What Should a M/Billionaire Give -and What Should You?

PERSONAL & PROFOUND: Make this article personally relevant:

HOW RICH ARE YOU?

IMPACT:
Why are the people who are giving doing so? Does it do any good? Should we praise them for giving so much or criticize them for not giving still more? Is it troubling that such momentous decisions are made by a few extremely wealthy individuals?

And how do our judgments about them reflect on our own way of living?

MOTIVES:
The rich must -or so some of us with less money like to assume -suffer sleepless nights because of their ruthlessness in squeezing out competitors, firing workers, shutting down plants or whatever else they have to do to acquire their wealth.

When wealthy people give away money, we can always say that they are doing it to ease their consciences or generate favorable publicity.

It has been suggested -by, for example, David Kirkpatrick, a senior editor at Fortune magazine -that Bill Gates's turn to philanthropy was linked to the antitrust problems Microsoft had in the U.S. and the European Union. Was Gates, consciously or subconsciously, trying to improve his own image and that of his company?

This kind of sniping tells us more about the attackers than the attacked. Giving away large sums, rather than spending the money on corporate advertising or developing new products, is not a sensible strategy for increasing personal wealth.

ABOUT YOUR WEALTH:
But if the rich just give their money away to improve their image, or to make up for past misdeeds -misdeeds quite unlike any we have committed, of course -then, conveniently, what they are doing has no relevance to what we ought to do.

When we read that someone has given away a lot of their money, or time, to help others, it challenges us to think about our own behavior.

Should we be following their example, in our own modest way?

WISDOM:
A famous story is told about Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English philosopher, who argued that we all act in our own interests.

On seeing him give alms to a beggar, a cleric asked Hobbes if he would have done this if Christ had not commanded us to do so. Yes, Hobbes replied, he was in pain to see the miserable condition of the old man, and his gift, by providing the man with some relief from that misery, also eased Hobbes's pain.

That reply reconciles Hobbes's charity with his egoistic theory of human motivation, but at the cost of emptying egoism of much of its bite. If egoists suffer when they see a stranger in distress, they are capable of being as charitable as any altruist.

Followers of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant would disagree. They think an act has moral worth only if it is done out of a sense of duty.

Doing something merely because you enjoy doing it, or enjoy seeing its consequences, they say, has no moral worth, because if you happened not to enjoy doing it, then you wouldn't do it, and you are not responsible for your likes and dislikes, whereas you are responsible for your obedience to the demands of duty.

Perhaps some philanthropists are motivated by their sense of duty.

Apart from the equal value of all human life, the other "simple value" that lies at the core of the work of the Gates Foundation, according to its Web site, is "To whom much has been given, much is expected."

That suggests the view that those who have great wealth have a duty to use it for a larger purpose than their own interests.

But while such questions of motive may be relevant to our assessment of Gates's or Buffett's character:

They pale into insignificance when we consider the effect of what Gates and Buffett (AND YOU) are doing.

The parents whose children could die from rotavirus care more about getting the help that will save their children's lives than about the motivations of those who make that possible.

Excerpted from: "What Should a Billionaire Give -and What Should You?" in the New York Times Magazine by Peter Singer the Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

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