Should we decide which charities to support purely on the basis of which would do the most good?
Atticus Dewe
In a world of limited time and money, it is easy to see how many are driven to wanting the maximum efficacy for their charitable contributions; perhaps because of the capitalist system that we often attempt to heal or fix the symptoms of in charitable work, we feel we must operate at maximum efficiency, and help as many people, or at least beings, as possible. Fundamentally, however, while I understand the desire for such actions, I doubt the human ability to judge what is the most good. Instead, I would embrace the unsureness in the world, and choose the destination of my charitable giving by including the value of a personal and social cause, even if it could be shown to be inefficient. What I hope to do, through following this argument, is prove that it is inherently impossible to pursue effectiveness in altruism, and that all it can cause is a degradation of other values. However, that is not to say I cannot understand the perspective of an effective altruist — someone who chooses to allocate resources to do the most good. This will, to help all others as much as possible, is flawed, but inherently noble, in my opinion, because it recognizes the brutal reality of the lottery of birth, and how through capitalism, someone must always be subjugated. This is because, at its heart, the value behind charity lies in the acknowledgment that nobody chooses to be born, or who they are born as, and so, we must work to create a world with as high a chance of possible in this ‘ lottery of birth ’ of having a good life. This gives charity its inherent value, as it allows us to equalize this lottery, and work towards creating a world where as many people as possible have as fair a chance as possible. This belief system, where decisions should be made behind a veil of ignorance as to who you could be in society, because your identity in life is random, is ratified when you acknowledge the secondary brutal reality: capitalism. In inherently relying on workers contributing to businesses owned by those who then do not have to work, capitalism allows a concentration of power that culminates in extreme wealth divides, where small numbers of people have outsized control and impact on the rest of the population. This is because, through mechanisms of power such as inheritance, as well as because of profit incentives leading to limited amounts of profit being shared with workers, wealth inherently consolidates, unless there is some intervention. This then leads to most of the population being oppressed, as their lack of wealth ensures that they are locked out of the key parts of society, or at least cannot access them as well as they should. This is especially believable when you consider that the profit incentive of the ownership class means they will want to minimize the amount of their costs, and so lack the societal structures to motivate them to provide services as well as they should to the lower classes (this also means that less are inclined to charity, emphasizing the importance of having as large an impact as possible for those who do donate). However, while I have presented a binary image so far, it is far from the case. In reality, the ‘ western ’ , historically colonial nations of the world act on a macro scale as the ownership class, but additionally, inside all functionally capitalist nations exists some form of this class structure in varying degrees. These impacts manifest in the widespread poverty and illness which have affected the ‘ Global South ’ (the phrase I will be using to refer to the geographic regions of
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