oh yeah and this

My claim, if you like, is that one or more parties in any conflict will be engaging for either control (of people) or resources. That other parties may simply be defending themselves is irrelevant, they wouldn't have needed to if those two problems didn't exist, and those two problems could be solved fairly easily.

Yes it is.

I've never said that you shouldn't give to charity. But, if you were asking me what I think you should do, it would be to examine your buying habits and discover for yourself exactly what you're supporting when you make a purchase. What is the true cost of that product or service? Where is the cost that you aren't being asked to pay actually being absorbed?

I just allowed my teenage daughter to buy one of these - Fair phone. She's had to wait over 6 months for it so far, which I actually don't mind because I think she'll value it more when it finally arrives. I strongly agree with the message that company is sending and I support that behaviour with my money, you have to be the change you want see in the world, right?

If we ethically sourced all the minerals we use in our gadgets, there'd be no more need to send aid to places like the Congo when they're torn apart in vicious civil wars over control of those minerals, not for that specific reason anyway. As I've already pointed out, the means to address other reasons for poverty etc, are within our current technological ability,. but we're too busy fighting over oil to burn for power (amongst other things like religion), it's kinda embarrassing.

Sure, but I'm not excited by, or personally satisfied by, short term solutions that fail to address the actual problem. When was the last time you donated to charity and the charity responded by asking you to stop buying oil and invest in clean, renewable technologies that helped remove many of the problems charities try to address, such as refugees from countries devastated by oil wars? You and I are both helping to support that, so what would be more effective, donating a tenner to a charity for quick fix, or slowly helping our society to wean itself off oil.

The problem is our values.

We're talking passed each other but it's a tangent so I'm happy to park it.

Are you suggesting that people should consider the consequences of their purchasing decisions?

This is what you said earlier

We can do both but it seems at an individual level giving to charity effectively will have a much more positive impact than merely purchasing ethically. If we really wanted to help then we'd give. If you think that changing the way we consume is going to have the biggest impact the changes, to be effective, have to be done on a larger scale on what grounds are you going to advocate for this?

You are making big statements about what we should do. That's a big claim and I wonder what virtues you are calling on to defend it.

My understanding of moral philosophy is pretty limited but I don't know that Virtue Ethics gives you the appropriate framework to defend these calls.

I choose, wherever possible, to donate effectively. I also try to buy ethically but I think you're asking for a standard that's going to be pretty hard to meet.

I think you fail to consider just how much good work is being done and just how important it is. There are 3 food centres opening in the UK each week. The people relying on these services are poorly aided by me only trying to buy ethically. There are also 20,000 people dying a day through hunger and 20,000 kids under 5 dying due to preventable diseases these can be helped now and equating the contributions of people trying to assist to throwing a tenner in a charity box for a quick fix does them a disservice.

Your analysis here is kinda embarrassing. Once again, you're trying to make a grand argument without a sufficient basis upon which to make it. Trying to jump from "ethically sourced" to "no need to send aid (for that specific reason)" just doesn't work. The parenthetical sweeps all sorts of things under the rug.

I don't think you've identified "the actual problem" by talking about oil wars any more than talking about ethically sourced minerals addresses "the actual problem."

The problem is you're naive.

Ok, but I will say one final thing and that's that we have the technological ability to remove the need to ever go to war over resources and we choose not to do it.

Yes, of course it would have to be done on a large scale, this requires nothing less than a major shift of attitude amongst billions of people. I'm discussing a paradigm shift, a big one. (Honestly, I think that even if we don't choose to do it, that circumstances will force it eventually because our current behaviour isn't sustainable.)

Virtue ethics is simply about what makes us good people. Am I a good person if I buy some clothing that was made in a sweat shop in China, or India and support that misery and suffering? Ignorance is no defence, before you suggest that I might not have known what I was supporting, I think we have an ethical obligation to find out and to research the supply chain. But, we're not encouraged to because that hurts profits. We're simply encouraged to consume.

The worst part is that even when exposed to the truth, people often don't care, or try for a while then revert to their former habits because it's 'easier'..... and I'm as guilty as anyone of that. I boycott a few companies and I feel better but it's nothing more than a conscience appeaser, like working for a charity at Xmas. It does nothing to address the problem.

Yes it's not easy, you'd have to live in a cave to actually achieve an ethical lifestyle with regard to your purchases, that's how bad it's got. The oil companies have a stranglehold on the world's economies and on us, and we keep giving them our money. How hard are you willing to try, how much are you willing to inconvenience yourself to help solve these problems? Also, you say you try to buy ethically, what do you do?

For the record, I'm not suggesting something like Utilitarianism taken to the extreme that is actually one of it's flaws. I think we could live in a world of plenty, we could have all the gadgets and the flash cars and plenty to eat, and we could do it without hurting other people or helping to support awful suffering, but again, we simply choose not to do it.

I read this paragraph, about people doing good, and all I see is 'Human race fail'. Imagine trying to explain to a Martian why we need food centres or why people are dying of hunger and disease. Charity isn't a solution, it's a symptom of the problem.

Virtue Ethics talks about the type of person to be, it's flaw seems to be that it doesn't give you answers as to what to do other than what a virtuous man would choose to do. This is limited and I don't think it provides you the framework to advocate for large scale purchasing changes across populations.

You don't want to accept we are where we are, we need charities currently to do work because other agencies aren't in that space and you see Human Race fail because people are doing it.

Any solution indicates a problem and to that extent can be symptomatic of a problem/. If there's no problem there's nothing to solve. I think your understanding of the work charities does is limited and understates the work they do by a considerable margin.

Also consider that you are advocating people consider the consequences of their purchasing decisions, what virtues are you leveraging for that claim?

I see you and I, and many many other people, supporting a system based on greed and rampant irresponsible consumerism and giving our money to the very people who cause most of the problems we face. When they're not directly responsible, they're busy bribing (sorry I meant 'lobbying') the politicians who are responsible or encouraging behaviour that causes and sustains the problems.

Have you ever wondered why we have homeless people, and under-educated children, and people on the poverty line, in the UK, when we can afford to spend an estimated £37 Billion fighting the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect our oil supplies? (and that's just this time around and not including the 1st Iraq war) You and I directly support the system that needs those wars, through our buying habits, we're part of the problem and charity is not the solution.

I asked you how hard you'd be willing to try to help eradicate those problems and what you do to buy ethically, is there a reason you didn't answer?

Ok, and I think that you fail to see that the only reason that charities exist at all is because of our failures and the problems that we create for ourselves through greed and ignorance. We are responsible for those failures and we could address them if we had a mind to.

Ok, since I brought this up I suppose I should try and fit what I'm saying into the moral model that I've chosen to subscribe to, it'll be an interesting exercise but I have to go out now. I'll have a think about that.

There is always a fine line between discussing trends and the actions of individuals. The only reason you are sometimes near this fine line is because you are treating this distinction as your own personal slalom course.

Asking me about eradicating these problems is talking to the wrong person. I try to buy ethically but I don't think it's as simple as you think. There may be good reasons to buy stuff that is produced by kids for instance and advocate groups acknowledge this and often don't recommend boycotts. You see charity as a symptom, is medicine a symptom of us getting sick?

No I understand why charities exist but you aren't suggesting how we resolve the needs they meet without talking to a non specific generalised we and a non specific generalised buy ethically policy.

We can probably end world poverty through donations to charity why shouldn't we do that?

It's an incredibly complex issue that can be reduced to very simple ideas. If we changed our values, just a little, we could eradicate many of the problems we face. It's similar to what Gandhi achieved, simply by changing the idea that resistance required violence. A very simple idea that challenged and ultimately changed a national paradigm with startling and far reaching results.

If everything were produced ethically, you and I wouldn't have to do anything would we. The problem is that's not profitable, and we keep giving our money to the companies that behave badly, so they keep behaving badly.

I'm simply stunned at this justification, or rather that we could live in a culture that could ever justify that the bad treatment of children could be better than some presumably even worse alternative, such as them dying of starvation. That there could ever be a 'good' reason to allow sweatshops and child labour/slavery beggars belief.

How did we let it get to that point in the first place?

Do you see charity as 'medicine'? If you had a Cholera outbreak, and treated the victims with medicine while making no effort to find the cause of the outbreak and treat that to prevent further outbreaks, would you see that medical treatment as a solution, or part of the problem because it's simply masking and helping to reduce motivation for solving the real problem, which is the contaminated water supply (which, to make this even more accurate an analogy, is contaminated because of the behaviour of a nearby, wealthy city who's inhabitants know that they're causing this problem but choose to continue in their behaviour)?

In that respect, I see charity work as part of the problem because it makes people feel like something is being done to solve the problem when in fact that's not usually the case. You're just treating the cholera victim then sending them back into the village with the contaminated water supply and ignoring that the nearby city is the cause of that. If you really want to solve the problem, you change the behaviour of the inhabitants of that city, you don't pass out cholera medicine, over and over again.

It's more a case of raising awareness of the issue, in the same way that recycling is not really effective but it at least raises awareness of issues of waste managed. As I said above, we shouldn't have to buy ethically, there shouldn't be another option.

I doubt that could be achieved but in any case it's inefficient and doesn't address the root problem unless you have ended the cause of the poverty.

Also, and this is a far worse problem in my eyes, for the majority of people charity is a salve, a conscience appeaser for people who then carry on living in a manner that supports the very same system that causes the problems. We help Afghan/Iraqi refugees with charity work/donations, then go back home in our cars that burn the oil and houses full of oil derivative products that created the need for the war. Does this seem sensible to you?

You have no idea of how effective charity can be. Just to take the cholera example charity can both treat the cholera and treat the water supplies.

One of the things I have found is that people who wish to criticise the efficacy of charity haven't researched how they can give effectively and also use it as a means to abrogate their own responsibility to the needy.

I may come back to the rest.

I think my objection here is that you are stating this isn't how the world should be while ignoring the fact that it is.

In my analogy, the water is polluted because of the city folks. Perhaps they enjoy cheap water rates but it's because the sewerage treatments companies aren't doing their job properly and they're releasing untreated sewerage into the village's water supply. Unless you can effect change in the behavior of the people of the city, and the result is that the water is properly treated, even if that costs the people more, you haven't solved the problem.

The cholera outbreak, and everything that follows it, no matter how much good is done or how efficiently, is only the result of an attitude amongst the city dwellers with regard to money, and who wouldn't argue that they perhaps should rethink it given the harm that they're causing?

This is missing my point. You can walk around handing out sticking plasters and picking up broken glass to your heart's content but if you can't get the message across the people who unthinkingly break the glass all the time and change their habits then you aren't changing anything really are you.

I'm curious about what you've said though, what responsibility do I have to the needy? I'd like to examine that.

No, this is not a correct interpretation of my position. If anything, human nature being what it is, it's exactly like it 'should' be right now so there's no 'should be' involved in what I'm saying, I'm describing how it 'could' be.

No. Virtue ethics are explicitly about how things should be.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/

This is a pursuit of how people should behave if they are to behave rightly or wrongly. In other words, it's about how people should behave. (That's the entire field of ethics! It's about telling people how they should behave if they were to behave rightly.)

Here's where you introduced virtue ethics:

Just remove virtue ethics from the conversation because it doesn't belong and it looks as if you don't even understand it anyway. And just say "I don't believe that charity work is a solution to the problem of poverty."

(Incidentally, it still looks like you're using a consequentialist framework when you say that there is some sort of ideal OUTCOME of the behaviors of people. If everyone behaved "rightly" there would be no people in need of charity.)

I think analogies are useful but we're in danger of missing the point. Maybe they get cholera because they don't have a clean water supply and so we need to fix the water supply and treat the people that have cholera. Charity can do both.

As above providing a water supply and treating cholera in those that have it is not equivalent to providing a sticking plaster. The point you are missing is that there are means to calculate the efficacy of charity contributions so you may want to demonstrate that these are flawed.

To be clear I didn't say you did, I don't know your circumstances I would consider benevolence and compassion both virtues though so if you're serious about living a virtuous life then you may want to. You may wish to strike these from your list of virtues however but I don't think you can do that honestly.

How could it be? What is the best contribution you can make to that?

This is all correct but this isn't my objection to MB's should be. In saying we shouldn't accept child labour or whatever he's ignoring what may be the best option in a difficult situation. It's as if he's saying we shouldn't have to countenance difficult decisions then deciding to ignore the difficult questions.

It's the difference between should do and should be.

You can forget about improving the world if you're just going to go chew out people who try to make it better.

Right now it only sounds like you want to save the world through sitting in your couch, awaiting the glorious system that will come down from the heavens and save all the people through good leadership and rational decisions for managing societies.

How that is supposed to happen when you deem doing charity useless I have no idea. I can only assume that you fight hunger by waging criticism against the contents of your fridge.

Have you grunched the whole thread? This post misses so many points I almost didn't answer it.

I'm not 'chewing' anyone out and the whole question is whether or not charity work is actually 'making it better' in any meaningful way as an approach to solving our problems.

If you understood what I was arguing you'd see that I actually can do a lot to 'save the world', as you put it, from my couch.

As for whether I'm doing anything about it, or just 'waiting' (not like you to fill a post with so much guesswork, rhetoric and hyperbole) you haven't asked, have you.

I don't deem charity 'useless', clearly it can have beneficial effects, but until we address the cause of the problems we face on a global scale, it's just a sticking plaster. What's required is a attitude change, and different set of priorities.

It's ridiculous (totally disgraceful?), for example, that I live in a country that has spent £30 Billion fighting the recent round of war in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect our oil based way of life and yet my local primary school has a volunteer group that raise money to buy books and other equipment for the school because they don't get enough money from the government.

No, it's not, it's 'could be'. I've already said that things are as they should be right now, basically because we're generally, a greedy, self centered and shortsighted animal. Nothing I see of how we live really surprises me, it's all depressingly easy to explain.

What I'm talking about is how it could be if we made a few small changes to our attitudes, specifically with regard to consumerism, and then we could go a long way toward removing the need for there to be charities. The problem for this idea is that however good people may be, they're also very reluctant to make changes to their lifestyle that cause great inconvenience for them, especially when it's to solve a problem that is a long way away and out of their immediate sight.

After all, who cares if the minerals used in the circuit board in that new smart phone came from a mine in the Congo where child soldiers who have been forced to kill their own parents, are guarding other children who dig the minerals up in extremely dangerous conditions, for some local warlord? Or that it was made in a factory in China where one suicide a month is the average. It's the new version of the phone, and owning that is cool and desirable, right?

I've had the same phone for 4 years, right there is something that's easy to do and I didn't even have to leave my couch.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't accept child labour, I'm saying that we should never be in a situation that requires it, or where it can happen. I fail to understand how you can't agree with that. As for the 'difficult situation', tell me, how do you think we arrived in that situation? Let's identify the cause of the problem and see where that takes us.


Sure, but what the charity hasn't done is change the selfish attitude of the city folk that are polluting the water supply in the first place. And the reason that's happening? Because the water treatment companies are greedy and are failing to do their job properly, but it's the city folk that are tolerating that and allowing it to continue.

That's basically the situation we're in.

I wanted to examine this because I was hoping that we could identify some desirable behaviors or qualities, and then show that the best way to enact those would not be to hand out soup but to change our spending focus and eliminate homelessness, as an example.

I shouldn't have mentioned ethics at all, it's just muddied the water. Instead, let's talk about the smart way to deal with our problems. Obviously, I don't consider charity to be the smart way.

How many lives do you think are improved by you not replacing that phone? What did you do with the money you saved by not replacing that phone?

I'm generally in favour of people reducing their consumption but I have concerns over the efficacy of individuals reducing their consumption compared to the efficacy of people making charitable donations.

My charitable donations have the benefit of reducing my consumption by mere fact of reducing the money I have to spend.

I don't disagree with that.

This is why I think your use of analogies is unhelpful. You are adding facts such as city folks polluting water when that's not pertinent in a lot of cases. There is no local water supply and charities can help address this.


I accept that I'm editing out some of your posts in order to reply to the bits that I think are important. What's noticeable in the edits you've made to my posts is the claim, there are organisations that can help us make better decisions with regard to charitable donations by evaluating their effectiveness, is gone. You ignore this then claim that charity isn't the smart way.

And I get the distinction between causes and effects and that you probably consider charity to address the effect, hence the sticking plaster, I think you understate the work that charities can do to address causes. Kids getting sick because of worms can be treated, preventing kids getting sick is treating the cause. You may want to regress the cause by talking about the bankruptcy of the state in which they live or whatever but that doesn't mean you or I are going to be more effective trying to address that cause than the direct cause of the kids getting sick.

Estimates of the number of mobile phone handsets sold (or given as free upgrades) every year is 1 Billion, so mightn't a better question be 'how many lives would be improved if we did something as simple as upgrade or buy a new phone every two years, or three?' Now you're talking about a significant difference being made, and that's just with mobile phones. Extend this philosophy to the full range of consumer electronic goods, or cars (because of similar purchasing patterns), that have built in obsolescence or rely on a consumer need to always posses the most recent version of their gadget, and you're talking about a massive reduction in demand for conflict minerals.

All that's required is a change of attitude, nothing else. So, by not changing my phone (that's not the only thing I do btw) I'm being the change I want to see in the world. By talking about it now, with you, I'm perhaps encouraging that change in others, or at least raising awareness of the issue.

This is the most frustrating part of it. Changing consumer attitudes is probably the fastest way to see change but ultimately no one need go hungry, no one need go without, this isn't about promoting an austere lifestyle where we all live in minimalistic housing and consume the absolute minimum (although I don't see anything wrong with that...). We could have it all and still live ethically without causing the suffering of others so we can have our gadgets. All the resources we could ever use are sitting in our solar system waiting for us to go and get them. The Chinese recently landed a probe on the moon and amongst other things it's looking for H3, which is used in nuclear fusion. Clean, endless energy. With no more need for oil, you can strike a significant number of problems that charities are involved with off the list.

Well, I've named several types of charity work that this approach would render redundant, perhaps you could suggest some different types and I'll see if I can identify how this philosophy could apply to it?


To be fair, I generally don't 'edit' your posts, I cut them into chunks and try to respond to each separate point.

Perhaps I didn't address that specific point because I don't consider it relevant. What I mean is that if, for example, Chinese workers are committing suicide because of the working conditions in a factory that produces iphones, that analysing how effective is a charity that is helping those people isn't an effective solution. What is an effective and meaningful solution would be reducing the demand for iphones because it's something that simply needn't exist and people can live quite happily without the latest iphone. It's a great example of rampant consumerism, an artificially contrived demand based on a primitive need to display wealth for reasons of personal status.

Changing attitudes won't eradicate parasites, I'm not talking about some unrealistic Utopia on earth here. Actually this point highlights an assumption I was making that perhaps I didn't explain. I'm not suggesting that no one need ever help anyone else anymore, there would still be droughts, or natural disasters, or parts of the world that would need to be helped to reach a better standard of living. What I'm suggesting is that our lifestyles needn't be contributing to (or directly causing) those problems and that charities shouldn't be the instruments of aid, in the same way that our local school shouldn't need charity from a group of parents when we have a government that are supposed to be educating our children

This doesn't answer the question. I am not asking you what difference this would make if lots of people followed your example I am asking what difference it makes of itself.

You require many more people change their purchasing habits to be effective. A relatively small number of people will effect more good by making charitable donations than the same number will by changing their purchasing.

You may also be encouraging others to not give to charity which may be detrimental given that you know so little of what effective donating entails.

I'm also sceptical of people who try to reduce big problems to apparently simple solutions like a only a change in attitude across billions of people. I think you understate the significance of the issues you are attempting to address.

It may also be the hardest to address and while that means people shouldn't try they should be mindful of it's effectiveness and determine whether it's the best that they can do. I can pretty much guarantee that you going one year to the next without replacing a phone does less good that putting the same amount of money in a large number of charity boxes.

Again this is only relevant if lots of people do the same thing, while your decisions may be commendable you can't actually demonstrate what good it does when you do it.

If you are going to contend that Charity isn't smart you may want to consider it relevant when I pose that there are very smart people doing very good work identifying which charities are effective and which aren't.

I'd quite like a world with international co-operation with no one oppressed or hungry and governments resolving local issues with the support of the international community but until we arrive at such a point I'll continue to contribute.

That's why I'm talking about a paradigm/attitude shift rather than a charitable effort. We don't want people to do without a new phone once or even twice as a charitable act, we want people to stop regarding a new phone as a necessary purchase and stop buying them or upgrading them for no better reason than that there's a new version out, or a bigger TV, or a better graphics card etc etc . Since the companies that profit from this (and the politicians that they own) are not likely to voluntarily stop marketing, creating and supporting that demand, there needs to be a change hearts and minds.

And this is the sort of problem that this action would make a difference too - Conflict minerals

How is charity going to solve that problem? It can't, it can only deal with the consequences. What can solve it is influencing the consumers and changing their habits and reducing the demand for those minerals, OR, giving the mining rights to ethical companies that will treat workers fairly and ensure safe working conditions etc, as with my daughters Fair phone.

You don't really know what I know about charities and believe me I'm not underestimating the significance of these issues, or, frankly, how unlikely it is that what I'm suggesting will ever come about. As I said, I think we're too greedy, self centered and short sighted to lift ourselves out of this mess. It will most likely remain to the charitable few to do what they can while the rest of us create and contribute to the problems.

I'm not sure how much you know about what really goes on so that we can upgrade our phones every six or twelve months. I encourage you to do some reading up, it's quite shocking what our buying habits support.


And I guarantee you that changing buying habits will have a far greater and much more meaningful impact than any amount of charity money, it could remove the need for those charities all together, can your donations do that?

We don't know what else those people are doing. Perhaps as well as helping in the short term, they are striving to create the change required to remove the causes of the problems. But they don't have any where near as much power to do that as we do, they're just pissing in the wind of excessive and out of control consumerism. Excuse my phrasing.

A better way to change things would be to choose carefully who you empower with your money. If we want the oil companies to continue to dominate our society with all the strife and suffering that needlessly causes in their quest for profit, then all we have to do is keep giving them our money. Simple.

MB - As with many of the position you put forth in this forum, you are oversimplifying things to the point that your model of reality does not reflect reality. You're also turning a blind eye to the data that's available that goes against what you've declared as your fundamental belief by focusing on a single issue and trying to make that issue carry the day for you.

Your basic argument here is "Charity can't solve *THIS* problem, so charity isn't enough to solve all the problems." I think everyone would agree with this. But there are also many problems that charity can (and does) solve. So the jump from "Charity can't solve *THIS* problem" to "People shouldn't support charities because they only deal with consequences" is erroneous and very ignorant.

I think the following quote is telling:

Here's the data:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-s...-longer-2013-9

What I think happens is that you get a mental image of what you think is going on, and then you cling to that mental image without bothering to look for data. And then you're very slow to adjust that mental image (if you don't outright refuse to admit error) and keep repeating these things because you believe them so strongly (see "religious marketing").

In this case, you've latched onto this idea that charity doesn't help, and you're going to keep repeating that over and over again and keep reframing the argument to try to find some way of making it sound like you're right, rather than taking a realistic look at the argument you're making and judging it on the actual quality of the argument rather than how well is supports your desired conclusion (see "axiomatic disdain for religion" or "I don't like consequentialism because it means that religion can be a good thing").

Yeah... "simple." :eyeroll: