I am on the board of a non-profit that gives out free stuff, including socks. As givers, we all feel good about giving but we're wondering if this is the best way to help others. So I've been doing some research. I just finished reading, Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. I'm pondering a few quotes that seem pertinent to this issue:
When help is moved into the private sphere, no matter how efficient we are told it is, the context of the helping is a relationship on inequality: the giver and taker, the helper and the helped, the donor and the recipient. When a society solves a problem politically and systematically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen. p262
“Why are there in the world so many people that you need to help in the first place? You should ask yourself: Have your actions contributed at all to that? Have you caused, through your actions, any harm? If yes, the fact that now you are helping some people, however effectively, doesn’t seem to be enough to compensate.” Chiara Cordelli, an Italian political philosopher at the University of Chicago. Think of the person who seeks to “change the world” by doing what can be done within a bad system, but who is relatively silent about that system. Such a person, for Cordelli, is putting himself in the difficult moral position of the kindhearted slave master. p259
On Mar 6, 2019 Vicky Smith wrote:
I am on the board of a non-profit that gives out free stuff, including socks. As givers, we all feel good about giving but we're wondering if this is the best way to help others. So I've been doing some research. I just finished reading, Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. I'm pondering a few quotes that seem pertinent to this issue:
When help is moved into the private sphere, no matter how efficient we are told it is, the context of the helping is a relationship on inequality: the giver and taker, the helper and the helped, the donor and the recipient. When a society solves a problem politically and systematically, it is expressing the sense of the whole; it is speaking on behalf of every citizen. p262
“Why are there in the world so many people that you need to help in the first place? You should ask yourself: Have your actions contributed at all to that? Have you caused, through your actions, any harm? If yes, the fact that now you are helping some people, however effectively, doesn’t seem to be enough to compensate.” Chiara Cordelli, an Italian political philosopher at the University of Chicago.
Think of the person who seeks to “change the world” by doing what can be done within a bad system, but who is relatively silent about that system. Such a person, for Cordelli, is putting himself in the difficult moral position of the kindhearted slave master. p259