A nearly ubiquitous credo that seems to be shared in today’s world by both the religious and the secular alike goes something like this: “Charity is virtuous. Charity is great. All people who desire to be good should practice charity.” Indeed, even most non-philanthropic individuals recognize that charity is a “good” thing.
I write from the perspective of an LDS Christian; but I assume that for a trait to be so sought after in the world, other religions must also have as a central tenet that its members practice (or attempt to practice) charity.
But the religious do not have a monopoly on charity. The Red Cross and Amnesty International, for example, are very large charities unaffiliated with any religion.
So what reasons do people have for being charitable?
It seems that many people practice charity to please their god. Perhaps the vain members of a church do it to appear* good with their church and friends. It appears that many people also practice charity out of a sense of civic duty, or perhaps just because it makes them feel good. By no means do these reasons compose an exhaustive list; such a list is not necessary for my purpose.
My purpose in Part I is to challenge the notion that the underlying* reason for being charitable is a sense or a desire to be selfless.
Since the practice of charity is a human action, it can be interpreted by means of economic reasoning. At the most basic level, the act of charity is a measurement of costs and benefits. Some examples:
The religious individual may say, “I will give $1,000 to my church, which it will use to help the needy.” This is a cost. But an implicit, and frequently unspoken implicit benefit, is that individual’s belief that “God will reward me.”
The philanthropist may say, “This man is begging for food and must be hungry, and I have an extra five bucks I don’t need.” The nominal cost of this is five bucks. However, $5 out of his $40,000 yearly income is negligible. In fact, he explicitly stated that he didn’t need the money. And he receives the benefit of feeling good for being nice.
I could enumerate dozens of more examples, but I don’t need to: the point is that any time an individual voluntarily practices charity, he is doing it because he feels the benefits outweigh the costs. If he did not feel this way, he would not be charitable.
Of course, the skeptics in the audience will want to discuss the “ideal selfless man.” By the ideal selfless man, I mean a person who is charitable even in the cases where the costs outweigh the benefits. This person is said to be truly selfless, and in religious circles, will be the first one into heaven. Unfortunately (for the skeptics), this perfect selfless person is still confined to the laws of economics.
If one were to truly give up everything* he had to charity, without the prospect of some commensurate return, or at the very least a subsistence level of remuneration, he would die. This would be true for a religious giving or a non-religious one. If he were religious, he would go to heaven; and if he were secular, he would live on as a saint to the people he helped. No matter how it is viewed, the result would be the same: the benefits (going to heaven or sainthood) outweigh the costs (death).
I feel the religious may still take issue with my stance, so I feel obligated to go on a small digression. I will start with two premises that I deem to be incontrovertible, albeit generalized, truths.
First, there are reasons for everything. And just because we don’t know all the reasons doesn’t mean they don’t exist. By “reasons” I mean “explanations” or “causes” – eg. Why is water wet? At some point in the past, people didn’t know why water was wet, but there was still a reason, an explanation, a cause. Likewise, right now we don’t know how Stonehenge came to be. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer, a reason, an explanation, for its origin. Some day we will know more about Stonehenge. And given time, the answers for every question will come.
Second, there are consequences for everything. Some are good, some are bad, and most are somewhere in between. A person’s interpretation of a consequence doesn’t change the fact that a consequence exists. When I eat a bowl of cereal, the consequence is that I get full. Another person might eat the cereal, get sick, and vomit. Another person may eat and still be starving. However, no one can eat the bowl and be exactly the same as they were before. Since time is a scarce resource, any usage of that time can never be retrieved, and so even sitting completely idle has the consequence that nothing will be accomplished.
Assuming the above are correct, let us ask the question: what reason does God have for declaring commandments? There are likely a myriad of answers to this, but the one I want to focus on deals with the positive consequences of living the commandments: we go to heaven when we die.
What about when no consequence or no reason is explicitly stated? What if we are told simply “to obey” for the sake of obeying? What if there is no explicit reward?
Remember: there are reasons and consequences for everything. Just because we don’t know the reasons or the consequences doesn’t mean they don’t exist. And with that in mind, we obey because even without knowing the reason or consequence, we can rest assured that “God is a good guy,” so, we are bound to receive a reward.
So again, the benefits outweigh the costs.
The whole point of this is to try to encourage thinking outside the box. To claim that “people who practice charity are selfless” is a inaccurate. The “truly selfless” people who practice charity get one thing: death. Furthermore, to say “selfishness is bad” is foolish. Selfishness can be good or it can be bad.
(Feel free to comment on any of the above material. Part II will address the good and bad of selfishness, as well as the ungoodness of selflessness. I hope to write it soon. Thanks go out to Brian and Bob for helping me sort out some of my thoughts while I wrote this.)
