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August 15, 2013 at 11:26 AM
The folks at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors might be forgiven for thinking that no good deed goes unpunished.
In a recent op-ed column in The New York Times, Princeton University bioethics professor Peter Singer takes RPA to task for declining to instruct its clients where to direct their charitable donations.
RPA is an independent nonprofit consulting firm that advises ultrawealthy individual, family, corporate and institutional donors on philanthropy.
Singer writes that “the prevailing assumption in their field is that we shouldn’t, or perhaps can’t, make objective judgments about which options are better than others.”
He doesn’t think this is true. “To me it seems clear that there are objective reasons for thinking we may be able to do more good in one of these areas than in another.”
He illustrates with this example. The local art museum asks a wealthy donor for $100,000 to help fund a new wing, while another seeks donations to fight an infectious eye disease that blinds children in developing countries. Research indicates that $100,000 could prevent 1,000 people from losing their sight, making this the more deserving cause.
Singer favors this quantitative method of comparing benefits, which is “used by economists to judge how much people value certain states of affairs.”
He contends that in general, “where human welfare is concerned, we will achieve more if we help those in extreme poverty in developing countries, as our dollars go much further there.”
Singer concedes that the trade-off between helping people and trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is trickier, as is deciding whether helping people or reducing cruelty to animals is more important.
