Fear of charity

and other barriers to aid, foreign and domestic

This post starts with an American flag, in honour of PEPFAR. Photograph by Noah Wulf, via Wikimedia Commons, used under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

I. Need

As you may know, the Trump administration has put in place a freeze on all foreign aid operations. Most of the staff at the U. S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have been put on indefinite leave, and all payments through the agency have ceased. Secretary of State Marco Rubio claims that waivers will apply to life-saving humanitarian assistance, but, as the New York Times reports, the funding freeze is still in place. So, I guess aid workers in those areas are allowed to help people without receiving retaliation for it — how generous of the administration! — but they’re not being given the money they would need to actually do it.

Particular focus has been given to PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief, which began in 2003 under George W. Bush and has been credited with saving more than 25 million lives at a total cost of about $110 billion over the entire time it has been in place. At around $4400 per life, it’s as efficient as the very best Effective Altruist global health initiatives, and larger in scale by a good margin. Creating a humanitarian structure of such quality is a remarkable achievement, not lightly to be discarded. Unfortunately, like many other life-saving initiatives supported by USAID, PEPFAR cannot simply be paused and unpaused without being damaged in the process.

Perhaps this is vice signalling on the part of the administration — a declaration that no moral claims, however worthy, will be allowed to stand in the way of Making America Great Again. Perhaps, as

Damir Marusic

suggests, its main aim is the broader goal of demoralizing civil servants. Perhaps it is being done for several reasons at once.

The Trump administration itself claims, plausibly, that some projects funded by USAID constitute waste and abuse. They highlight unintended consequences (such as agricultural efforts in Afghanistan that were partially used for opium poppies by the local population) and projects that they do not politically support (such as funding for LGBT groups). Not everything listed by the Trump administration was funded through USAID; some are politically-inflected foreign cultural projects that were supported by the Biden State Department directly in accordance with the previous administration’s politics. It is understandable that the Trump administration would wish to cease such activities. It is inexcusable that they would be willing to let innocent babies be infected by HIV rather than take the time to whitelist the obviously good projects and exempt them prior to their funding pause.

II. Ordered loves

Concurrent with these destructive events, J. D. Vance posted on X in defense of a totally different set of Trump administration policies by referencing ordo amoris. This is a Catholic concept of “rightly ordered love.” As Vance puts it:

[T]here’s this old-school [concept] — and I think a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

Vance was not talking about USAID, he was talking about immigration policy. Specifically, he was accusing liberals in the USA of loving unauthorised immigrants more than citizens of their own country, and claiming that they ought instead to do the reverse.

Inevitably, however, ordo amoris has been introduced into the USAID debate, leading passionate Effective Altruist Scott Alexander (of

Astral Codex Ten

) to post on X:

I went on a walk and saw a child drowning in the river. I was going to jump in and save him, when someone reminded me that I should care about family members more than strangers. So I continued on my way and let him drown.

The USA spends 0.7% of its annual budget on foreign aid. Continuing it will not result in hardship for citizens. In truth, the concept of ordo amoris does not deserve to be dragged through the mud by being used against USAID in the first place. As a wise acquaintance of mine pointed out, Thomas Aquinas’ extended treatment of the topic is nuanced and leaves room for judgment:

For it must be understood that, other things being equal, one ought to succor those rather who are most closely connected with us. And if of two, one be more closely connected, and the other in greater want, it is not possible to decide, by any general rule, which of them we ought to help rather than the other, since there are various degrees of want as well as of connection: and the matter requires the judgment of a prudent man.

Such considerations could, prudentially, allow us to succor non-citizens, if they are in greater need than citizens. This is not a concept that can definitively settle either of the political debates into which it has been introduced.

III. Fearful sophistry

People fear the vast mass of needy humanity. It’s understandable. Allow the whole world to have a claim on you, and what will you have left? Scott Alexander’s follow-up post deals extensively with this, carefully placing charitable giving outside the realm of obligation and into a nebulous category of ‘virtue’ instead.

Richard Y Chappell

, another Effective Altruist, goes so far as to outright recommend ‘honest compartmentalization’ as a strategy for dealing with this. This is, he says in careful air quotes, ‘“better for your soul,” we might say,’ when compared with moral delusion.

Charity, Guido Reni, circa 1630. Honestly, three babies already seems like a lot.

Arguments for not extending charitable giving to particular groups of people abound. This is as true in Christianity as it is anywhere else. Here on Substack, Johann Kurtz of

Becoming Noble

is downright scornful of any kind of optimised foreign aid. After all, the story of the Good Samaritan is about helping your neighbour, and that means you only have to help people in close proximity to you. Effective Altruism is, says Kurtz, completely devoid of love.

As counterargument to this final charge, allow me to simply quote Scott Alexander:

I'm not a very emotional person myself, but having kids gave me a really strong sense of what it is to love someone really really hard. Then I think about the fact that a bunch of kids are dying of preventable diseases in India or wherever, that they have parents just like me, and that those parents would feel just as devastated if their kids died as I would feel if mine did. I don't like thinking about this too much because it's a good way to send yourself into a horror-depression spiral, but being able to think like this when needed helps restrain my natural tendency to end up as one of those guys tweeting stuff like "why save African children when they barely contribute anything to GDP?"

I submit that this is a clear example of sincere care for other people. Complaining that it doesn’t count as “real” charity because Scott Alexander doesn’t know all of those people personally is just a sophist’s argument for avoiding uncomfortable moral possibilities.

Mind you, not all sophists on this subject are Christian. I suspect that some of the suspicion that accrues to Effective Altruism as a movement is based on how it can be, and is, used to excuse people from thinking too much about their needy neighbours. These people, too, present a scary claim on us that we might seek false reasons to resist. “Your money could do more good elsewhere” can be an enticing excuse to ignore the suffering around you. And of course, this risk gets even higher when you pull in longtermism, which holds that actually your biggest moral obligation must be to the far larger number of people who could ever exist in the future, so, oops, maybe you should drop the boring healthcare charities and donate towards more exciting stuff like travel to other planets?

Not all longtermists are moral sophists, and many longtermists continue to donate more than most people would to causes that are helping people right now. Still, there is one clear example of a man who has claimed to be a longtermist, for whom the designation “moral sophist” would be too generous. I speak of Elon Musk, who tweeted of Will MacAskill’s book What We Owe The Future that the book is “a close match for my philosophy.” Is it really? I find that unlikely. If Elon Musk truly believed in the importance of helping as many people as possible as effectively as possible, he wouldn’t be dismantling USAID with no thought spared on his part for malnourished children or drug-resistant tuberculosis. Sophistry would be an improvement.

IV. Misdirection

If you can’t deal adequately with the scary moral possibilities of foreign aid, do you really think you will be able to deal adequately with the scary moral possibilities of aiding the needy in your neighbourhood? Playing one of these priorities off against the other doesn’t solve the problem that there are too many people, in any sphere, who could really use your help. Drop the sophistry. There are better approaches.

Personally, when I started giving to beggars, I did it out of spite. A Christian friend-of-a-friend had tried to give me the “no, it’s about loving your neighbour” argument, just like Kurtz. Since this particular guy also argued that solving other people’s problems for them via charity was probably just going to deprive them of meaning in life, I did not believe for a minute that he was the sort of person who would actually help anyone in poverty. I decided his claim that ‘The homeless person down the street is your neighbour’ was a beautiful point that really deserved to be made by a better person, and that if I acted on it even slightly I’d probably at least be a better person than that guy.

Hey, it was a nice way to distract myself from the fear of obligation. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t close myself to the yawning pit of need that I was potentially opening myself to. I knew it was there, I just kept it in the periphery. Spite was easier.

Meta-cognitively, I was giving myself as much as I could handle. I figured, perhaps I would get used to it, get better at seeing the true deeper motivation without being overwhelmed by it.

I am not saying I am good at it, but I did get better.

V. Truth

When you consider someone in need, either a person in front of you or a person far away, there are several ways that you might respond to the knowledge that you are not helping this person as much as you theoretically could.

One way is to blame the person for being needy in the first place. This is not necessarily always false, per se. Many people are in need due to their own bad decisions. Many of them will continue to make bad decisions in the future. I am completely certain that at least some of the money I’ve given people over the years has been spent on alcohol, don’t get me wrong.

But you can’t get too reliant on this. If you need them to be bad people in order to justify your own actions, do you really think you can judge them reliably? I don’t. If you want to see truly, and I do, then you can’t deny the possibility of some culpability on their part, but you also can’t rely on it. Moreover, even if they are culpable to some extent, that wouldn’t forbid you from trying to help them.

Another way is to claim other obligations: to yourself, to your family, to other groups of people with greater claim on you or whom you might be able to better help. This, too, is usually not wholly false. For the comfortably middle class, however, the central obligations to self and family will only go so far. They will not solve your problem.

You can compartmentalize, you can misdirect, you can downplay the potential for obligation. If you’re doing it in a way that assists you in helping people more than you otherwise would, then I won’t tell you that you’re wrong. I’ve done this and I still do it, both in person and with more formal charitable giving, all the time.

But I want to see truly, without denying the possibility of moral claims upon me. For that, I need the big one. I need to be able to look at myself, and look at the world around me, and simply admit that I’m flawed.

VI. Freedom

Christians have a really obvious process for dealing with overwhelming obligations. It’s right there. You ask forgiveness and you have faith in the grace of God. Why, instead, institutionalise processes of sophistry and denial? Why try for laws against love, or kindness? Are you scared of becoming a good person?

Fair enough, if so.

I do wonder about the extent to which non-theism allows for freedom as a release valve. If you think of all your moral obligations as being, on some level, voluntarily taken on, then perhaps it leaves more room for meta-cognitive reasoning like “If I take this obligation further then I’ll get scared or uncomfortable and drop the whole thing, so I will stop here for now until I feel I can do more.”

Christianity contains a lot of freedom, too, though. Consider: “By the grace of God I have been given the free gift of redemption. In love, I should respond by being as good as I can. Right now, this is what I feel I can do. May God forgive me for what I have left undone, and I’ll try to get better over time.” Is that so different? I would not have thought it less powerful than existential freedom, as an approach.

Mind you, if I was trying to do it while my community hammered me with proof-texts I suspect that would dull the efficacy quite a lot. Whenever I see that, I am grateful indeed for my own existential freedom. It’s a delicate business, trying to be better in the face of the dreadful possibility of becoming truly good. When the fear gets too much, be free. Be so free you don’t need your defenses.

VII. Final wishes

To the remaining civil servants in the beleaguered US governing apparatus: it must be rough. I am thinking of you. Don’t let them make you believe that what you’re doing is not worthwhile. Hang in there as long as you can, and do your best.

To those who will suffer from the lack of humanitarian aid, and to those who are still trying to help them: I am so sorry. I am thinking of you, too.

To Elon Musk: be a better technocrat. To Donald Trump: have you considered that it’s possible to project power by being magnanimous instead of a bully? (I have to try.)

To everyone who read this far: thank you so much. Due to the fast pace of current events, this post was written more hastily than usual and has been proofread by no-one but me. I beg your patience for wherever I have misspoken.

Lastly, to my friends in this thread, particularly

ProfGerm

but also

DrManhattan16

, UAnchovy and others: this whole post, for better or worse, would not exist without you. I’m in your debt.