Does Philanthropic Peer Pressure or Morality Matter More?
By CATHERINE NEWMAN
Do you know
the philosopher Peter Singer’s thought exercise about charitable
giving? It’s this: Imagine you’re on your way to work, but you see a
child who has fallen into a pond and appears to be drowning. The idea of
ruining your shoes or suit — or even, say, your brand-new Christmas
iPhone — would not keep you from rescuing that child. You would, in
fact, do it again the next day. So, why don’t we? What is keeping us
from giving more to ill and malnourished children around the world,
whose lives could be saved by the cost of a pair of shoes?
KJ Dell’Antonia
We grapple with it as a family, the problem
of weighing our own luxuries and creature comforts against another
person’s ability to simply live. And I just don’t know — about why we do
what we do, or whether we’re talking to our children about it in a good
way. For example, our Haiti Jar. These are funds earmarked for the
organization Partners in Health, and
they’re generated when we decide consciously to give up something we
don’t need so that others can have something they do. So, for example,
despite my wanting of an eggnog latte, I make coffee at home and plunk
into the jar the $3.50 I would have spent at a cafe. We commit to
getting our movies from the library, even if one of the discs of “Parks
and Recreation” turns out to be scratched, and we add the Netflix
savings to the jar.
Come the end of the year, the kids do their
own allocation of funds (allowance that’s been put aside for the
purpose), and we decide, as we do every year we’ve lived in this house
with its kitchen so full of boots and thawing sludge that I want to kill
myself, that we don’t need to build a mudroom. We might not even have
the clearance to build a mudroom, and it’s possible that I would rather
give the money away than talk awkwardly to our neighbor about an
easement. And what if they were our children, lying hungry or ill in our
arms, and we looked across the world to see the “problem” of somebody’s
excess shoes valued over our barest sustenance? It’s hard to measure
the precise weight I put on each of the many arguments against
renovation, but the mudroom money we’ve saved, a sizable amount, goes
into the Haiti Jar.
Besides constantly wet socks, one problem
that arises is the inadvertent cultivation of a certain smugness (“We’re
the kind of people who …”), a certain hypocritical sanctimoniousness,
even as we continue to go out for chicken wings and buy organic
dishwasher detergent and drive our Subaru and live just generally huge,
at least globally speaking. Writing this now, I asked my kids what they
thought about our choices — why we continue to live relatively
decadently when we know that the money we spend could save lives. We do some; obviously, we could do more.
“In some ways it’s really complicated,” my
10-year-old daughter says. “I wouldn’t describe us as a selfish family.”
She falters. “But maybe it’s not actually complicated. We’re basically
selfish. I mean, in a nice way, but still.” Oof. Our 14-year-old son
defends us, “I bet we give relatively more than most people,” he says.
Then again, this boy is more or less Alex
Keaton from “Family Ties:” the money-loving kid stuck in a family of
disheveled hippies. (We showed our friend, the columnist Ron Lieber,
Ben’s second-grade “Map of My Heart” painting, with “$” taking up
nearly all of the available landscape, and “family” and “the world”
tacked onto the bottom as an afterthought. I think Ron is still
laughing.) Ben is caring and kind, but he has expensive tastes. I think
he wishes we would neither build a mudroom nor give the money away, but
rather fly first-class to Hawaii so that he can snorkel among the
colorful fishes before sinking into a gold-plated armchair with the
Hammacher Schlemmer catalog. Instead, he is stuck snorkeling in the pond
by our campsite, where he can see only muck, bare legs and the
dollar-bill signs in his own eyes.
Maybe I’m goading him, but what I feel is
confused. “Comparing ourselves to other people doesn’t seem like a very
good test of moral behavior,” I say. How do we justify putting even tiny
amounts of money aside for our own hypothetical futures — college,
retirement — when someone else’s real, material present is in jeopardy? I
want to be more like Zell Kravinsky, the utilitarian philanthropist who
gave one of his kidneys away to a stranger. We live in a world, it
seems to me, that demands immoderate action. Is Ben right, that it isn’t
true morality but relative morality that defines that action?
“If we knew other people were giving more
than us, you think we would give more than we do,” I say. Ben nods,
considers, then says: “If everyone we knew lived in a one-room house and
gave all their money away, we’d probably do that, too. But we don’t.
You’re influenced by everyone else’s decisions. And then you try to give
more than what is typical.” It’s like philanthropic peer pressure.
Keeping up with the charitable Joneses.
And that just feels wrong. Cry me a river,
right? Philanthropy — talk about a first-world problem. But if St.
Francis of Assisi was right, it really is in giving that we receive. And
maybe I just want more.
