Uncharitable Thoughts

Sooner or later it comes up; someone comes along and says snarkily , “Why are you working with greyhound rescue/heritage preservation/local football/whatever when there are children starving to death in Africa? Wouldn’t that be a more moral use of your resources?”

This is particularly irritating, of course, when it comes (as it very often does) from someone who hasn’t really made any effort for either the greyhounds or the African children and who’s just making a pre-emptive strike in case you’re going to ask him to, but there is a real argument there, and it does deserve an answer.

The problem with this approach is that as an argument it’s altogether too good. Taken to its logical conclusion, it would involve everybody in the world getting together, coming to an agreement on which single individual in the world is absolutely the worst off of anybody, and fixing that person’s problems.

And then moving on to the second priority, and so on down the list.

That way we could be sure that our funds were only going to the most deserving case.

There might be a world out there somewhere in which this would work, but it’s not the world we live in. Our world doesn’t have a single scale of value on which we rank everybody and everything. We weight our preferences according to our histories and our responsibilities and our beliefs and our capacities. We look for areas where our talents can be put to use. We choose between making a large difference to a small cause and making a fractional improvement in a worldwide problem.

And all of this is quite proper.

This isn’t to say you can’t do more, or do better, or do both. But the ideal world isn’t one where everybody is working for the same good cause – an ideal world is one where every good cause has someone willing to take it on.