I want to give them money but since my childhood my parents pretty much told me that they are all either faking it or are too lazy to go to work for money. I mean, I guess they can go to work but not everyone gets accepted to work as easy as it sounds like.
Kant had a point there, but I think he also fails to address the problem.
The existence of charitable organizations means that the government has failed that group of people. Charitable organizations are extremely inefficient and sometimes are prone to the exact problems he brings up with donating directly to individuals, or they may prioritize certain individuals with certain religious beliefs over others.
Charitable organizations need to be folded and replaced with government programs. We don’t need to be paying CEOs salaries when we’re just trying to help someone on the street.
The thing about “Don’t do X, because we SHOULD do Y”
Is that nobody’s doing Y, and we’re nowhere close to getting there, so, until we are, we should support the X.
So then we should ignore Kant and give money to individuals because it’s better than nothing
Sure - if your alternative is doing nothing. It’s not like he’s saying giving money to beggars is immoral, it’s just amoral.
Amoral means not morally relevant. Something that is morally neutral is not amoral, it’s morally neutral.
E.g it is morally neutral to pet a dog, it is amoral to like the colour blue.
Normally in moral philosophy one would avoid this confusion by classifying morally relevant actions/outcomes as “bad”,“neutral”, or “good”.
And Kant would, if I read him correctly, argue that giving money to a beggar is not a moral action - it’s a selfish action, and not morally bad or good as such. It doesn’t have to do with morality, it has to do with our need to feel better about ourselves. :)
Or what if we support anyone who can help in the way that they are able and feel comfortable helping?
Trying to help, helps, even if they aren’t helping how you think they should.
That was the point of my comment.
I’ve been involved as a treasurer for a number of “medium” charities in Australia. Most recently one providing free legal services to the disadvantaged, and another running a refuge for homeless youth.
As an aside, bear in mind that I as a treasurer as well as the entire board are volunteers - well qualified and experienced professionals donating their time to ensure that the organisation is run efficiently and is maximising the benefit to the community.
Your comments really grind my gears. They’re born of shallow social media type thinking. These falsehoods are commonly used as a “reason” why one ought not to donate to charities.
Certainly there are overpaid CEOs, but these are a minority. Recently the charity running the refuge got a new CEO. He had been a police superintendent. He took a pay cut of about two thirds in order to be our CEO. He said that he had spent most of his career locking people up, and wanted to spend the last part of his career changing kids trajectories before they got involved with the law.
Imagine saying that this organisation would be more efficient of it were subsumed by the government, so the CEO-equivalent could be paid 3x as much.
I read @bustrpoindextr as not criticizing the charities directly, but rather reflect that they represent a systematic failure of government structures. We shouldn’t need homeless shelters or soup kitchens - there shouldn’t be homelessness or hunger. Taxation and sensible public spending should render charity unnecessary.
Which is a nice thought - I wouldn’t judge people for giving their money to political interest organizations promoting solidarity rather than directly to charities.
It’s a fine balance between patching the flaws of the system and trying to replace it all together. In some extreme cases charity might make the system just bearable enough that it’s not overthrown, which might occasionally do more harm than good in the long run.
A refuge isn’t really a shelter for people who are “homeless”.
How would a government provide temporary accommodation to a 12 year old who is at risk of abuse?
The need for this type of refuge isn’t the product of a shitty housing market.
Note also, most of the funding comes from government agencies.
He should name the charity with which he speaks of, “United way”
The rest are mostly as you describe
I’m not sure this is a valid critique of Kant - he invites us to step back and consider how we would address the problems more rationally and in ways that could be universal rules, rather than merely as an emotional response. We might very well conclude from this reflection that we should organize politically and deal with systematic injustice rather than donating to the local soup kitchen.
Personally I think there’s room for both - in an ideal world the public should guarantee a baseline, but there might still be room for charities. The soup kitchen might not only help the people it serves food to - it might also give a sense of purpose to those volunteering for it.
I’m not saying the soup kitchen shouldn’t exist. It’s absolutely necessary, it should just be part of the guaranteed baseline, provided by the government.
Yes, I think I got your point - the soup kitchen should be financed by taxes rather than volunteer contributions by charitable souls. And I of course completely agree.
Even then, there might be room for a charity providing a social space for those with fewer means or who find themselves in a rough spot in life. I think no matter how well the state is doing in guaranteeing for people’s needs, there’ll be some room for civil society to make a contribution; if nothing else because the sense of purpose it can give the helpers is in its own right a goal worth pursuing.
I think ideally the point of charity organizations should be a stop gap measure that identifies issues the government needs to address, and then temporarily addresses them.
How that works in practice 🤷♂️
You trust the government enough to properly provide for those most in need, but the government has pushed the work onto the very charities that you are arguing against. The government leaks tens of billions annually on preserving the needs of the richest members of our society, a quarter of which could have made a massive impact on world hunger.
I don’t think the government or private organizations generally have anyone’s best interest in mind when they do what they do, besides those who have the most influence.
Source on charities being extremely inefficient?
I mean, you can look anywhere, whether it’s upwards of 70% of medical donations not being used: https://academic.oup.com/inthealth/article/11/5/379/5420717?login=false#151492984
Also you can dive into the problems with definitions of “the cause” https://hbr.org/2009/06/beware-of-highly-efficient-cha
A charity can loosely define what counts as their cause which means they can tell you that 95 cents on the dollar go to the cause, even if it’s only 20 cents.
Moreover it’s really suspect that the rich keep getting richer even in the “nonprofit” sector: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/4/24/15377056/big-charities-best-charities-evaluation-nonprofit
Furthermore, even from an innocent standing. When you have multiple charities working on the same thing, that’s crazy inefficient.
Let’s talk about the Red Cross, great organization. One of the things they do is blood donations. They’re responsible for about 35% of the blood donations in the US, the rest come from other non profits.
That means there’s competition among the non profit blood donation organizations to provide blood for emergencies. Whether they want to compete or not, they have to.
Just from a blanket statement, if you moved all of those blood donations under a single entity, you remove a lot of inefficiencies.
You don’t need to advertise for multiple organizations, you don’t need to coordinate with all those different organizations during a crisis, you don’t have the same overhead for the same problems across multiple organizations. It’s just by design, inefficient. It’s not their fault.
Government programs are literally no better when it comes to administrative costs. In fact way worse in the vast majority of cases.
CEO’s are only a thing with very large charities on the order of the Red Cross, (or rich people money laundering charities). Your local shelter or food bank isn’t going to be having a high overhead, in fact it’s going to be much lower than the government agencies because of almost entirely free volunteer work. The point where the government is more efficient is due to the fact that welfare fraud is a crime, so people are naturally less inclined to lie to receive benefits.