I read recently about the brave outsiders who came to Rwanda during the height of the genocide. Peacekeepers who stayed in the region, knowing full well this came with risk that they’d be shot to death. Aid workers who delivered aid, even as they knew that they might be hacked to death with machetes. These people were willing to risk their lives—to risk unbelievably horrible deaths—in order to save other people’s lives.
Reading about what these people did, I find the claim that effective charitable donations are too demanding viscerally unbelievable. Remember: the benefits of donating to effective charities are similar to the benefits of running into a war zone. In both cases, your actions stop children from dying. It isn’t obvious that a death from malaria is less painful than one by machete.
Right now, if you so choose, you can sign the Giving What We Can pledge and give 10% of your lifetime income to effective charities. The best charities save lives for about $4,000. If you make this choice right now, many fewer children will die horribly. At the very least, think about this choice seriously. Think about whether you want to be the kind of person who sacrifices a fraction of your annual income so that multiple children’s deaths are averted every year.
The heroes in Rwanda ran into a warzone in order to save children’s lives. All you have to do is send some money to effective charity. And you complain about this being too demanding? Come on. There are children dying—this is totally preventable—and yet people claim that doing anything about it would be too demanding. Compared to the sacrifice that others have had to make to save lives, this one is minuscule.
Effective charitable donations can be thought of as heroic virtue made easy. You don’t need to display any great courage or self-sacrifice. All you need to do is send some money over to GiveWell top charities, and fewer kids will die. The peacekeepers in Rwanda did not complain about their task being too demanding. How could I complain about mine being too demanding, when mine is nothing in comparison to theirs? That would be pathetic.
Now, here is the obvious objection: we don’t ordinarily think that the peacekeepers’ behavior was obligatory. It was heroic precisely *because *it wasn’t morally required. They went above and beyond the moral call of duty. So then you can’t use the fact that some burden is lighter than theirs as evidence that it is required.
This is indeed correct. I did not intend to be making any deductive proof from the fact that donating demands less than entering an active war-zone. This example aims to pump your intuitions. Think vividly about what these people do to prevent children from falling to the blade. Then think of what you are being asked to do, so that children do not fall to an equally deadly pathogenic invader. Think about what is at stake. Could it be anything other than an obligation?
Maybe some people don’t have this intuition. I’ve run no polls. But when I contemplate it, it seems super obvious to me. The notion that we have no obligation to make effectively improving the world a core part of our lives strikes me as morally absurd. Here, mileage may differ. But the contrary view, it seems to me, can only be consistently maintained so long as one steadfastly refuses to vividly consider what is at stake.
But even if we grant that it is not an obligation, it is still undeniably worth doing. Even non-obligatory actions may be very good. When I think vividly about the courage of the peacekeepers who stayed in Rwanda or those brave Germans who hid Jews in their basement, it seems the very least I could do is give some of my salary so that innocent people don’t have to die—or to other equivalently good causes. Anything less, even if not violating any moral obligation, would seem pathetic; it would seem I was failing in a deep sense to do what I can to make things better.
This is not the only time I read recently about heroic virtue. I also read about the life of Catholic Saint Maximilian Kolbe. Kolbe was sent to Auschwitz, where ten men at random were set to be executed in response to a single prisoner’s escape attempt. One of the men selected was a husband and a father named Franciszek Gajowniczek.
Gajowniczek and the other nine men were to be left in a bunker with no food or water and left to starve to death. When Gajowniczek cried out about his wife and children, Kolbe offered to be sent to the bunker instead of Gajowniczek. He voluntarily offered to die in place of a total stranger—to be starved in a bunker to save the life of a stranger. With the other men in the bunker, he led singing and prayer, even as their feces piled up around them, even as their parched lips yearned for water, even as they starved and starved and died. From one source on the subject.
“I could only thank him with my eyes,” Gajowniczek said. “I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me — a stranger. Is this some dream?”
Take a moment to think about what Kolbe did. Imagine being so noble as to be willing to die horribly in another’s place. Imagine being willing to be tortured to death in order to save someone else. That is the heroic virtue Kolbe manifested—willingly and joyously.
Kolbe gave his life to save the life of a stranger. He did it because he recognized that a stranger’s life is a thing of such incomprehensible value that it is worth dying for—it’s worth being tortured to death in a bunker for.
You’re not being asked to be tortured to death in a bunker to save a stranger. You’re being asked to give 10% of your annual income, and you will save a stranger every year (or, if you give to other effective charities, do incomprehensible amounts of expected goods in other ways). If a stranger’s life has enough value for it to be noble to starve in a bunker to save it, you can afford to give away a bit of your salary—leaving you still richer than almost everyone who ever lived. To achieve the good that Kolbe did, you do not have to pay the horrible price he had to pay. You just have to give some of your money away. Failing to do that is, in a deep way, failing to live up to Kolbe’s sacrifice—a culpable omission whose cost is measured in dead children.
