Is Charity Immoral?

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fiby41
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by fiby41 »

Dragline wrote:Ok, Ebeneezer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYHmQT_7a2c
Bah, humbug! You can't reach me with your merry videos and elicit an emotional response!
Because I have flash disabled: viewtopic.php?t=6250
Ego wrote:
The drive to prove our goodness is so strong it causes good people to do things they know are not good because they fulfill this need to prove goodness. It creates meaning. Might there be better ways to do that?
What was the purpose of charity again if it is yet another item to be ticked off on an itinerary and to be bragged about amongst friends after being bought for a ticket price?

Scrubby
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Scrubby »

fiby41 wrote:Now war and natural calamities are the only two remaining ways of population control. By shipping in resources (food, medical aid, volunteers...) across the border, the people affected by the earthquake aren't helped at all but made more dependent. The number of people immigrating using the open borders policy into India make it clear that the economy wouldn't by able to provide for the ~5k deceased even if they had not died.
Of course they are helped. It's cold at the moment, they have little food and have lost a large part the infrastructure they need to survive. That doesn't mean they will never be able to rebuild. Does your logic apply to any natural disaster in Western countries as well? Should we just let Americans or Europeans who are hit by storms, floods or whatever starve or freeze to death?
fiby41 wrote:The dehumanizing comes from the fact that you are now effectively playing God for him. Today, by helping him, you have extended his suffering by a day while patting yourself on the back. Why not just legally adopt him and care for him then? If you are unwilling to adopt him, don't interfere in the natural course of things under the feel good pretense of having helped him. All you did was prolong his plight by one day. Instead of dieing today, he will suffer for one more day, thanks to you.
If he preferred to die he could easily kill himself. Clearly he doesn't.

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jennypenny
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by jennypenny »

I went to look for an old post of mine, and didn't realize we had two threads going about this topic: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5044

This conversation always depresses me. I can see not liking huge charities that are mostly about having a special color ribbon and a "walk." I don't like commercialized charity either. But if I have more than I need, and someone has less than they need, what's the big deal if I choose to share?

Dragline
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Dragline »

Come on, jp, don't you know that you are supposed to conform to the norms of Homo Economicus? http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers ... omicus.asp

And if you don't conform to those norms, you deserve to be punished, right? Because your existence disrupts the Order of Efficiency, which is the Supreme Value. Charity has no place in the NORMS OF THE SUPREME VALUE OF EFFICIENCY. It's just that old kindness crap that only inferior, irrational sub-humans would subscribe to. Because in the perfected utopian future, we will rid humanity of these defects, by getting rid of said charitable sub-humans, if nothing else. Decrease the surplus population. Perfect the race. It's all good in the end.

Isn't that the true religion of man?

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fiby41
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

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jennypenny wrote:I can see not liking huge charities that are mostly about having a special color ribbon and a "walk."
The color ribbon charity you are referring to gets half their money from suing organizations which use their copyrighted symbols. They are "breast cancer awareness charity" ("Hey did you know there is something called breast cancer?") and nothing you donate will go to actual research but the relatives of the founder who get inflated pays.
jennypenny wrote:But if I have more than I need, and someone has less than they need, what's the big deal if I choose to share?
You certainly can. But by "sharing" you will be making a chronic illness worse not better. How do you chose in what way your charity helps the recipient, if at all, and who 'deserves' to receive it if there are N number of equally 'worthy' (or shall I say 'needy'?) recipients? What you can do is simply not enough. And worse, you don't know what is best for the recipient. "Giving a helping hand" without going the full length is just plain mockery of the circumstances the recipient is in. The fact that people pray to a God asking him to favor their own interest instead of their neighbor's shows that they do that trust the judgement of God.

There is simply not enough resources for everyone to have what they need. Moreover, "what people need" is not something static. Everyone's expectations keep auto-adjusting to surrounding on the hedonic treadmill unconsciously; and if those expectations aren't met the next time, it leads to unhappiness. Most of evil is done with good intentions.

--

@dragline: You might want to look at the thread title again. We are discussing moral, not financial, implication of charity with the interest of the potential charity recipient in mind. Here charity in the general sense means not just giving out money but includes time and energy spent: volunteering for a non-profit NGO, visiting an old age home, etc.

--

To wit, I could say legalizing prostitution will help the chronically poor with no skills more that charity by creating safer work conditions and make it an economic transaction where value is created for both sides involved. Is it revolting?
Subjugating the recipient by you act of benevolence is okay but letting him provide for himself on his own isn't?
Last edited by fiby41 on Fri May 08, 2015 1:05 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Ego
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Ego »

jennypenny wrote:But if I have more than I need, and someone has less than they need, what's the big deal if I choose to share?
The closer I get to those who are in need according to people like me....
1) the more I realize that the need is usually not as great as it seems from afar
2) the more I realize that there can also be considerable harm done by giving.
3) the more I realize that good people, myself included, are skilled at ignoring #2 because we want to believe there is something we can do.

Sympathy, compassion and empathy are all similar but they are not the same. To be truly helpful the helper must have empathy. In other words, they must be able to imagine themselves in the shoes of the needy person. They must have a basic understanding of how that person got to where they are and have an inkling of what will happen if they were to drop $100 bill in their cup.

This is why we can walk past the same homeless guy every single day without helping. We understand that the $100 bill will do more harm than good. We can actually project ourselves into his mind, into his shoes. But that act of self-projection is painful. So we look for problems that are further away, problems where we experience sympathy and compassion but spare ourselves the pain of empathy. When we find that comfortably far-away problem we imagine that Singer's project of throwing cash at the problem is somehow different than dropping the bill in the homeless guy's cup.

Jenny, I know that your help is done face to face and a great deal of walking in the other person's shoes is done. I have come to have great respect for that.

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jennypenny
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by jennypenny »

I know a common criticism of charity work is that it alleviates the symptoms to the point that society is no longer forced to address the cause of the problem. But even in the best of times, there will always be people with more and people with less, whether it's money, agency, health, or luck. No matter how you measure it or adjust the 'system' to try and compensate for it, inequality will always exist. Maybe charity isn't the reason the problems aren't fixed--maybe charity is the fix?

Part of the issue in this discussion is lumping all charity together. Some issues are different than others, and some assistance is better than others. For every example someone can give of a charity doing more harm than good, someone else can give an example of a charity doing amazing work. We can all find examples to justify our positions. I prefer face-to-face charity work like preparing meals because I want to see whether what I'm doing is making a difference. It could be argued, however, that helping even the 'neediest' person in my neck of the woods is just one first-worlder helping another, and does nothing to address the needs of the millions of people around the world who live without reliable access to food, water, sanitation, education, medical care, and a safe environment. They wouldn't be wrong.

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fiby41
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by fiby41 »

jennypenny wrote:No matter how you measure it or adjust the 'system' to try and compensate for it, inequality will always exist.
Aristotle wrote: The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

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jennypenny
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by jennypenny »

Aristotle wrote:The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
Says the guy who was more equal than most during his time. ;)

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Ego
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

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jennypenny wrote:It could be argued, however, that helping even the 'neediest' person in my neck of the woods is just one first-worlder helping another, and does nothing to address the needs of the millions of people around the world who live without reliable access to food, water, sanitation, education, medical care, and a safe environment. They wouldn't be wrong.
Yeah, it seems I revisit this topic every time I go to a place where people from far away come with the desire to do something for the needy, as if there are not good people who would or could do that locally. The needy person in your neck of the woods is the only person you can effectively help without causing greater harm. The further removed you are from the need the more amplified the distortions in both directions.

I've had the opportunity to meet a handful of foreigners who are running programs in remote places that people in their home countries considered "amazing work" and have come to the conclusion that the only reason they can stomach the damage they've done for so long is because they are f#©£ing nuts. Or they are in love with a local. Or they are addicted to the local drug of choice. Seriously. That's why most programs are relatively short term. Because anyone who isn't certifiable, in love or addicted, realizes the harm and moves on. If they've got an advanced degrees in aid work they get themselves promoted out of fieldwork.

It is ironic that we believe we are the people to fix those whose entire culture revolves around community ubuntu.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(philosophy)

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Ego
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Ego »

Here are a few interesting critiques of Singer's Effective Altruism

http://bostonreview.net/forum/logic-eff ... e-altruism

However counterintuitive it may seem, children are not dying for the lack of a few thousand dollars to keep them alive. If it were so simple, the world would already be a much better place. Development is neither a financial nor a technical problem but a political problem, and the aid industry often makes the politics worse. The dedicated people who risked their lives to help in the recent Ebola epidemic discovered what had been long known: lack of money is not killing people. The true villains are the chronically disorganized and underfunded health care systems about which governments care little, along with well-founded distrust of those governments and foreigners, even when their advice is correct.

http://bostonreview.net/world/emily-clo ... ruism-ngos

In the worst case, the presence of NGOs induces exit from the state sector. When relatively efficient, well-functioning NGOs enter a health or education market, for example, citizens in that market who are paying attention are likely to switch from government services to NGO services. The result is a disengagement of the most mobilized, discerning poor citizens from the state. These are the citizens most likely to have played a previous role in monitoring the quality of state services and advocating for improvements. Once they exit, the pressure on the government to maintain and improve services eases, and the quality of government provision is likely to fall.

The second argument is similar to one of the criticisms of school vouchers. The most engaged get pulled out of the public system, leaving behind the poorest and those least motivated to make the system work well.

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Ego
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Ego »

It seems the new cause célèbre among international aid workers is to return home and soul search aloud in print. This is good. A decade ago they would have remained silent for fear of harming their resume. In the past year I've been tempted to post about a dozen stories written by these returnees. This one is better than the others for its thoroughness. He misses the boat on the conclusion, but that's understandable because it is still impossible for anyone in the field to admit that doing nothing is an option. God forbid anyone suggest it as the ideal option.

https://newrepublic.com/article/120178/ ... lan-fix-it

My favorite example of unintended consequences comes, weirdly enough, from the United States. In a speech to a criminology conference, Nancy G. Guerra, the director of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Delaware, described a project where she held workshops with inner-city Latina teenagers, trying to prevent them from joining gangs. The program worked in that none of the girls committed any violence within six months of the workshops. But by the end of that time, they were all, each and every one, pregnant.

“That behavior was serving a need for them,” she says in her speech. “It made them feel powerful, it made them feel important, it gave them a sense of identity. ... When that ended, [they] needed another kind of meaning in their lives.”

The fancy academic term for this is “complex adaptive systems.” We all understand that every ecosystem, each forest floor or coral reef, is the result of millions of interactions between its constituent parts, a balance of all the aggregated adaptations of plants and animals to their climate and each other. Adding a non-native species, or removing one that has always been there, changes these relationships in ways that are too intertwined and complicated to predict.

According to Ben Ramalingam’s Aid on the Edge of Chaos, international development is just such an invasive species. Why Dertu doesn’t have a vaccination clinic, why Kenyan schoolkids can’t read, it’s a combination of culture, politics, history, laws, infrastructure, individuals—all of a society’s component parts, their harmony and their discord, working as one organism. Introducing something foreign into that system—millions in donor cash, dozens of trained personnel and equipment, U.N. Land Rovers—causes it to adapt in ways you can’t predict.

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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by BRUTE »

Ego wrote:because it is still impossible for anyone in the field to admit that doing nothing is an option.
all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Dragline »

It all comes back to that fractal math and complexity theory, eh? :D

It is correct that any intervention into a complex adapative system is likely to have unintended consequences, both positive and negative, that cannot be predicted from the outset. And the outcomes can be vastly different due to differing initial conditions, even in neighboring communities. This is not just true of developing countries but of every complex society. (We have the same general issue with "education reform" in the US.) But I think the lesson is more of moderating expectations than collapsing into analysis paralysis. And trying to be a bit more targeted like how those "play pumps" are doled out now.

The fact of the matter is that most people's lots in life in the world have improved dramatically over the past 30 or 40 years. So the question is why? And are those improvements replicable? It probably doesn't have too much to do with NGOs and magic/fad fixes. I would guess its largely related to the reduction in war in most of the world, the emancipation and education of women (leading to lower fertility rates) and the loosening of some economic freedoms in places like China. Places like Vietnam are prime examples of positive feedback loops resulting in greater prosperity. But every place has its own story and what works in one place may have an entirely different outcome in another.

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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

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Dragline wrote:Places like Vietnam are prime examples of positive feedback loops resulting in greater prosperity.
Vietnam is hilarious because they'll have a BoA, a KFC restaurant and a reinforced concrete and glass building, but there'll be hammer and sickle banners hanging from them. brute thinks words like communist/capitalist have completely lost their meaning.

in Dragline's esteemed opinion, if one were to realize that a system is complex and complicated and non-linear and fractal and all that, how would one go about inducing non-random change in that system? is there a methodology? if the consequences are unforeseeable, maybe a sort of metaphorical "wading in slowly", seeing if the resulting waves lead to what was hoped?

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Ego
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Ego »

BRUTE wrote: if the consequences are unforeseeable, maybe a sort of metaphorical "wading in slowly", seeing if the resulting waves lead to what was hoped?
The eternal dilemma. Who is the person watching the consequences? Wading in slowly means a long-term commitment. Anyone with a conscience gets out when they realize the unintended consequences are almost never good. The slow-wade restarts with each new bright and shiny recruit. Those who stay longer have a vested interest in this life or, more often, the next, and factor that heavenly payoff into their calculation of the resulting waves.

BRUTE
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by BRUTE »

so shit's just random?

Dragline
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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Dragline »

BRUTE wrote:
Dragline wrote:
in Dragline's esteemed opinion, if one were to realize that a system is complex and complicated and non-linear and fractal and all that, how would one go about inducing non-random change in that system? is there a methodology? if the consequences are unforeseeable, maybe a sort of metaphorical "wading in slowly", seeing if the resulting waves lead to what was hoped?
Yes, like most of life it requires empirical observation. Basically do something and see what happens and then make an adjustment, and don't do something too drastic right away. It's no different than starting a new exercise program.

The example of the books from the article is a good one as something that could be easily corrected if somebody would have been paying attention. Providing books written in a language that people can't read is like supplying somebody with rowing equipment and not teaching them how to use it.

I like to say life is more like tending a garden (a dynamic system) than constructing a sculpture, building or some other static object. You have to pull weeds, get feedback and make adjustments as you go. But it you try to do too much all at once, you'll probably have bad results.

I'm reading an interesting book right now "The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck . . ." by Maubossin that, while focussed on business, sports and investing, gives ten guidelines for approaching human-based complex systems that are generally applicable:

1. Understand where you are on the luck/skill continuum
2. Assess sample size, significance and swans
3. Always consider a null hypothesis
4. Think carefully about feedback and rewards
5. Make use of counter-factuals
6. Develop aids to guide and improve your skill
7. Have a plan for strategic interactions
8. Make reversion to the mean work for you (or at least account for it)
9. Develop useful statistics
10. Know your limitations

But most NGOs are not designed like this. They quickly become more about marketing, which they need to do to sustain themselves and attract a steady stream of donors. So they focus on short-term appearances/fixes and not long-term results. Their incentives are all wrong and the results are haphazard. (Note that article was a bit slanted sometimes -- things like de-worming might not improve the GDP of the community very much, but I'm sure they improved the lives of people who would otherwise have them.)

The organizations that are most likely to succeed are those that are not caught in endless funding cycles and can work on long-term planning and assess results as they go. These would be things like the Gates Foundation, which adopt many of the kinds of controls in that list above and are highly focussed on "making lots of small bets" and getting feedback on them. See http://www.gatesfoundation.org/How-We-Work

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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by Tyler9000 »

jennypenny wrote:This conversation always depresses me. I can see not liking huge charities that are mostly about having a special color ribbon and a "walk." I don't like commercialized charity either. But if I have more than I need, and someone has less than they need, what's the big deal if I choose to share?
I also find it sad when people dismiss all charity because of the poor examples that many of the big organizations set.

There's a really big difference between the core concept of personal "charity" and "charities" in the organizational sense. The well-deserved cynicism for the latter is usually due to a notable lack of the former. Too often, charities are about changing your neighbor socially or politically or virtue signalling to your neighbor from a safe distance rather than simply giving a meaningful helping hand to the person next door. IMHO, if we all took to heart the true meaning of "charity" and acted accordingly on a personal level rather than deferring it to others to do it for us, the world would be a much better place.

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Re: Is Charity Immoral?

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Dragline said: I like to say life is more like tending a garden (a dynamic system) than constructing a sculpture, building or some other static object. You have to pull weeds, get feedback and make adjustments as you go. But it you try to do too much all at once, you'll probably have bad results.
I agree. Gardening is a good analogy for life as a whole, because it requires a balance of masculine energy (towards order) and feminine energy (towards chaos.) Taking even one more step back or up from gardening towards permaculture, you can learn to dispense with the quicker judgment inherent in use of terms such as "weed", "invasive species" or "pest." it's not that all things are equally valued, but rather that all things are equally worthy of consideration.

Why is there a good deal of chicory growing on the abandoned lots in my neighborhood? Why are there young cats hiding underneath my camper? Why are there a great many immigrants from Yemen and Bangladesh moving into the abandoned houses in my neighborhood? Why did I feel happy yesterday, when I was attempting to explain what the word "family" meant to a third-grader with very little English, so she could complete the assignment of drawing a picture, and she suddenly blurted out "Mommy, Dahddy, baybay...", and we slapped each other 5? Why do I feel like the underpaid hireling representative of a Confederacy of Dunces when I hand out free government-issue shrink-wrapped Nutri-muffin snacks to children whose mother's are at home cooking delicious, nutritious stews for their dinners?

The most important thing to notice about weeds is that they are pre-defined to prevail.

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