When I got back to Australia at the start of last financial year, I was in debt a couple k to my parents for the flight home and getting started in Melbourne without a job. Bank account negative, sleeping in spare rooms/on couches. Despite still being in the red last October, I recently gave more than 10% of my 16/17 gross income to the Against Malaria Foundation. This blog post explains:
Why Give?I recently finished Ethics in the Real World by Peter Singer, a collection of 82 essays and articles on a range of topics. Every piece of writing on every topic is incredibly interesting and thought provoking. They are each around five minutes long, and I tended to listen to one then think about it for a while before I could move on to the next one. One of the main takeaways for me was about how cognitive dissonance affects me, even though I try to negate it as much as possible. There are a lot of ethical hypotheticals he brings up which really make you think about your place in the world. Here’s a random example I liked: You’re in a burning art warehouse, trying to escape. You head down a hallway to the exit, knowing that nobody will be able to come in and save any of the art or anyone inside. You pass a set of doors. The one on the right contains three paintings you could carry, each worth over a million dollars. The door on the left has a little girl whose leg has been broken by a falling rafter. You must choose between saving the girl and saving the paintings. Which door do you go for? Almost every human goes for the left door. The more ethical choice in my opinion is to go for the right door. $5m in paintings that can be saved and sold, the money going to a charity which saves literally 1,000 lives, compared with one life here and now. What would I do? Probably poop myself with fear, but afterwards I would definitely try to save the child. The ethical choice isn’t necessarily the right one, or the easy one. If I got the paintings, I would have to live with the image of the burning girl for the rest of my life (until Brienne beheads me, Stannis, what were you thinking, she was just a little girl). I’ve also been listening to a lot of Sam Harris, which gets me thinking about the complete good luck that has me in the situation I’m in, and the complete bad luck that has someone else born into poverty and treated cruelly. Humans tend to think that they would end up in whatever position they are in, with similar values, regardless of where they were born. This is simply not true. Someone born to a rich Toorak family in 2000 does no more to deserve their situation than someone born in Mozambique in 1980. The experience that you have growing up are severely based on those circumstances, not on anything you do yourself, so you don’t really “deserve” them either. So I can think of my current situation as “I’ve got these things and I’m going to have myself a great life”, or I can think “I’ve won the lottery, probably should share some of the spoils.” As I mentioned earlier, last July to October, I had money for food from my parents and a somewhere to sleep thanks to my friends. Plenty of people don't have that net. I get that you don’t want to be sitting at the pub, tossing up between getting a second pint or giving that $10 to charity. You don’t want to be out for brunch talking about this stuff and occasionally looking at each other thinking “why are we spending $30 each on brunch when that’s the same price as 6 mosquito nets”. But maybe you do want to be thinking about how you can save money and have an equally fulfilling experience every now and then, even if it’s a bit more effort socially. The reason I’m not giving away all my money is because I find young philosopher William MacAskill’s view of “give what you can while maintaining a fulfilling life” more reasonable than Singer’s “give everything you can” (which comes across in some of his essays, but isn’t necessarily his view on it). For reference, MacAskill gives everything he earns over I think 35,000 USD (pre tax) to charity. I’m not sure where Singer sits, but I think they both live very humble and minimalist lives. I bet MacAskill gets the second pint at the pub without thinking of himself as a bad person, but he views the relaxation as part of the emotional maintenance he needs to do so he can carry on with the good work. Why the Against Malaria Foundation? One of my favourite Waking Up episode is the one with William MacAskill about effective altruism. He’s really into finding out the actual nature of things, rather than making assumptions and going with what other people think. GiveWell embodies this, and evaluates charities based on their actual effectiveness. The results surprisingly show that even among charities that do what they say they will do, there are many charities that have a zero or negative effect on those they are trying to help. Also, many people give because their friends are part of, or support a particular organisation, rather than that organisation actually being effective. I’m not going to sit here and say “don’t donate to breast cancer charities” or something like that. Personally, the way I see it, if ten lives can be saved (extended for 50 years) for the same amount of money as the extension of one life for ten years, that is an objective ethical no-brainer. That said, if everyone gave to one single charity, that wouldn’t be a great situation, so variety is necessary. Also, I do understand that part of the social contract in many parts of the world involves looking out for those around you, and there are some great evolutionary reasons for this. Similarly, if I get sick and require expensive treatment, it would be a tough call to say “all g, give it to charity, I’ll just check out now”, even if there were a mechanism to do that with insurance money that would be otherwise spent on treatment. Why tell people? Social proof. Humans tend to do things that other humans do, and tend not to do things that other humans don’t do. This obviously isn’t true in all cases, otherwise there would be no progress in the world, but for the majority, it holds true. It’s generally held by western governments that giving 2% of your gross annual household income to charity is what people in wealthy countries should do. The national average in Australia is currently around 0.2%. I’ve contributed to that number being low based on the fact that I’ve spent a fair bit of my adult life living for me (I’ve got some catching up to do). The 2% target depends on what that total household income is ($50k vs $500k) and what your commitments to others are (many dependents vs 28yo healthy man with no dependents). Anyway, if I give a bunch of money to charity and don’t tell anyone, the effect I have is the effect my money has when used by that charity. If I share it on Facebook and write my reasoning on my blog, there’s the potential for other people to start giving, give more, or be more likely to give in the future. If all my friends were writing about this stuff once a year around tax time, I probably would have foregone some luxuries in the past and donated more to charity over the years, which I think would have been a good thing. ActionSo, friends, now it’s up to you. I could ask you to give money to an effective charity. I could ask you to think about giving money, which will make you more likely to in the future, or more likely to give more if you’re already giving. But the fact that you’ve made it to this point means the topic likely interests you and you’re already thinking about it more for having remained engaged. Maybe you should just go to the pub and buy two pints :)
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