“Is it less altruistic to support charities that we sympathise with/relate to, as opposed to supporting all charities within our means?”
Thank you, Arjun Sambhi, for another head-scratcher!
Altruism speaks to our motives, rather than specifically the things we do. We act from altruism when two things happen at once: firstly, when we are motivated to make someone else better off; secondly, when we want them to be better off for their own sake. If I wanted to make someone better off because it would make me feel less guilty about something I had done, then my concern is my own interests. This is not altruism. Whilst giving to charities that defend the interests of groups we are members of might be self-serving in an indirect way, that doesn’t necessarily mean that benefiting ourselves is what motivated us. We can altruistically give to charities that help ourselves if our motivations line up right.
I think this is normally what we’re doing when we give to charities. Most charities work for the benefit of some group of people. Supporting a charity is intended to serve the interests of that group. Supporting that charity is important to us because we care about the interests of members of that group – we are motivated for their sake. It might even be easier to give altruistically in these cases, because we can more easily imagine what ‘the sake’ of the people affected looks like when it’s a group we identify with. The morally important interests of ‘people like us’ are often more intelligible to us than the sakes of people we don’t understand. Even if we might eventually benefit from the charity’s work, as long as other people’s benefits are what we’re looking for, and we’re looking for them because we care about their interests, we are giving altruistically.
The worry is that we might only be motivated to act for other peoples’ sakes if we understand them as ‘like us’ in some way. Kant famously put respect for human dignity, or humanitas, at the heart of proper moral motivation. There is something wrong with our altruism if we only recognise the dignity of others like us. Humanitas must encompass people unlike ourselves. A large part of moral education and practice is learning how to meet other moral patients on their own terms. I do not think, however, that this means we must be wholly impartial in how we behave altruistically. Putting aside worries about how we would support every charity we could afford to (perhaps with only a penny each), let us consider whether we should.
Bernard Williams famously objected to this kind of impartiality requirement. If you can only save one of two people from a fire, he argued, the fact that one of them is your wife and the other a stranger shouldn’t be a tiebreaker. It should settle the matter for you immediately. Being partial, deciding what to care about, is part of what makes us into the particular people we are. We have reasons to give to lots of charities, but they don’t all amount to individual moral demands on us. As long as we are striving to relate to people who are unlike us, there is still altruistic space to prioritise charities that focus on the matters we care about.
What do you think? Is it less altruistic to support charities that we relate to? Let us know in the comments.
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Image: The Three Graces, from Sandro Botticelli’s painting Primavera in the Uffizi Gallery. In Greek mythology, the Graces or Charites are the goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity, goodwill, and fertility.
I started studying philosophy at the University of Glasgow back in 2011. I was officially a psychology student back then, but I jumped ship almost immediately, and now I'm working on my PhD at the University of Kent. My interests sit mostly in moral and political philosophy, but I have that magpie-like tendency to dip into all the areas of philosophy I know less about as soon as I see a shiny idea. My research focuses on autonomy in mood disorders, pulling together moral psychology, some phenomenology, and moral philosophy. I've also been getting more and more interested in Epistemic Injustices recently (which ties in nicely with my core research), so for now that might be my new favourite area in philosophy.