Section 9
Final Project Installment 1
For this installment I choose to look into “Ethics in the
Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter” and in particular the
chapter of “Good Charity, Bad
Charity”. As the title suggests this
chapter explores ideas that, while all charity is beneficial and a great thing,
not all categorizes of charity are as beneficial as others. Before reading the
chapter I almost immediately disagreed, in my mind all forms of charity were
equal. While one may be more beneficial in some aspect, in the end they would
all weigh evenly in one aspect or another.
Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors suggests philanthropy in
health and safety, education, arts and culture, human and civil rights, and
environment. Knowing that all these are good causes to donate to, they ask,
“What is the most urgent issue” and that “there’s no objective answer to that
question”. The book then compares “health and safety” and “arts and culture” by
donating $100,000 to each. For Health
and Safety one would donate the money to help people suffering from trachoma,
which causes blindness in third world countries, but is treatable for $100, and
for arts and culture one would donate to build a new wing of an art museum. At
first glance in my mind this is a simple answer. Since the art museum is already
built and fully functioning the more important issue would be saving people
from blindness. Even though the new museum wing has the potentially to affect
millions of people, the thousand people that you could save from blindness
should be the more urgent issue since this has the potential to destroy ones
life. While the book agrees with me it does give a nice way of thinking about
this. If the new wing of the museum was built but a demon was going to curse
every hundredth person to visit the new wing with fifteen years of blindness,
would you still visit the new wing? I would not; to me the risk is not worth
the reward. Even if this were changed to every thousandth person I would still
be to scared to go. If you agree then you must also agree that “the harm of one
persons blindness out ways the benefits received from the new wing”.
While I agree that there’s “no objective way of answering
this question”, my belief that all charity is equal did change after comparing
a few for myself, I now believe that some charities are of more importance than
others. While I do see the value in arts and museums, personally, I will always
choose the charity that directly affects someone’s life. Weather it is helping
people in third would countries avoid blindness or donating to help keep after
school programs available to children. While you will help a much smaller
portion of people, the affect made on there lives will be far greater and worth
while.
This is a good point, it really makes you think!
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ReplyDelete"There's no objective way of answering" just means, I think, that there are more worthy causes than we can practically address as we ought, but as a practical matter we must do what we can... so we must choose and rank those worthy causes. We need a criterion of choice, and it's hard to argue against placing life and quality-of-life issues (like blindness) at the top of our list. Most important is NOT to throw up our hands in resignation at the thought that we can never do enough. We have to try.
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