Topics Ethics

Question How much, if any, of our money should we donate to try and alleviate the profound levels of human suffering which exist in many parts of the world? I assume we accept that we have a strong moral obligation to alleviate human suffering if it is within our power and that this obligation becomes all the sharper if we benefit materially from the forces which keep people in poverty. For instance some would argue this is the case in Africa. Say I could live in relative if basic comfort on 50% of my salary. Am I morally obliged to donate the other 50% to initiatives which aim to redress the life-threatening poverty in which other people live? I accept that long-term solutions to the problem may be provided by government action on trade etc. over which I as an individual have little or no control. But I would like to know whether, in the absence of these long-terms solutions, the panel feels that I (together what I assume is the vast majority of westerners) am acting immorally by donating only a small proportion of my relative wealth.

Accepted:
November 17, 2005

Comments

Let's distinguish cases along the lines of your second sentence. Begin with the least disturbing case, where we have neither contributed to, not benefited from, severe poverty or its causes. Their severe poverty is due to a meteorite, say, and our wealth is well-earned through hard work and good planning and husbanding of resources.

In this case, it would surely be immoral to do nothing to help people who are suffering greatly and struggling for the survival of themselves and their families. I do not think there is a clear-cut amount or percentage one ought to give in such a case. The reason is not just that circumstances vary among the more affluent (a millionaire should give a larger percentage than you), but also that the moral assessment is scalar here: On the scale of possible contributions, there is no sharp point demarcating "too little" from "enough" (or "immoral" from "moral"). Even someone who is giving 20 percent of her teacher's income has moral reason to give more (people are starving, and children are dying), but one would not call her immoral if she did not.

It is important, here and often, to add the reminder that what really matters is not the amount of money you give away, but the amount of harm your gift prevents. It is important, therefore, to aim for a tax-deductible gift (so that, holding fixed the cost to yourself) you can give more. And it is even more important to give to an effective organization that actually prevents harm in a cost-effective way -- even if it cannot, in the kind of world we're in, prevent most or all of it. I have often been astonished seeing people spend a lot of time choosing among cars or mutual funds and then giving hardly any thought at all to the allocation of their giving.

The real world you are concered with (Africa) does not exemplify the least disturbing case. In this world, we are benefiting from injustice -- from the historical injustice that gave us possession of our country and from the ongoing injustice of lop-sided rules of trade, finance, and investment. And we are contributing to injustice as well, when we participate in our country's designing and imposing such rules or in recognizing wholly illegitimate rulers as entitled to sell us "their" country's resources and to borrow in its name, thereby entrenching themselves in power. We actually face then the most disturbing case: We are both contributing to and benefiting from severe poverty and its causes.

Assuming that (as you write) you can do little to promote institutional reform, you should at the very least prevent your fair share of the harm we together are responsible for, insofar as you can do so out of the benefits you derive from this injustice. How much of a contribution would this require?

Suppose we define severe poverty in terms of something like the World Bank's $2/day poverty line. Residents of the US would count as poor by this standard if they had less than $1082 per person in 2005. In poor countries $300 are typically enough to get above this poverty line. About 43 percent of humankind, some 2700 million people, are reported to be living below this line.

Collectively, the global poor have annual income of about $400 billion and would need about $300 billion more to reach the $2/day poverty line. The non-poor 57 percent of humankind have collective income of about $40,000 billion, with eighty percent of that going to the high-income countries containing under 16 percent of humankind. Given a global average income of over $6000 per person per year, severe poverty could clearly be avoided through just global and national institutional arangements.

On a minimalist account of economic justice, which requires merely the avoidance of severe poverty, the world's affluent are collectively responsible for the $300 billion poverty gap and all the harms it entails -- such as 18 million annual deaths from poverty-related causes (one third of all human deaths), including 10.6 million children under age 5. If we all gave about one percent of our gross incomes, in a perfectly efficient way, toward poverty eradication, we would compensate for our contribution to injustice and end severe poverty. This is the very least we each should do, especially since we are profiting to a much greater extent from historical and ongoing injustices. Even if we do this successfully, we are not yet helping the global poor. We have merely, at best, avoided being net contributors to the harms inflicted upon them.