Thread by @PerBylund

If we truly want to change things for the better and contribute to a better community and society, then we should judge charitable acts based on their outcomes (the good expected or brought about), not the personal sacrifice of carrying out the act (what the doer gives up).

Many would consider a highly paid, and therefore also productive, individual spending a full day laboring in a soup kitchen a greater charity than if they had donated the money they would have earned. This conclusion requires focusing on the sacrifice, not the good brought about.

Say this individual would have earned $1,500 in their day job ($390k/year) had s/he not worked in the soup kitchen. This income is the sacrifice (cost). But the sacrifice says nothing about the good brought about by laboring in the soup kitchen.

It's not the loss to the doer that matters for the poor and homeless. This person's sacrifice does not automatically make them better off. What matters to them is what they get out of it. What is the gain? 8 hours, say, of serving food in the soup kitchen.

This is all well and good on its own, but it is an idiotic way of helping people in need. This person could do much more good by instead working their day job and donating the day's earnings toward paying people (perhaps the homeless) to work in the soup kitchen.

At the so-called "living wage" of $15/hr, this highly paid person could give the poor and homeless 100 hours of soup kitchen work instead of (their own) 8. That's an increase by a factor of over 12! But this act we do not consider as charitable, despite doing much more good.

Note that the sacrifice by this person is the same: $1,500 worth of labor. But the outcome is very different for the poor, who would have benefitted 12x more without this guy in the soup kitchen. But as bystanders we don't recognize the gain--we even prefer to do less good!

What we in effect do when calling the much less effective action (in terms of good outcome) charitable, but the effective one not, is to sacrifice the poor, who could have been helped much more. Because we want to see the rich not make the money they could.

In other words, what guides our ethics is envy: it is not to help as much as possible, but to do much less good if the "gain" is to see the highly productive do simple work. This is only destructive, and those losing out are the people we say we want to help.

It is difficult to think of anything more destructively and pathetically egotistical than this: to pretend to deal with charity by presenting one's envy as a higher moral code while, in effect, hurting if not sacrificing the very people you claim to want to help.