Matt Yglesias recently took to his blog to decry one of the great evils of our time: Harvard students who donate $10 to support their school. To make his case, he sets up a straw man — namely, the idea that we give Senior Gifts primarily to “promote social justice”:
[L]ook, if you’re considering giving $10 to Harvard or lighting a ten dollar bill on fire, then obviously you should give it to Harvard. But if you’ve got some cash that’s burning a hole in your pocket and you want to give it away to charity and you specifically want to give it away to a charity that “succeeds as a mechanism for social justice” and “promotes socioeconomic mobility” this is an insane course of action. Harvard has a lot of money. Almost everyone needs your money more than Harvard does. Give it to Oxfam. Give it to a homeless person. Next time you’re on the T, leave the money on a seat. It’s an almost trivial task.
All true. But if we start trotting out act utilitarianism in order to argue against Harvard’s Senior Gift, where do we stop? Presumably Matt’s dad could have created more good for our world by donating to Oxfam rather than giving his son an iPad for his birthday. But one wonders: did Matt point this out at the time?:
My dad kindly bought me an iPad for my birthday which of course prompted a lot of questions from Pad-skeptics about why would someone need one of those. The answer, of course, is that you don’t…That said, for an eleven-day trip to China it’s an excellent thing to have.
To be clear, the Crimson does argue that we should we donate to Harvard for “social justice” reasons. But not for the ones Matt suggests. The Crimson isn’t saying that we should give to Harvard in order to maximally advance social justice in our time; it’s saying that one reason, among others, to be proud of our school is its commitment to “empower[ing] the middle class and working class.”
By comparison: Matt’s dad probably believes Matt is “worthy of support” (to use the Crimson’s phrase) because Matt spends a lot of time “promoting social justice” (inasmuch as he can). This makes his dad proud, and it should! But there are a whole host of reasons his dad, presumably, is proud of his son — reasons that might have nothing to do with “social justice” — and then a whole host of reasons to give him a birthday present other than pride. To list a few: love; that feeling of shared destiny between father and son; because gift-giving is a ritual, and being a member of a family means performing rituals (even though rituals lack instrumental rationales, almost by definition). Without invoking these ideas, Matt’s iPad present is totally inexplicable. His dad should have left cash on the T for a homeless man, just like Matt tell us to do.
The fact that most people have no problem understanding why a father gives a gift to his son just exposes the problems with an indiscriminate application of act utilitarianism as a policy tool. Maybe airdropping malaria nets on Africa, at cost relative to the amount NATO is spending to intervene in Libya, would create more welfare for the world. Maybe this is true. But not intervening to prevent the massacre of Libyan rebels doesn’t magically give Africa malaria nets. That’s not how the world works! Likewise, not giving birthday presents, or Senior Gifts, doesn’t magically make our world a better place. In fact, it makes it worse: a world where we’re never urged to give back to the people and institutions that play a formative role in our lives, for no reason other than the fact that we’re members of a shared community, is a world that I’d rather not be a part of. It would be a more, not less, selfish world.
Photo credit: Class of 2010