Quote:
Originally Posted by David Sklansky
Good investments add more than they cost.
Sure, but are bad investments obscene?
When you say that good investments add more than they cost, i'm not sure whether you mean only that good investments are profitable, or you mean they add more social value (more for "the general good of humanity"). Usually people mean the former, and that's the observation I was making. We tend to evaluate charitable giving by its social value, but investment by profitability. Now, I'm not saying that profitability has no social value, but it's not the same thing, and the most profitable investment is not necessarily the one that produces the most good.
Basically I was suggesting there are two aspects to how people react to scenarios like giving large sums to rebuild Notre Dame: there's that aspect where we expect charitable giving to be altruistic, and the aspect where it seems immoral ("obscene") for individuals to control large sums of money.
On the first, I think it's worth pointing out that most charitable giving by the very wealthy is not driven exclusively by altruistic motives. Like an investment, the people giving may feel that they receive a status dividend worth more than the cost. And of course there are other ways people get returns on their charitable giving, e.g. by giving to universities expecting their children to be prioritized for admission, or to gain preferable tax treatment, or whatever.
So my point was that we probably shouldn't evaluate charity by an entirely different set of criteria than investment, or expect entirely different motivations, and the real moral crux of the situation is the second factor: how mind-boggling it seems to 99.9% of the population for individuals to have so much money -- regardless of how they use it.