How Much Does Morality Require You To Give?
Not all, nor none, nor some specific dollar value
There’s been a lot of talk recently about effective altruism and what demands it makes on giving. Contrary to the claims of its critics, effective altruists do not hold that one must give away all of their money. They’ll generally say that it would be best to give away almost all of your money—that a perfect saint would give away all their money above probably around 30,000 dollars. Crucially, this is something we should all hold! It would be a better thing if you saved a life instead of going on a vacation. But insofar as our practical moral norms of what to reasonably expect from others are built for men and not angels, we cannot expect people to give away all of their wealth. The standards for saintliness are different from the normal standards for morality.
So, then the natural question is: how much does morality require us to give? The amount we’re required to give, when we can save lives for just a few thousand dollars, is obviously more than nothing but less than everything.
Here’s a parallel question: how much are you required to give to your kids. Obviously the answer is not nothing. Similarly, ordinary norms hold that giving near the bare minimum is impermissible. If you’re very wealthy, and you only barely keep your kids healthy and fed, never spending money on anything they’d enjoy—going to restaurants for their birthday, buying toys when they’re young, and so on—you’re not meeting your demands as a parent.
Or more broadly: how great are your parental obligations? How much time do you have to spend doing nice things for your kids? Once again, there’s no clear bright line. The same goes for your obligations to your parents, friends, and the like. There’s no clear threshold—spend 10% on your kids—but what morality requires is that you do a lot. That you make helping your kids a major part of your life.
When it comes to charitable giving, I believe that the answer is the same. There is no precise dollar amount that you must give. 10% is a good heuristic, and you ought to give more if you’re wealthier. What morality requires is that it’s a big and major thing that you do. Like with regards to parenting, there isn’t a precise cutoff: morality requires that giving is one of your major life projects. C.S. Lewis, in a characteristically sharp passage, writes:
I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.
The drowning child argument is often given to argue for the obligatoriness of charitable giving. It goes like this: imagine you came across a child drowning in a pond. You could wade in to save them. But crucially, doing so would require ruining your suit. Are you morally required to save them?
Most everyone answers: of course. But then the question arises: doesn’t that also imply an obligation to give? For just a few thousand dollars, you’ll save a life. Yes, the children drowning are nearer, and you can see them directly, but those don’t seem morally relevant. You’d still be obligated to save the child if you couldn’t see them, and had to ruin a suit to swim to the bottom of a pond and press a button that would see them. Whether a person is near to you just isn’t morally important.
But now suppose that there were constantly lots and lots of children drowning. In that case, you wouldn’t be required to spend all of your time and money pulling kids out of the pond. But at the very least you’d be required to make saving those children a big deal—a major thing that you do. If we think saving the children from the pond is analogous to charitable giving, the same applies to charity.
Thus, I think that when it comes to effective giving The Moral Law doesn’t require you to give some highly exact percent of your paycheck. It isn’t that if you give 10%, you’re in the clear, but 9.9%, then you’re a moral monster, and 10.1% is just gratuitous. The more the better. No exact amount is required, but you should give enough so that it’s a major thing that you do. If you’re not sure how much to give, 10% is a safe bet!
I had a professor explain it like this one time: if you get convinced by the "drowning child" argument and give away virtually all your money, that's great and you've helped some people, but you haven't made much of a dent in the problem. It would have made a much bigger impact if lots of people had donated. But people aren't going to give away everything they have. But if you give away 10% of your income and inspire others to do so, you'll have a much greater absolute impact on the problem. For a long time I thought that's what "effective altruism" was but I think that professor was referring to something else, maybe the "giving what we can" pledge.
I kind of like the scalar approach. More is better and that's all there is to say at a fundamental level.
It's useful to construct norms around "requirements" or "obligations" (which is perhaps what this article is doing), but they're nothing more than that.