Philath. Philo.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magazine/17charity.t.html?pagewanted=print
What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?
- Unicef, more than 10 million children die every year — about 30,000 per day — from avoidable, poverty-related causes.
- Hobbes, the 17th-century English philosopher,
- we all act in our own interests.
- On seeing him give alms to a beggar, a cleric asked Hobbes if he would have done this if Christ had not commanded us to do so. Yes, Hobbes replied, he was in pain to see the miserable condition of the old man, and his gift, by providing the man with some relief from that misery, also eased Hobbes’s pain. That reply reconciles Hobbes’s charity with his egoistic theory of human motivation
- 18th-century German philosopher Kant disagrees.
- an act has moral worth only if it is done out of a sense of duty. Doing something merely because you enjoy doing it, or enjoy seeing its consequences has no moral worth, because if you happened not to enjoy doing it, then you wouldn’t do it, and
- you are not responsible for your likes and dislikes, whereas you are responsible for your obedience to the demands of duty.
- Gates told a Time interviewer, “There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning” than going to church.
- Thomas Pogge
- international corporations are willing to make deals to buy natural resources from any government, no matter how it has come to power.
- providing a huge financial incentive for groups to try to overthrow existing government. Successful rebels are rewarded by being able to sell off the nation’s oil, minerals or timber.
- beneficial for the industrial nations, because it enables us to obtain the raw materials we need to maintain our prosperity, but it is a disaster for resource-rich developing countries, turning the wealth that should benefit them into a curse that leads to a cycle of coups, civil wars and corruption and is of little benefit to the people as a whole.
- our obligation to the poor is not just one of providing assistance to strangers but one of compensation for harms that we have caused and are still causing them
- (Living luxuriously, it is said, provides employment, and so wealth trickles down, helping the poor more effectively than aid does. But the rich in industrialized nations buy virtually nothing that is made by the very poor.)
- MDGs
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