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I’m more of a consequentialist; I consider a larger philanthropist who cares about public attribution to be more admirable than someone who is a smaller philant

by dsacco 9y ago

I’m more of a consequentialist; I consider a larger philanthropist who cares about public attribution to be more admirable than someone who is a smaller philanthropist but doesn’t care about public attribution. Personally, I would absolutely like to have my name on something if I were to donate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars towards it. In my opinion the intention or ego of a philanthropist is approximately negligible when it comes to their charity and donations. If a billionaire wants to solve a problem out of a sense of personal grandiosity, or in a vain attempt at figurative immortality: so be it. At least they have the capability to do something good and are actually following through with it. In a vague sense there might be more nobility in anonymous charity, but nobility doesn’t contribute real resources to a problem. Phrased another way: if a billionaire donates $100M to a charity and a pauper donates $1 to the same charity, but the billionaire requires his name to be affiliated, which of the two is doing more “good”? If you believe the answer is the poorer person, your axioms are fundamentally incompatible with consequentialism, because you’re incorporating selflessness into your definition of good. But if you believe that the billionaire is doing more good in this example despite his vanity, you’re a consequentialist - as they say, we’ve established terms, and now we’re just haggling.

herodotus 9y ago
It is not a question of "good" it is a question of my admiration of the donor. On my organizations drives, I completely supported the naming campaigns because I accepted the view that some donors generosity is tied to their naming. I am happy that those named people chose to support a cause that I care about. But I always instructed staff members to honour the small donor as much as the large - it might be as much of a percentage of their net worth in both cases. And I will always have respect for the donors of large amounts who do not need to be named.
burntwater 9y ago
You seem to be implying that philanthropists who don't do naming rights only give smaller donations. Any evidence to back that up? If Philanthropist A donates $10 million and asks for his name on the building, while Philanthropist B donates $10 million and requests no name on the building, I will absolutely have much more respect for Philanthropist B.
- dsacco 9y ago
  > You seem to be implying that philanthropists who don't do naming rights only give smaller donations. No, I’m not. I constructed extreme upper and lower bounds as a baseline for comparing axioms. That was the purpose of my reference to the apocryphal, “now we’re just haggling over price” quote.
  - burntwater 9y ago
    Axioms that don't exist in the comment you replied to, so I'm unsure why you're bringing them up here.
    - dsacco 9y ago
      Of course they do. Axioms are inherent to all positive statements, even if they’re implicit. And you can’t construct (coherent) normative statements without positive ones.
rhizome 9y ago
It's not about doing "good," they're both doing "good." It's about milking the charity like you can't give money away without getting something in return.
- dsacco 9y ago
  My point in this line of questioning is purely dialectic; in essense, I am indirectly targeting the question, “Why is something undesirable, if it is not bad?” So we have a few possibilities: - Is demanding attribution in philanthropy bad? If it’s bad, how does it decrease the concrete “goodness” of the philanthropy? - Is it not bad? Then why is it undesirable? - Is it neither bad nor undesirable? Then why is it relevant? People have (normative) reasons for personal admiration, and they can’t really be right or wrong. I’m interested in digging at the normatives. Generalizing this further, we can say that people are easily offended by grandiosity and vanity, or at the very least find it distasteful. As a philosophical question I consider it interesting to wonder why that is the case, in a scenario where that person is not doing anything “bad” from a consequentialist perspective. As it turns out, anonymity and attribution in philanthopy seem to be a good real-world setting for this question, because narcissism appears to become invalid as a signalling heuristic.
  - csaOY2dRRuysksq 9y ago
    Charitable gift exchange is a zero-sum game between giver and recipient. On the table is the money in question, attribution, tax relief, future control of the money, and the conditions for future gifts. Attribution is essentially a public statement on behalf of the recipient that the giver is a good person. These statements have a value. You could not pay me $10 to say that Bill Gates is a good person, but you could probably pay me $100,000. However if Bill Gates wanted to give me $100,000 without attribution, I would be spared the cost of saying I thought he was a good person in public.
  - didibus 9y ago
    I think the answer to your question relates to the ability of the billionaire to do what he wants on his terms. You have to ask yourself what are the implicating consequences of this kind of concentrated influence? So I think in terms of consequentialism, you need to look bigger. Should the billionaire be further rewarded for philanthropic actions? What else would he have done with the money without those rewards? How do the rewards to big donors affect the donations and volunteering of smaller participators? What was the long lasting consequence of the big donation which awarded rewards to a big donor? The answer to that is complicated, but could change the consequence of the system, so are relevent to a consequentialist perspective. Of most noteworthy to me, I think is the idea that a single entity can have so much concentrated wealth in the first place, where we now need to put motivations in place for them to give it away. Why award so much wealth to that entity to begin with? What consequences does this has on the moral objective you're looking to get as a consequence of our system? And so, if you believe having billionaires generates overall bad consequences, then you'll want to demotivate people to become one, thus you might start by shaming them for their wealth, by conveying to their ego that they are not special, loved or admired for those traits, and that their big donations is frowned upon, that we'd rather they just volunteered their time, because no one cares to know how much they were able to donate. But, if you frame the problem in the small, and don't explore alternatives, or quesrion the consequences of the given frame, ya, a billionaire which gives hundreds of million to charity in exchange for a thousand of dollar statue is an all around good deal for the charity in terms of consequentialism.
paulsutter 9y ago
A better comparison may be, (a) $100M for a museum named after the donor, versus (b) Elon Musk spending his last $100M on SpaceX. Donor (a) seems long on ego, short on imagination and ability. We wouldn’t have the same view of the person donating a dollar to the same museum.
specialist 9y ago
I agree. For example, the consequence of the Koch brother’s philathropy is the normalization of their radical (belligerently anti-democratic) political agenda.

by dsacco 9y ago

herodotus 9y ago

It is not a question of "good" it is a question of my admiration of the donor. On my organizations drives, I completely supported the naming campaigns because I accepted the view that some donors generosity is tied to their naming. I am happy that those named people chose to support a cause that I care about. But I always instructed staff members to honour the small donor as much as the large - it might be as much of a percentage of their net worth in both cases. And I will always have respect for the donors of large amounts who do not need to be named.

burntwater 9y ago

You seem to be implying that philanthropists who don't do naming rights only give smaller donations. Any evidence to back that up? If Philanthropist A donates $10 million and asks for his name on the building, while Philanthropist B donates $10 million and requests no name on the building, I will absolutely have much more respect for Philanthropist B.

dsacco 9y ago
> You seem to be implying that philanthropists who don't do naming rights only give smaller donations. No, I’m not. I constructed extreme upper and lower bounds as a baseline for comparing axioms. That was the purpose of my reference to the apocryphal, “now we’re just haggling over price” quote.
- burntwater 9y ago
  Axioms that don't exist in the comment you replied to, so I'm unsure why you're bringing them up here.
  - dsacco 9y ago
    Of course they do. Axioms are inherent to all positive statements, even if they’re implicit. And you can’t construct (coherent) normative statements without positive ones.

rhizome 9y ago

It's not about doing "good," they're both doing "good." It's about milking the charity like you can't give money away without getting something in return.

dsacco 9y ago
My point in this line of questioning is purely dialectic; in essense, I am indirectly targeting the question, “Why is something undesirable, if it is not bad?” So we have a few possibilities: - Is demanding attribution in philanthropy bad? If it’s bad, how does it decrease the concrete “goodness” of the philanthropy? - Is it not bad? Then why is it undesirable? - Is it neither bad nor undesirable? Then why is it relevant? People have (normative) reasons for personal admiration, and they can’t really be right or wrong. I’m interested in digging at the normatives. Generalizing this further, we can say that people are easily offended by grandiosity and vanity, or at the very least find it distasteful. As a philosophical question I consider it interesting to wonder why that is the case, in a scenario where that person is not doing anything “bad” from a consequentialist perspective. As it turns out, anonymity and attribution in philanthopy seem to be a good real-world setting for this question, because narcissism appears to become invalid as a signalling heuristic.
- csaOY2dRRuysksq 9y ago
  Charitable gift exchange is a zero-sum game between giver and recipient. On the table is the money in question, attribution, tax relief, future control of the money, and the conditions for future gifts. Attribution is essentially a public statement on behalf of the recipient that the giver is a good person. These statements have a value. You could not pay me $10 to say that Bill Gates is a good person, but you could probably pay me $100,000. However if Bill Gates wanted to give me $100,000 without attribution, I would be spared the cost of saying I thought he was a good person in public.
- didibus 9y ago
  I think the answer to your question relates to the ability of the billionaire to do what he wants on his terms. You have to ask yourself what are the implicating consequences of this kind of concentrated influence? So I think in terms of consequentialism, you need to look bigger. Should the billionaire be further rewarded for philanthropic actions? What else would he have done with the money without those rewards? How do the rewards to big donors affect the donations and volunteering of smaller participators? What was the long lasting consequence of the big donation which awarded rewards to a big donor? The answer to that is complicated, but could change the consequence of the system, so are relevent to a consequentialist perspective. Of most noteworthy to me, I think is the idea that a single entity can have so much concentrated wealth in the first place, where we now need to put motivations in place for them to give it away. Why award so much wealth to that entity to begin with? What consequences does this has on the moral objective you're looking to get as a consequence of our system? And so, if you believe having billionaires generates overall bad consequences, then you'll want to demotivate people to become one, thus you might start by shaming them for their wealth, by conveying to their ego that they are not special, loved or admired for those traits, and that their big donations is frowned upon, that we'd rather they just volunteered their time, because no one cares to know how much they were able to donate. But, if you frame the problem in the small, and don't explore alternatives, or quesrion the consequences of the given frame, ya, a billionaire which gives hundreds of million to charity in exchange for a thousand of dollar statue is an all around good deal for the charity in terms of consequentialism.

paulsutter 9y ago

A better comparison may be, (a) $100M for a museum named after the donor, versus (b) Elon Musk spending his last $100M on SpaceX. Donor (a) seems long on ego, short on imagination and ability. We wouldn’t have the same view of the person donating a dollar to the same museum.

specialist 9y ago

I agree. For example, the consequence of the Koch brother’s philathropy is the normalization of their radical (belligerently anti-democratic) political agenda.