Are all charitable causes equally good?

Is donating ten pounds to the Doodle Trust (who rescue and rehome Doodles and Poodles throughout the UK) equally as important as donating to Doctors without Borders?

We in the UK are a charitable bunch. In 2016, 61% of us gave money to causes and between us we gave £9.7 billion. That’s a fair chunk of change by any measure, so I’ve been wondering recently what causes we give to as a nation, and whether or not we donate to worthy causes as a group of 70 million people.

More specifically the question I asked myself is, is it possible that as individuals donating to causes of our choice, we in fact make a very poor choice as a group, and therefore leave some of the world’s greatest issues un-tackled, whilst focussing instead on ones that have little impact? If we were to start from a position of thinking about our own moral compass and values, could we still justify the outcome of all our charitable giving?

SPOILER ALERT — we kind of suck at giving to the right causes. Here’s why…

Our moral compass and values

In philosophical debate there are things known as thought experiments. These distill complicated real-life examples into slightly abstract and extreme scenarios to tease out what we really think about a given issue and the consequences of those conclusions. Many thought experiments kick off discussions of ethics — the trolley problem is perhaps the most famous, and opens up a rabbit hole or complex and potentially inconsistent ethical views.

Let’s consider this simple thought experiment:

You find yourself in a position where you pass two burning buildings. In one, is a child, who you do not know. In the other, a dog, who you do not know. You calculate that you have time to save only one of these two, without risking your own life. Which one should you save?

I would wager that most would save the child, which seems an extremely defensible choice. We might start to doubt the character of a friend if they said the dog without hesitation.

Here are some further complications we may throw into the mix:

What if instead of any dog, it was your family dog?

What if it was not a child, but an extremely elderly person, and instead of a single dog, it was half a dozen puppies?

What if instead of a dog, it was a building full of priceless artworks?

What if it wasn’t you doing the saving, but you had the choice to pay a person to save the child, or pay a person to save the dog? How much would you pay?

This dog doesn’t even want to be saved

Each of these further scenarios present us will some interesting things to consider, but it seems likely that many of us reading the above would always value human life over animals, and even more so with inanimate objects such as artwork. We might create a hierarchy of moral beliefs:

The protection and saving of human life The alleviation of suffering in humans The protection and saving of complex animals The alleviation of suffering in complex animals The protection of the environment The promotion of well-being of humans … ….

Thus, the protection and saving of human life would be more important than stopping suffering in an animal, and so on; something higher up the list would trump something lower down the list when faced with a choice between them.

As this list progressed downwards you get into some murky decisions about the priority order of your moral values. For example you might be deciding between whether or not the eradication of all books was more or less bad than the killing of livestock. You might complicate it by including the proximity or relationship of individuals to you — for example is the life of your sibling more or less important than that of two strangers on the other side of the world? How could I compare saving one human life with that eradication of all elephants? Or squirrels? Or a rare species of butterfly?

These are difficult questions and not ones I have the answer for here. But looking back at the original thought experiment, you would undoubtedly call the person who saved the child a hero, and not assign them blame for not saving the dog. If someone did choose to save the dog, you’d likely feel significant misgivings about their moral character. As a rule of thumb, saving human lives trumps reducing animal suffering.

So what happens if we change the scenario to one where you could donate £1000 to save a child, or £1000 to save a dog, would the decision change?

Well the first option is certainly possible.

A lot of human suffering and death

So let’s look at one problem that exists in our world:

The World Health Organisation estimates that in 2015 alone, 438,000 people died of malaria — 292,000 of whom were children under 5 in sub-Saharan Africa.

This is a huge number, and incredibly sad to think about — 292,000 children under 5 dying in a year.

What’s interesting about this particular problem though, is that we’ve found an extremely effective way to reduce this number; insecticide-coated mosquito nets. In fact, rates of malaria have halved over the past 15 years, almost entirely because of distributing mosquito nets:

“bednet distributions are one of the most cost-effective ways of preventing disease and death. Since 2000, one billion bednets have been distributed (costing around 5 dollars each), and have averted 450 million cases of malaria — this suggests that, on average, one episode of clinical malaria can be prevented for about $11 (malarial fevers can be very painful). One recent study suggests that in Kenya, bednet distributions between 2003 and 2008 have prevented a death of a child for about $1,011 on average”

Just to reiterate, for just over $1000, it is possible to prevent the death of a child.

The amount of extra money required to achieve universal coverage of malaria nets — a way to prevent suffering and death — was estimated at around $200 million for 2015.

So given that we could establish an order list of moral priorities, and said that the saving of human life should be pretty high up on that list combined with a known cause of human death AND a way to prevent it, do we as a nation give to causes that aim to prevent human suffering and death over others?

Not so much.

Charitable giving

I want to outline some of the consequences of private charitable giving in the UK. None of the following charities are bad in themselves, but I want to pick out some charities who explicitly do not charge themselves with preventing human suffering or death, and look at the amount of money they have fundraised, along with what they did with that money:

The Donkey Sanctuary

From their site:

“In Europe we rehomed 367 animals, the highest number for some years, as the economy in Europe continues to strengthen and our restructured welfare operation settles down. As at 31 December 2015 we were looking after 4,960 donkeys and mules and a further 1,700, mainly donkeys, were living with Donkey Guardians in private homes, schools and other institutions. Our human-donkey interaction work, where both donkeys and humans gain benefit from the mutual contact, recorded growth in the number of projects in both the United Kingdom and other parts of the world such as Ethiopia, Sri Lanka and Belgium.”

Amount raised in 2015 — £31.93 million (that works out at almost £5000 per donkey)

The Dogs Trust

From their website:

Side note — there are estimated to be 8.5 million dogs in the UK, so The Dogs Trust effectively influenced the welfare of 0.18% of the total number of dogs in the UK.

Amount raised in 2015- £83 million

Guide Dogs for the blind

Taken from their site:

We are responsible for around 8,000 dogs at any one time — active working guide dogs and those enjoying their retirement. We matched 828 people with a guide dog in 2016. It costs £56,800 to support a guide dog from birth to retirement.

Amount raised in 2015 — £98.90 million