Does Compassion Have A Place In Philanthropy?

Not much. Not much at all, as I will now argue. This post is a continuation of the last two posts which were about the Japanese earthquake vs the Haiti one.

I thought the intent of my posts was pretty clear but looks like people interpret commentry on tragedies very differently so let me spell it out. My point was that the causes we find salient enough to donate to (eg. Japan today) are not necessarily the causes where the most help is needed. There are plenty of other causes (eg. Haiti today) where we should help more but due to cognitive biases, social biases, the news cycle, information paralysis etc etc we are not helping in those causes. I consider this to be extremely bad.

Now onto compassion. Compassion is a gut instinct and — like all our other gut instincts — it evolved as a sub-optimal, inconsistent and potentially damaging system. It is “compassionate” to see images of devastation in Japan and pull out the wallet. It is not “compassionate” to donate to a general disaster relief fund (knowing full well that this money will probably NOT be used in Japan), even though this action will save more lives.

That’s the bottom line. If of course human lives are to be the name of the game, as opposed to some warm fuzzy feeling of self-fulfilment that we might get from donations.

Compassion is very provincial. It is certainly useful but I see it more as a general tool. If I see a person suffering, I might have compassion. In that case, it might motivate me to try and reduce suffering in general, at which point reason should take over in suggesting the best course of action. But I don’t see how we can argue that I should follow my instinct of compassion to help that one person who I saw. The chances that I couldn’t save 2, 3, 5 or 100 others with the same resources are extremely small.

This is how I will think of philanthropy from now on. A donation made out of MERE compassion I cannot call philanthropy (especially in terms of the original Greek meaning of “love of humanity). It is more of a whim, a whim which may have wonderful consequences or it may not. For philanthropy, I would reserve actions that may have compassion as their root cause, but which are evidence-based and analysed to maximise the return (ie. benefit to human lives) on your investment.

Tomorrow I’ll look at the clusterfuck that is the comments to the Felix Salmon article in terms of compassion vs what I consider “real” philanthropy.

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