be as innocent as said companies using the money they donate that year to reduce their taxes to your organisation, or as not so innocent as said companies returning the favor by awarding contracts to your other businesses.

All of it tax deductible off course, not to mention free publicity back and forth and cleaning up your image. After all, your pharmaceutical company can't be all bad if its sending TB meds to africa at a significant discount. Even if it does charge 750 dollars for a months worth of insulin, a substance you can buy for 20 euros per liter in europe.

The charities that do work, get money through grass roots, and give money directly to locals. Either through microloans to help them build businesses, or straight up donations to families that can use the money to improve their lives, get necessary healthcare etc.

So I would choose charities very carefully by weighing who benefits from them, and how much.

Well, you can always choose randomly, so you give a chance to all kinds of charity.

[XnohbodyX]

It's hard to say when deciding between charities, but I can say quite confidently that if there are two charities dealing with the same problem you should give to the one that the most effective.

[bassem]

The question boils down to: giving or not giving to charity. After informing oneself well, one should give within ones means. It adds to the positive Karma in the world... not giving does not. ( I am assuming that we are considering legitimate charities, which help those in need ). :)

[Laecy]

There’s an assumption that charity is fixed for each person. It could just be that I’m absurdly forgetful, but giving money to the charity collector right in front of me is money I’d have forgotten to give elsewhere. So my absolute level of charitable giving goes up.

[Amy-zbph]

I never give to charities but I often give to people in need. I don't just hand a homeless person money, I bring food and eat with them. Now maybe it's more selfish to give in this way because I am receiving benefit by having had someone with whom to eat and talk. It's just the way I do things because I also want to be aware of the actual problems going on firsthand instead of hearing it from someone else, plus there are no administrative costs when I give in this way. The nice thing about this is that, even if you don't have money to give to a person, you still have friendliness to give to that person. I don't know how it is in the UK, but people in the US tend to try to look away from homeless people and pretend they don't exist. I feel like people give to one another when we treat each other like human beings, even if we have nothing else to give.

[smartITworksme]

To devote time to ponder on whom to give charity is in my opinion a considerate act. But I think it is "amoral" when you have to choose between two good things. It doesn't have to cause 'DILEMMA' in a way. No one can fully determine which one needs it most or have great urgency. At this point, I suggest that one can just say a prayer for the rest of the charities that he has not chosen to give. God bless you for a good episode.

[reganheath]

Ultimately the choice of a specific charity may be subjective, but I believe this is ok.

If we assume that giving itself is what we "ought" to do, then where/to whom we give and how much is all that remains to decide.

But this reasoning you cannot then simply say "nah" and give nothing - so strike that option.

Deciding how much to give is tricky, but as long as you give something you're doing better than most people who give nothing and as IMO human morality stems from group pressure this will be seen to be "moral".

So, to whom to give.  You can be fairly objective about deciding upon a short list of charities, provided you can obtain information about the problem they address and how big it actually is, about what they actually do and about how effectively they actually do it.

But, assuming the charities on the short list are all equally deserving then you cannot objectively pick between them, instead you have to decide subjectively (or by flipping a coin).  Assuming there is no point at which a donation it too small to do any good, and I cannot think of a reason this might be the case (you just might not be able to "see" the good your 1 pence actually does) you could donate a fraction of your total to each.

Of course, if everyone did this then certain charities addressing certain issues would get no support.  What then?  Well, ideally we need a dynamic ranking system for charities which takes into account donations so far and lowers the priority of issues which are being addressed in favour of those lacking in support - in addition to taking into account their effectiveness.

Some intersting links..

[bobsobol]

I think a lot of the problem is that people are taught to equate money to success, and are not taught the evils of advertising. One of the few lessons I remember and value from school was one called "Are You Being Swerved" where we learned to consider peoples intentions and goals before what they actually said.

Marketing = Propaganda = Marketing. This is how evil doers gain power and influence, and nobody who is worthy of support needs to do that. IMHO

[psiryan]

I recognize that this is a particularly old video, however, given that there appear to be some relatively recent comments, so donate my own two cents and wonder about how active this thread really is. It seems to me that the principal behind donating to a charity is giving a little so that the charity eventually collects a lot, hopefully enough to help whatever objective it has. To me that stands to reason that as long as people continue to donate it doesn't matter which charity I choose, regardless of reason, because in the end all charities will receive a significant collection toward their respective goals. If I walk past 10 people asking for donations and I only have $10 to donate, I can confidently give my $10 to the last person I meet because I would know that nine other people would eventually walk by those nine other solicitors and each donate something.

If nothing else, it might be cheeky to say, but spending any amount of time listening to any charity solicitors is in itself a donation of personal time, which absolutely has value.

[katraylor]

1) The perfect is the enemy of the good. If you spend too much time agonizing over finding the BEST POSSIBLE WAY to give to charity, then you're probably not going to make that many donations overall. Better to just find the best choice available at the time, give what you can, and keep your eyes open for even better choices. 2) The average person does not earmark much of their money for charity. If someone approaches you on the street representing a good cause, and you say "Oh, okay, " and reach into your wallet for ten pounds, it's almost certainly an impulsive donation. You're spending money that WOULD NOT otherwise have gone to charity, so you're not taking it away from any particular cause. Charitable donations are a GIFT, and people can give gifts to whoever they want, and don't have a moral obligation to give them to anyone. This is why societies need to pay for their own people's needs, rather than forcing them to rely on charity, which may or may not be coming.

[davidcassar]

I think the best system for choosing which charities to donate to objective ly is to use Maslow's heirarchy of human needs. For example, if Charity A provides improved quality of life for its clients, and charity B provides basic human needs for survival, I would choose B over A as it satisfies a greater need. Of course, not everybody would agree with the rankings on the hierarchy, but you can always make your own - at the cost of losing it's objective value.

[aaaer]

One thing I would consider first is to see is how the my donation would be distributed. For example, say I gave $1 to World Vision, the way they distribute the money they obtain is that they take around 70 cents for themselves to pay the employees as well as their advertisements which I personally cant stand, while only the remaining 30 cents would go to the cause. knowing this, I would rather give money to an organization that I know is giving atleast a majority of the donation to the cause

[ArcaneOwlchemist]

I do donate to charitable causes, not necessarily charities. Like, during Thanksgiving and Christmas time, I would donate food to one of the churches in my town because I have been in a situation where I needed help and this particular church has helped me. I don't see how helping an organization who has helped you is greedy, but I can see why someone would argue such a thing. I also grab a child or two off of the "Angel Tree" where you buy a Christmas gift for a child that may not get one, for the same reason as the church I decide to help. But I am also very susceptible to guilt and feeling guilty, so that always makes me donate if I can....

[Pandaemoni]

Subjective criteria are what people use to select charities because, to be honest, we are generally too lazy to rely on a proper cost-benefit (in this case the "benefit" being "charitable benefit to others") analysis based on good old utilitarian values.

Evaluating the actual effectiveness of a charity is hard work and takes time. Giving money to your favorite celebrity's charity, that's quick. If you never really investigate how your money was used, you can even *assume* that your choice was very good. (And, in that case, why "confirm" whether or not your choice was good? If you find out it wasn't, that just takes away the good feelings you had from giving in first place!)

I am being facetious, but the over-reliance on subjective factors is why you get fiascos like that of the 2009 "PlayPump" water pump for African villages using the power if children at play. It was an idea that generated a lot of subjective appeal, as it seemed (it was successfully pitched to me explicitly) like we could get people clean drinking water they needed as a direct resuilt of bringing joy their children's lives by encouraging the children to play. It was all win-win. It was a well intentioned idea (I like to assume), but it was a while later that I read the children had to "play" 27 hours a day to produce as much water as I was told this device would. And that is underselling the problems it had from an engineering perspective and the human indignities it created in many places for the people it was supposed to help.

That was when I decided I needed to do the research and the math and not give myself over to foolish subjectivity.

If I can spare $100 a month on charity, and I can wither give it to an organization that will use my finds save a person's life, or to an organization that will save 20 person's lives, I have no issue being a consequentialist and going with the latter Factor in that many charities are, unfortunately, not all they are cracked up to be, and it reinforces the point. It may seem like I am making up the one vs 20 comparison, . And I am. The actual differences are much more stark. When tested, something between 50% and 75% of social programs produce no statistically significant betterment in the conditions they seek to ameliorate. Of those that are effective, the differences are often a factor of a hundred between those that show merely "some positive effect" and the very best and most effective.

I'd recommend anyone interested in charity (and the philosophy of it) read William MacAskill's book "Doing Good Better" and take a good look at the Effective Altruism movement he helped to found.

[BBrucker]

I don't know if it helps answer the question, but I try to pick charities that I feel will have a more widespread effect. Yes, there are a lot of diseases that I could contribute to fight, but rather than choosing a specific disease, I could donate money towards medical research in general, or, seeing as many diseases are more likely to hit the uneducated or are exacerbated by environmental factors, I could donate towards education or the environment. That's one way of looking at it, anyway.

[bobsobol]

That just proves my moral point. I won't give to charitable organisations because (in the UK) they do all the things this guy is suggesting they should. CEOs of UK charities take home wages and bonus pay equal if not higher than CEOs in the city.

Everyone who is out begging for charity on our streets and knocking on doors is paid, and usually they are paid in commission on their "sales".

The more I see companies advertising the less I will buy from them, same must apply for charities.

[KarolaTea]

You could probably chose a charity based on what saves the most lives, or what saves the most years of life, per money. There's plenty charities that aren't in the business of directly saving lives, but rather making them a bit nicer (like, supplying toys to children in hospitals). Sure, that might also save a few lives, cause mental health also matters. But probably not as many as supplying chemo to kids without health insurance. Then there's also issues that are cheaper to fix, like supplying mosquito nets to protect against malaria. Or you could also argue that some issues mainly affect older people (alzheimers for example) and thus less years of life would be saved.
Now you could probably argue how moral each of these calculations is in and of itself. Like, is an older person's life worth less than a child's just cause they'll have less long to live (and that's not even guaranteed, that kid still could die in an accident right after walking out of hospital).

[nerdynerdynerdnerd]

It is not a question of moral, because you can't do something immoral by donating to a charity. You can argue that one is more important than the other, but that doesn't undermine the fact that it is a charity that wants to do some good.

What is questionable is the reaction from other people. Doing something good should be respected and not be judged. You wouldn't judge a mother who takes care of her child by saying: “ You know that there are children in Africa who need much more help.”