QB: Can Philanthropy Be Undemocratic?
A Response to Sam Arnold
[#5 in my series of excerpts from Questioning Beneficence: Four Philosophers on Effective Altruism and Doing Good. This is my response to one of Sam Arnold’s essays, ‘Can Philanthropy Be Undemocratic?’]1
Strings
What should we think about donations with (policy-influencing) strings attached?
The answer might depend upon the generality of the question. If we expect most such strings to be distorting, biasing policy towards the interests of the donor rather than the general good, then we could reasonably oppose such strings in general.
But we can also evaluate particular proposals on a case-by-case basis. (Compare: some people are generally in favor of greater government regulation, others are generally against. But specific regulations vary enormously in their merits. So we might think the best approach is to focus on more specific questions, and evaluate any given proposed regulation on its merits. For an even starker example, consider how silly it would be to be blanket for or against legislation, without regard for the particular content of the legislation.) Maybe we should be opposed to strings that pull people towards bad policies, and favor strings that help to pull them towards better policies.
Fairness
Arnold disagrees. He suggests that it is procedurally unfair for “a tiny elite—no matter how politically competent and wise—to enjoy vastly disproportionate influence over issues that affect all of us.”
I’m not sure how much we should care about procedural unfairness. Suppose a benevolent and omniscient God offered to take over the reins of government for us. Would that be unfair? I’m not even sure what the question is asking. It would obviously be an improvement (only the most rabid partisan could possibly think that their preferred leader was better than God; and of course we tend to be landed with our dispreferred option half the time), and that’s surely what really matters.
What’s more, it just seems completely inevitable that some people will have more influence than others. Consider Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump, or members of the New York Times editorial board. No ordinary citizen has anything like the political influence of these culturally influential people. Is that “unfair”? Again, I don’t know that the question even makes sense. People choose how to direct their own attention. Should we force them to put down their newspapers and listen to a homeless person’s incoherent rambles instead? Obviously not. Would it be “fairer”? Maybe, in some sense, but not in any sense that’s worth caring about.
Given that strict equality of influence is a non-starter, I don’t really see much force to the complaint that it’s unfair that rich people (in addition to journalists, politicians, and other culturally influential people) have more influence than ordinary people. Fairness just doesn’t seem the normative property that’s worth attending to here. What we should assess is whether it’s harmful that rich people have such influence, and if so what should be done about it.
Even if it is in general harmful for rich people to have such influence, it doesn’t follow that every particular rich person should refrain from trying to improve public policy. Perhaps the best way to stop a bad guy with a suitcase full of money is with a good guy’s suitcase full of money.
Philanthropizing Democracy
Still, it could be worth thinking about ways to reconcile philanthropy and democracy. Usually, this involves trying to make philanthropy more democratic: Arnold approvingly mentions unconditional gifts to the state that leave existing policies untouched. But I’m skeptical of the wisdom of ordinary political priorities. I wonder if we might do better to make democracy more philanthropic.
Imagine decentralizing the public purse by distributing philanthropic vouchers to each citizen, to be regranted at their discretion to any eligible charitable organization or government-run project. Like basic income proposals, philanthropic vouchers are a means of redistributing wealth and influence without necessarily increasing government. I think they have two primary benefits worth highlighting:
First, by making tradeoffs explicit, and making the stakes of one’s decision explicit, it encourages more careful reflection and decision-making than typical political processes such as voting. Currently, the US government spends vastly more on the elderly than it does on children, and close to nothing on the global poor. It seems plausible to imagine that these priorities could change significantly if individuals had to explicitly decide for themselves how to apportion their share of the public purse. Or they might not: perhaps people would endorse the status quo distributions upon further reflection. But either way, such a process would surely have greater democratic legitimacy than our current political sausage-factory, in which most people have very little idea of what they are actually voting for when they elect one representative over another (except, perhaps, as it relates to the most hot-button issues).
Second, the incentives surrounding public political debate would be radically changed by shifting from winner-takes-all political contests to civic persuasion on a continuous scale, since now each additional person you persuade makes an equal incremental difference to the overall distribution of resources. Boosting support from 19% to 21%, or from 79% to 81%, is just as significant as the boost from 49% to 51% of the population. This is clearly more principled, and provides a salutary incentive to appeal to as wide an audience as possible rather than separating into competing political coalitions and resting content with 51% support.
Not all decisions can be decentralized in this way, so I don’t pretend that this is a total replacement for all politics. And it raises a number of important questions, such as (a) what things should the government directly fund independently of citizen-supported funding? and (b) How restrictive should the eligibility criteria be for charities? To address coordination problems, citizens might be invited to delegate their voucher to a trusted intermediary regranting organization (like the EA Funds for effective altruists). Tracking running totals with live updates could better inform citizens about which of their priorities have already received sufficient funding from others’ vouchers, and protect against wasteful overconcentration of funding on the most popular few organizations.
Many such details would need to be carefully worked out to make the idea work as well as possible. But it strikes me as well worth exploring. Philanthropizing democracy would be a truly radical systemic change; but it’s one with an unusual amount of promise, or so it seems to me. (And like basic income proposals, it could begin small, and gradually scale up if it seems to be working well.)
I’ve added subheadings for this blog version that aren’t in the printed original, added links, and left out the footnotes.
Without having read Arnold's essay, I can't say whether this is a compelling response. But on its own terms it feels weaker to me than your usual content.
The "Philanthropizing Democracy" section is an interesting policy idea, but isn't really responsive to the question of whether philanthropy can be undemocratic.
The "Strings" and "Fairness" sections convince me that "procedural unfairness" as you've described it is not the right concept to be using: we should rather want more good things and less bad things. I would have been interested in more depth on this point: the side of the argument you're on would seem to lean toward "it's worth it overall to let rich people have more influence," so I would have liked to see you directly accept or reject that. But perhaps that wasn't necessary in the context of Arnold's essay.
Lastly, this sentence seems fallacious (although maybe i'm misreading it?): "Given that strict equality of influence is a non-starter, I don’t really see much force to the complaint that it’s unfair that rich people ... have more influence than ordinary people." Replace "influence" with "wealth" and it seems to fall apart: one can sensibly complain about a concerning degree of wealth inequality without advocating for strict equality of wealth. You argue before this that fairness just isn't the right concept in this case, but as far as I can tell this sentence isn't advancing that argument -- it's making a new, invalid point.
In some CEE countries, a small proportion of individual's tax burden - 1 to 2% - is discretionarily allocated to "socially beneficient causes" eg Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Hungary. Not universal (you have to be a tax payer) but close. In Italy, just under 1% is allocated either to specific religious denominations or government welfare programmes based on people's declarations. So there's already a tiny precedent for something akin to "philanthropy vouchers" albeit for taxpayers only. How deep this could be extended realistically until we'd end up with even more desperately underfunded prisons and even more money for the Worthy Elderly Who Fought for Our Freedom (despite majority of them being now boomers born after the war) is hard to tell....
As to money and influence and "fairness". I feel this is not so much about unequal influence or sources of wealth but because I suspect people, even people who are ok with wealth inequalities, don't feel that greater wealth should AUTOMATICALLY lead to greater influence. It feels like cheating because people feel that influence should be allocated not so much equally, but on a different basis.