The English bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, makes a bargain with the poor, saying: ‘If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary!’
—Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working-class in England (1844), p. 279
‘Ooh, Heaven is a place on Earth’
The French King, Louis XIV (1638-1715), was by historical standards, perhaps the richest person of his era—with stunning control over the French empire1. What is striking, though, is that despite Louis’ relative wealth and power, most people living in wealthy nations today would not want to trade places with him—his standard of living is too low. Of course, in some ways it would perhaps be exciting to the world’s most powerful monarchs. However, this power and notoriety would come at too high a cost: we would be forced to live without stuff like easily and cheaply available fresh produce, antibiotics, and technology like the internet and flush toilets. If we could flip a switch and trade places with Louis, we wouldn’t. This would be analogous to an average person, a few centuries hence, preferring not to trade places with Jeff Bezos, because it would mean a decrease in their quality of life.
The middle class in many wealth nations is markedly better off than King Louis XIV. Perhaps the best kept secret is that the contemporary world, including the poorest parts, have become substantially richer, especially over the last century, faster than at any other time in history2. By historical trends, people in wealthy nations reside in a golden age that is unrivaled by any other in human history. Most people in rich nations are blithely unaware that they live better than most people who have ever lived, and that they could forgo some of their excess to save the lives of desperately poor people, dying from lack of water, food, and shelter, who could benefit from our largess. This striking tragedy prompts a question of what, if anything, we owe the poor.
Do the Poor Deserve More?
Over the centuries, theologians and philosophers argued we should give more to the poor if we can. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant3 famously argued that we have an imperfect duty of beneficence, meaning a moral duty to help others in need ‘where we can’ provided that doing so doesn’t interfere with our other duties. This was and remains perhaps the most common moral attitude toward charitable giving in the West.
More recently, and more radically, moral philosopher Peter Singer argues that we are morally required to give more of our expendable income to the poor than most people typically do. It isn’t the giving would be morally supererogatory—a kind of moral extra credit—but rather that giving substantially more is morally mandatory. He uses the following thought experiment to motivate his argument,
On your way to work, you pass a small pond. … [You] are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond […] it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. […] The child is unable to keep his head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy4.
Singer thinks we ought morally to save the child, even though we are not responsible for the child’s plight—we could easily solve the problem, and so we should. This is especially clear when thinking about the moral stakes: we would ruin our dress shoes to save the child—or we could keep our shoes nice, and let the child drown. Since a child’s life doesn’t morally compare to a pair of shoes, we greatly benefit the child at low cost to ourselves. Singer argues that we would agree that morality requires us, when possible, to save the drowning child.
Now consider the numerous people living in abject poverty—which roughly amounts to living on less than two dollars a day. These folks are suffering and dying, like the drowning child, and could be helped by a charitable donation, and will likely suffer and die, from lack of things like food, potable water, medicine, and shelter, without help. The good news: you could easily save these folks by donating your expendable income—the money you spend on fancy coffees, movies, vacations. Some of that expendable income means relatively little to you, but a lot to the desperately poor.
We can make this argument is by appealing to a basic economic insight: diminishing marginal returns5. Everything else equal, the first unit of something is worth more than the next, and is worth more than the next, and so on. Each additional unit you input or consume is worth less than the last. By example, Scully lacks decent clothes to keep warm. The first decent outfit she acquires is highly valuable to her; it improves life substantially. The next outfit is valuable too, but less so. Once she has hundreds of outfits, more won’t add much value; by the time she has thousands of outfits, each may have negative value. Scully may even pay people to haul away the extra outfits. Since the thousandth fancy coffee won’t mean much to you, but the money you spent could help save a child’s life, it would mean a lot to her:
When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look "well-dressed" we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief. By doing so, we would be preventing another person from starving. It follows from what I have said earlier that … [We] ought to give the money away, and it is wrong not to do so6.
Singer argues not donating, when we could easily and it would save lives, isn’t morally different than not saving the drowning child. If we refuse to save a drowning child only because it would ruin our clothes and shoes, it would be no different than refusing to forgo the money to buy extra clothes and shoes, and donating that money instead to save a child.
The first pair of shoes and suit we sacrifice to save a child isn’t worth much to us; we have lots more, or could easily get more; the same applies to the money we should donate to the poor. Each time we sacrifice to save someone it becomes harder and harder: whatever remains grows increasingly valuable as it shrinks from sacrifice. We likely agreed with Singer that we should save the first child because we have so much stuff that sacrificing some of it wouldn’t be missed, but would mean the world to the person we save. Until our donations mean roughly as much to us, as they do to the poor folks we’re saving, we should keep donating.
The Threshold is Fuzzy
Singer began his case for mandatory donations with a simple thought experiment: we should save a drowning child if doing it isn’t too costly, and sacrificing one’s clothes and shoes doesn’t morally compare to a child’s life. However, there is a big difference between sacrificing one’s clothes and shoes once to save a child, and doing it over and over again. Repeatedly saving kids, by sacrificing our income, will eventually become onerous. The first sacrifice would be easy; but beyond a certain point, each sacrifice becomes increasingly costly. This approach to mandatory poverty relief leads to a moral sorites paradox.
Before advancing, we should step back to examine the nature of sorites paradoxes. Like many things in philosophy, they sound more complicated than they are. A simple example will illustrate. Consider a heap of sand. Taking a single grain of sand won’t destroy a heap; the same applies to every grain of sand. But if taking a single grain of sand doesn’t destroy the heap, we could take a single grain of sand, over and over, and on this reasoning, a heap would remain—we only took one individual grain of sand at a time! But clearly taking one grain at a time, over and over, eventually destroys the heap. We can formulate this as follows:
(1) A pile of one trillion grains of sand is a heap.
(2) A single grain of sand isn’t a heap.
(3) Taking one single grain of sand won’t create/destroy a heap.
This is a paradox: a set of statements that seem individually true, but where they cannot all be true. If we took a single grain of sand from a heap, over and over, then on rule (3), we could do so over and over indefinitely, without destroying the heap. Even though we clearly know that must be false: if we took enough individual grains of sands, over and over, the heap would cease to exist. A puzzle here is that rule (3) looks right on its face: adding or removing a single grain of sand won’t create or destroy a heap of sand. Singer’s argument can be formulated as sorites paradox:
(4) Saving an innocent person, with a modest donation, isn’t morally too demanding.
(5) There are millions of people we could save with a modest donation.
(6) A moral requirement to save everyone we can with a modest donation must, eventually, become morally too demanding.
Here’s a defense of (4): a cup of coffee or a new shoes doesn’t morally compare to an innocent person; if we could save them, by donating the money, instead of buying stuff we don’t need, morally we should. But when we apply this line of argument over and over, there will come a point where we won’t be able to watch a football game, and have a few beers, because it would be wrong. Each time we reach for a beer, Singer could remind us that ‘a beer is worth a lot less than the life of a child.’ In each individual case, that looks right: we can’t morally compare the life of a child to watching a football game buzzed. Instead of having a few beers and watching a game, we could work overtime and donate the money to charity. However, it looks like that demands too much of us. This should make us suspicious. We began with a simple, but powerful argument—letting a child drown is morally no different than buying stuff you don’t need while kids die from lack of food and water—but arrived at a conclusion that looks too demanding to be right7. We were originally moved by this argument because of its modesty, but we ended up at a place where we weren’t moved to give any more because that would demand too much.
One of the reasons that people do not donate more is that the threshold that separates donating that is morally mandatory from that which is morally supereragatory looks fuzzy and arbitrary. When is another act of charity too much? Unclear. However, there are other obstacles to donating more, too, like psychological makeup.
Why We Actually Donate
We approached the issue of charity with an argument: philosophers like Singer try to persuade us to give a lot more expendable income to the poor. This should prompt questions like: why don’t people give more already? Or: why do people actually give? It turns out the social sciences shed much light here. We don’t donate for reasons most us think: it is tempting to think people donate to charity because someone’s plight tugs their heart strings. But often something else is at work: we donate mostly because of how it makes us look to others.
Before exploring why people actually donate, we should step back to think about why it matters how others view us. We often (unconsciously) engage in what economists call ‘signaling’: we try to signal to others that we’re a good person. People look for those signals because it isn’t obvious from the outside whether someone can, say, be relied upon. Before we cooperate with others we want to know they’re trustworthy. Hardly anyone wants to start a business with a flake, or have children with someone coldhearted. We care how others view us: recent research reveals that we would often prefer ‘jail time, amputation of limbs, and death to various forms of reputation damage’ like gaining a reputation as a racist or child molester8. Our reputations are tied to flourishing and survival. Many ancient societies thought banishment worse than death; it was the same as death, only more prolonged.
This is where signaling enters: we act in ways that show we can be trusted, and that are hard to fake. If they were easy to fake, then anyone could wrongly inflate their reputation. The evidence highlights how charity is typically motivated by conspicuous caring: showing others, by sending costly and hard-to-fake signals, that one is caring and trustworthy. Just like an engagement ring is a costly signal of commitment that’s hard to fake, giving money to the less fortunate is hard signal to fake.
We This is a primary motive for charitable giving: by example, people don’t donate to charities on the basis of their effectiveness helping the poor. This is odd: if one donated to help the poor, one would presumably care if their donation was effective. However, if one wanted to signal how much you care more than actually help, then they would donate to the more conspicuous , but were less motivated to actually help, you donate to a conspicuous charity. Even establishing a charity does a hundred times more good than a different charity doesn’t affect where people give. Many studies have shown that the following factors heavily influence when and how much people donate9:
Visibility: people are more likely to donate when we are observed by others and their reputation will be tied to how much they were willing to donate.
Peer pressure: people are more likely to donate when pressured to donate by peers and in-group members, and when high-status individuals visibly donate.
Sexual motive: people are more likely to donate when they are primed by sexual thoughts or the prospect of a long-term partner, or when asked to donate by someone they find attractive.
This behavior is better explained by reputation management than concern for the poor. It isn’t that people don’t care at all—if so, signaling wouldn’t work. It does mean, though, that humans are less purely altruistic, and more self-interested, than many of us would prefer to believe. People typically do not make these kinds of calculations consciously, but rather they have less altruistic motive subconsciously10. This cognitive design better allows us to deceive others as to our true motive to donate, and do other altruistic stuff, by deciding ourselves. To the extent we sincerely believe that we are acting altruistically, the better we are able to act sincere and convincing11.
What about Anonymous Donations
There is a potential objection lurking here: many people donate to worthy causes anonymous. However, if donating is primarily about looking good to others, then why do people give anonymous? There are a couple replies here.
First, not everyone is motivated by reputational pressures to give. It could be that there are some people who would give to others regardless of the reputational stakes—perhaps they donate to preserve their personal moral identity12, or for the warm feeling they get after donating. Reputational and signaling motivations explain lots of giving behavior, but not all of it—people are complex, and are their reasons for action.
Second, sometimes having one’s good qualities and deeds discovered confers a better bump to one’s reputation than conspicuously signaling them, especially when those qualities are likely to be discovered anyway. As researchers have noted in a recent study on what they term ‘buried signals’:
[Donors] may prefer anonymity to avoid being harassed for further donations, this argument alone would not explain why anonymous donors are seen as more virtuous. However, donations are never fully anonymous. These donations are often revealed to the recipient, the inner circle of friends or fellow do-gooders […] These few privy observers, in turn, do not only learn that the donor is generous … they are also likely to infer that the generosity was not motivated by immediate fame or the desire for recognition from the masses13.
There are explanations for anonymous donating that fit broadly within a reputation and signaling framework. And that help to explain why people are bad at donating such that their donations are effective at improving lives: what looks good to others often doesn’t do enough to help those in need. It is the age old problem—it is easier to look good than to do good, so people opt for the former over the latter.
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Angus Deaton (2013). The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality. Princeton University Press.
Simon Hope (2023). Perfect and Imperfect Duty: Unpacking Kant’s Complex Distinction. Kantian Review 28 (1): 63-80.
Peter Singer (2009). The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to Stop World Poverty. Random House, p. 3.
Tregarthen, Timothy and Libby Rittenberg (1999). Economics (2nd Edition). Worth Publishers, p. 170.
Peter Singer (1972). Famine, Affluence, and Morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (3): 229-243, p. 235.
Timmerman, Travis (2015). Sometimes There Is Nothing Wrong With Letting a Child Drown. Analysis 75 (2): 204-212.
Andrew J. Vonasch, Tania Reynolds, Bo M. Winegard, and Roy F. Baumeister (2018). Death Before Dishonor: Incurring Costs to Protect Moral Reputation. Social Psychology and Personality Science 9 (5): 604-618, p. 604.
Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson (2018). The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press, p. 205-244.
Brokensha, Haley, Line Eriksson, and Ian Ravenscroft (2016). Charity, Signaling, and Welfare. Politics, Philosophy and Economics 15 (1): 3-19.
Simler and Hanson (2018).
William von Hippel and Robert Trivers (2011). The Evolution and Psychology of Self-Deception. Behavioral and Brian Science 34 (1): 1-16.
Sam Hardy and Gustavo Carlo (2011). Moral identity. In S. J. Schwartz, K. Luyckx, & V. L. Vignoles (Eds.), Handbook of identity theory and research (pp. 495–513). Springer Science.
Moshe Hoffman, Christian Hilbe, and Martin A. Nowak (2018). The Signal-Burying Game Can Explain Why We Obscure Positive Traits and Good Deeds. Nature Human Behavior (2): 397-404, p. 400.