Felicifia is an online community for all things related to the utilitarianism ethics system. See the tag list for catergories.
New users: see this welcome message.
In a previous post, the question was raised as to how much charitable donations to one cause take away from donations to other causes. The topic can be extended to "charitable activities" more generally: Do people have a fixed "charity budget" of money and energy, such that after they've spent some amount of that budget, they feel relieved of further obligations? Or is charitableness more variable, such that small amounts of charity might snowball into bigger amounts of charity that wouldn't have otherwise occurred?
One arena in which this question has already been raised is in the context of companies promising to give away some fraction of the sales price of their goods. The Product Red campaign is a well known example of this. Many of the participating companies donate relatively modest shares of sales revenue (e.g., 10% for Apple iTunes store cards). If, as a result of buying Red products, people feel somewhat relieved of their charitable obligations and decrease their ordinary donations by more than 10% of the purchase price of the product, the result is a net loss (assuming their other donations would have been equally cost-effective as the Red money directed to the Global Fund). This scenario seems to be part of the motivation behind the Buy (Less) Crap response to Product Red.
Two counterarguments have been raised to this criticism: (1) International health is a cause that Americans usually don't contribute toward on their own. If money spent in that area is sufficiently more cost-effective than ordinary charitable donations, then even if the Red campaign did reduce overall charity, it would be worth the cost. (2) The campaign raises awareness. This point is especially important if you think your cause is much more urgent than the other social problems that people usually think about.
A related dilemma could arise in other contexts. For instance, imagine a utilitarian entrepreneur who founds a company that sells, say, sports video games (or something else that itself has no "redeeming social value"). The utilitarian then donates 90% of his take-home income to, say, Population Services International (PSI). Assuming his customers approve and are mildly supportive of the charity, should the utilitarian publicly highlight his donations? Perhaps doing so would generate publicity, improve sales, and make people more aware of PSI's work. But it might also make purchasers of the games feel as though they're fulfilling part of their charitable duties just by buying the products. The next time they walk past an Oxfam donation box on the street, they can say, "No thanks, I'm already doing good by playing video games." On the other hand, one can also imagine instances in which people with no experience giving to charity might be newly exposed to the pleasurable brain chemicals that it produces and thereby induced to develop a habit of charitable giving in the future.
Which effect is more prevalent? Is there existing research on how fixed / variable the level of charitableness is among the general population?
