Doing Good
When I was young, I would frequent two Catholic churches. One took its weekly collection by passing around a cloth bag, while at the other the congregation placed their offerings on a tray. I saw no reason for the variation, but an older churchgoer explained that it made a big difference to what people gave. People would put coins into a bag because others could only hear and not see that they had donated, whereas they would be more inclined to put notes onto a tray as a public display of their generosity. For an innocent young boy, it was a startling introduction to our endemic cynicism about charitable giving. You are seen as comically naïve if you believe that people give up their time or money purely out of the goodness of their own hearts. ‘What’s in it for them?’ is often the automatic response to signs of conspicuous altruism.
Indeed, this reaction is no longer seen as cynical at all, but simply realistic. Good causes are increasingly trying to convince us that there’s at least as much in charity for us as there is for those we’re supposed to be helping.
Even apparently heroically selfless lives can be reinterpreted as selfish quests for meaning, purpose or prestige. For instance, why are those who devote themselves to raising funds to help fight a disease so often people who have lost members of their own family to it? What are they fighting most, the disease or their own demons?
In a world where pure goodness looks like fairytale nonsense, ‘do-gooders’ are brought crashing from their pedestals. Mother Teresa, once a byword for selflessness, has been described by Christopher Hitchens as a ‘friend of poverty rather than a friend of the poor’, who enjoyed her fame but did little to actually improve the lives of the poor of Calcutta.
Are we right to be so suspicious of apparent acts of kindness? Cynicism about charity becomes inevitable once you demand that genuine altruism is never tainted by self-interest. But why should we ever think that in the first place? Consider two people who give the same amount to charity: one who gets pleasure from helping others, and one who begrudgingly gives out of duty. Which is the more morally praiseworthy? If charity shouldn’t benefit the benefactor, then we are forced to accept that the reluctant donor is superior. But surely it is the mark of the truly kind that doing good feels good and is something they want to do.
There’s a kind of puritanism in the idea that charity must hurt to really count. The whole point of helping others is to make life better. But your life matters, too, so how can making it worse be better? From an objective point of view, altruism that helps both the giver and the recipient does more good than altruism that leaves the altruist worse off.
Nor should we worry too much about motivation. People’s motives are invariably mixed, and if self-interest is among them, we shouldn’t worry, just as long as what they do genuinely helps others, too.
Indeed, evolutionary psychologists would argue that the origins of the charitable impulse lie in the morally blind workings of natural selection. Put simply, groups of organisms that never co-operate or help each other are less successful at reproducing than those who do. The most successful replicators are those who help each other out, unless their apparent kindness is abused.
So there is no contradiction or hypocrisy in giving that benefits the benefactor. Problems only arise if apparent altruism helps only the giver and perhaps even harms the recipient. And if you do good primarily to make yourself feel better, you can lose sight of whether ‘doing good’ really helps others at all.
This is the danger with the generally welcome growth of ethical consumerism. Concern for the environment can easily become a form of eco-narcissism, where the main priority is to keep ourselves pure. But how altruistic is it to eat locally grown organic produce while refusing to spend money on food from countries that need our trade? How entitled are you to feel good about fitting a few low-energy light bulbs if you fly even once a year? And might your refusal to eat gene-modified foods be hampering a technology that could make feeding the world’s poor easier?
The purpose of charity is to make life easier for everyone. Sacrificing some of your own self-interests for a substantial benefit to others is certainly laudable, and something too few of us are willing to do. But if we can help others while also benefiting ourselves, that is even better. When charity really can be a win-win deal, we would be foolish not to take it.
Julian Baggini, Psychologies Magazine