It isn't very provocative to ask, "Should we donate more money to the needy?" That's an obvious yes. I'll try to draw the focus back to the more controversial question:

You (anyone reading this) are probably a person who regularly spends money on both essentials (shelter, food, etc.) and non-essentials (movie tickets, CDs, etc.). How do you justify your choice to spend money on non-essentials instead of giving it to the needy?

I don't think I have a good answer for that myself. In fact, I think according to my ethics, it's plainly immoral. This week I've paid for a pasta dinner (when leftovers were available), two books, two CDs, two movie rentals, and my friend's beer. In each of these cases, it's impossible to make the argument that I spent my money on the most important thing. My (and my friends') entertainment is surely of less importance than the survival and subsistence of the needy, yet my spending habits imply just the opposite.

Lately I've been tossing around the idea of allowing myself a maximum annual income ($30,000-ish perhaps, which would change if I ever started a family) and donating the rest.

I can't answer for iamntbatman or anyone else, but I can say how I justify it.

I believe that if all people ceased supporting entertainment and luxury industries, then the world economy would be negatively impacted to the point where millions would lose jobs and people in our very own countries would become the starving persons. We are doing a kind gesture to both ourselves and society when we purchase unnecessary products, and it could encourage corporations to develop and spread to create more jobs for the needy.

Of course, there will be plenty in need who are unaffected by this. That's why it's always nice to balance this idea off with donating to some charities or doing some volunteer work.

Heavymetalbackwards has a good point. Leisure/luxury/non-essential industries do employ many people and spending money helps out the economy. I agree that this issue is not as black and white as it would seem. My problem with this though is that by supporting our (assumingly yours too) western countries we are supporting economies that are pretty much built on the exploitation of the third world. It seems a little silly to "pick the side" of the supposed bad guys in order to justify not supporting the thirld world.

Our economies take advantage of the third world, but the good outweighs the harm. As horrific as sweatshops are, go to one of those countries and poll them. Most would rather they continue to exist than to be removed, because then they'd end up picking through garbage dumps their whole lives.

I don't want anyone to misunderstand me. I think we should make an effort to improve how corporations treat the third world; it is a noble thing to do. But, the worst thing we can do is discourage these corporations from making a market in these places at all.

^I suppose you're right. Unless the west could give the third world economies a huge boost they're more or less dependent on the big players of the business world thanks to their monopolization in third world economies. Too bad these guys tend to kill union activists.

That's a powerful argument, but it may not be necessary for us to stop spending all the money we normally spend on non-necessities, and ending world poverty may not necessarily have that kind of impact on the economy. I wish I had some sort of figures to back this up, but I'm afraid the following will only be speculation:

If we were to take the entire population of individuals who have surplus income and suppose that every one of them would play an identical role - doing no more and no less than another - in ending world poverty, it may be the case that the industries concerned with luxury would be only marginally affected. If X dollars are needed to end world poverty, and there is a total of Y individuals who have surplus income, then the loss of, say, X/Y dollars per individual (I'm avoiding a percentage-based system just to keep the illustration simple) may leave each individual with enough to keep those industries alive.

In reality, of course, far from every individual will donate their fair share, so if the goal is to be met, certain individuals will have to take it upon themselves to donate more; depending on the figures, these individuals may again be faced with the original dilemma: to do all one can in order to end poverty, which may entail the foregoing of all non-necessities, or to do less than one can in order that one may enjoy some non-necessities. In this situation, I doubt there would be any moral justification for the second option.

You made a good point in your earlier post and another one in this one. The thing is this: sure, if you took away the sweatshop it would have a largely negative impact on the local economy as now you've got a whole lot of people out of work. On the flipside, though, the only reason these people ever worked in the sweatshop in the first place is because the modernization of their local economies made it so that it was better for them and their families to work in a factory earning a meager wage than to work as subsistence farmers. So the real question to ask isn't "are these people better off with or without the sweatshop" but rather, "are these people better off with the sweatshop that they have now or were they better off before they needed the sweatshop job?"

Bringing this same line of thinking back to your previous post, sure, spending money on books and CD's and movie tickets and beer supports a large part of the economy and therefore keeps a lot of people employed and happy, but would we be better off not having these types of industries and instead have more "constructive" industries? For example, what if all of the people that work in book printing factories and CD pressing plants and breweries instead worked to build roads and dig wells in the third world?

Your argument here is a very strong one, and one I've contemplated over before. However, it only works particularly strongly in an ideal economy. In an economy with many shortcomings, every little contribution improves upon things. There was a huge layoff at a plastic factory around where I live that left people I know out of work, some with children. Imagine that this plastic factory were a CD store. If I spend 1,000 dollars on CD's there over the course of a couple years (which for me is realistic, if they carried a lot of metal), it could tips some stats right over the line to prevent maybe one lay-off, potentially eliminating a hungry man, wife and three kids.

Now, with that 1,000 dollars I may have been able to affect more people in Africa. However, I do believe that proximity plays a role in the ethics behind charity. As much as I care about foreigners and strangers, I want my family, friends, and neighbors to survive the most because they are people I know for certain, from personal experiences, are deserving and worthwhile. It doesn't mean the strangers aren't, it just means that we help the ones we personally love or care about in our everyday lives first.



These places would be better off, in at least many cases, had they been left as, or driven toward, becoming agricultural societies. However, since they're already on the long, painful road to industrialization, I find things to have gone past the point of no return. For all the suffering the natives have gone through with the dream of one day being post-industrial, I feel we should let the blood, sweat and tears be not in vain. In the end, an industrialized society with modern technology is better for the human species and its well-being, joy and comfort than an agricultural one. It's the transitional period that can be messy.

As for more productive industries, building roads in third world countries would not be a profitable investment. Maybe there's a way, but it would require a change in the collective mindset to be less greedy. I don't think it would be possible to bring such a change about. Ideologically speaking, yes, there are certainly better ways to help others than buying movies and music and soda and beer. But yeah, you're definitely thinking on the right track as far as how an ideal world should operate, and you're ethically correct in my opinion.

People engage in an activity as long as the marginal benefits of participating in it outweighs the opportunity cost (the value of the next-best alternative). If someone decides to not give their money to the needy, it's because they get more enjoyment out of whatever else their money is going towards. That's how I think people justify speeding money on non-essentials instead of giving it to the needy.

Agreed, but this ethical justification only works if one believes that most ethical outlook on life is putting yourself and your pleasures first. Since I don't believe this, I have my aforementioned way of justifying it which works better with my personal ethics.

But yeah, I would agree that everything we do is self-motivated.

Do you think there actually is another way of living other than ultimately putting yourself first? When you help someone, don't you feel better than you would have if you hadn't helped them?

True. A person who gets laid off in the United States is in much less danger of starvation than many children in Africa.



Putting loved ones ahead of strangers is perfectly understandable on a psychological level, and your moral justification is hard to criticize, but I think it only works up to a point. If you saw your neighbor getting attacked by a squirrel and a stranger getting attacked by a pack of wolves, and you had only the chance to help one person, would you refrain from helping the person whose need was greater on the grounds that he, unlike your neighbor, could turn out to be a serial rapist? Probably not. The severity of his situation far exceeds that of your neighbor, and although you don't know him, surely the odds of his being a raging sociopath are smaller than the odds of his being a typically upstanding citizen.

All else being equal, it's best to focus your altruistic efforts on those who are most needy. But we can't really say that all else is equal if the choice is between a friend you know to be decent and a stranger who may be an irredeemable scoundrel or parasite. This tips the balance slightly in your friend's favor, but it doesn't permit you to completely ignore the stranger, especially if he's the more needy of the two. I can't formulate this precisely, but the amount you're obliged to donate seems both proportional to the neediness of your recipients and inversely proportional to their untrustworthiness.



By "justify" I meant morally. The moral thing to do isn't always the most enjoyable.



There was a thread on this not too long ago: "Is everything we do selfish?" My take on this was that there are no acts of genuine altruism - only apparent altruism - as everything can be construed (however laboriously) as an act of self-interest: The individual seeks to minimize what registers with himself as bad and maximize what registers with himself as good. The soldier shields his comrades from a grenade blast because it feels right to the soldier. (Whom else would his feelings feel right to?) But this really isn't of much philosophical interest. For one, it's tantamount to saying that motives cause the individual to act, and the motives that cause the individual to act exist in the individual; it's about as fruitful as the observation that all perceptions belong to a self. It's also unfalsifiable; again, since it's possible to construe anything as a self-interested act (given that the self will always have some involvement in the act), it's impossible to produce any evidence against the theory of psychological egoism. And at most, for the proponent of altruism, it calls for a qualification of terminology rather than an actual change of concepts: The distinction between self-helping acts and others-helping acts becomes the distinction between self-helping acts and (self-and-)others-helping acts.

Yeah, I'd agree about the squirrel thing. I'd probably help the stranger being attacked by the wolf first. But if a loved one was being attacked by a dog, while a stranger was being attacked by a tiger, I still think I'd go after the loved one first. There's no universal place to draw the line.

And yeah, that's why as I said, I don't just buy luxuries and movie tickets and feel I've contributed to society enough. I also do some volunteer work and donate to some food pantries, so I take both approaches. From the beginning I basically am saying that people should simultaneously keep our economy strong and neighbors employed and eating by buying entertainment, and do some old-fashioned charity.



I don't think there's any alternative. I'm just saying that it's not the most ethical way to live, even though I believe every single living thing lives this way and literally has to. It's not what I'd call justification, any more than it is to steal and say "I was unwillingly given my exact genes and unwillingly exposed to my exact circumstances and so my actions are not a result of my own will."

The ideal ethical human would be one who achieves happiness only through altruistic behavior, and their level of altruism correlates with their level of happiness.

Yeah, me too. I mean, have you SEEN a tiger?

In all seriousness, I was playing a bit of the devil's advocate in my earlier post directed at you. The positions I was talking about are very compelling ones and on some level I do agree with them. However, as I pointed out back on the first page somewhere, I don't really see the value in creating an ethical code that strives to be objectively true or better in a normative sense than other codes. Instead, I like to approach ethics in a more descriptive way. I just happen to believe that some flavor of utilitarianism (specifically a rule-based flavor) does a good job of describing how people understand morality on a psychological level. Because I approach ethics from this angle, in the end even really compelling arguments like the ones I've made above still just don't quite sit well with me because people are so quick to come up with psychological justifications for their actions that contradict these consequentialist codes. In the end, I think what might be missing from the whole equation is that there is (perhaps a great deal of) utility to be had in developing close, even preferential relationships with people. Perhaps because people strive to be the preferred person in other people's lives (I want to be the one you'd pick to save!) they tend to act nicer to people in general so that they might forge these kinds of relationships. This behavior pattern might result in a hell of a lot more utility being generated than whatever is lost when we choose to please those close to us (or even ourselves!) rather than those who, although we have the power to save, we have zero chance of forging a meaningful relationship with. On a case-by-case basis, such as the starving kids in Africa, it may seem like spending money on those close to you (yourself included) is wrong but this could be ignoring the societal benefits of behaving in such a way. Who knows, though; maybe in the future because of the constant expansion of globalization not only will we be able to directly help those in need halfway 'round the world, but maybe we'll be able to make donations like these benefit us in an even more meaningful way.

Quick pointers:
(1)It is paramount that one considers actual numbers when debating the necessity and impact of providing aid. The total aid provided by the United State (private and govt. combined) is less than .5 % of the GDP. And as I said earlier some of this aid goes in lining the pockets of dictators and corrupt regimes who serve to further the economic, military and political interests of the donor nation(s). Increasing this aid to say about 3 % or something is unlikely to make a dramatic shift in the economy. The amount of money spent in Iraq is about a billion dollars a day and the amount of money spent in bank bailouts is well over $2 trillion. However the unfulfilled commitments made to fight poverty was about a total of $100 billion ( all G-8 countries put together; I need to check the numbers myself though)
Edit:

From World Vision

Some G8 countries -- most notably Italy -- have suggested that the fiscal squeeze in Europe and North America makes delivery of current pledges unaffordable. But on closer scrutiny this is a flimsy alibi: the global aid increase promised by 2010 is equivalent to just 2% of the total stimulus package announced for G8 countries at the London G20, and would be equivalent to about 1% of public spending in most EU member states.

Inaction by the G8 is the real unaffordable luxury, not least from the perspective of the 9.2 million children who continue to die each year from easily preventable disease. Where the G8 has delivered additional aid for areas such as health, it has made a lasting and positive impact.
A 90% reduction in deaths from measles in Africa since 2001, and provision of life-saving antiretroviral drugs for 4 million people with HIV and AIDS would not have been possible without the support of G8 countries. This is a platform that needs to be built on when the G8 meet in L'Aquila, not squandered.


(2) Yes, it is true that not spending money on buying retail goods is going to slow down the economy of a country like the United States. However, aid agencies located in the US can procure the required aid materials be they food, medicines or machinery and technology for supply of clean water, etc from US companies itself. If that can be done, the demand for these goods would be maintained and perhaps even increased. Of course, that would mean that the the demand for some other product would go down in relative measure but that can be countered by an adjustment in the economy and if these changes take place gradually there should be no problem. Also, the very rich may not really contribute to increasing demand in the consumer sector as they tend to invest in stocks, bonds and shares. I doubt if economic activity would take more than a negligible hit (if any at all) should they decide to donate more.

(3) heavymetalbackwards: Your reasoning is precisely the reason why sweatshops are considered as examples of severe exploitation- to cynically use the prevailing poverty and unemployment in the region to extract work at a horrible wage in terrible conditions with no benefits. It is analogous to you having lots of money on your hands and effectively coercing a poor starving kid into a labor-slave promising to feed the person everyday in return.

(4)Existence of sweatshops as such has nothing to do with industrialization. Sweatshops in third world operated by corporate giants in developed countries are usually involved in the manufacture of consumer goods using unskilled labor. In fact industrialization would require that indigenous industries develop and establish themselves in the region without depending on the agricultural economy for growth and progress. Globalization has played a part in precluding such a thing from happening in fact.