HOLIDAY RUN-UP

Well, the holidays are upon us (the Judeo-Christian holidays anyway…. with our group “the holidays are upon us” is probably always true in one corner of the world or another). So, now, instead of writing about how many problems we all have, I am making a schizophrenic leap to writing about how fucking lucky we all are.

I, like probably all of you, have a fairly complicated and conflicted attitude towards philanthropy, all the more so having made the transition from social entrepreneur/NGO director to MBA (going from “business is the enemy” to “business is the answer” and now finding myself taking a bit from column A and a bit from column B). Nonetheless, there is no denying that we are all among the most fortunate people in the world...even those of us unemployed/saddled with debt. Think of how few people are even CAPABLE of piling up that much debt? Hehehe.

There was a fascinating article in the New York Times Magazine this week by a professor of philosophy from Princeton (Peter Singer) who was advancing a theory about how much of their worth people in the developed world should donate to help alleviate poverty in the developing world and all of the death, disease and all its other resultant tragedies. As a jumping off point, it used the same position that is the guiding principle of the Gates Foundation: “All lives- no matter where they are being led- have equal value.” From there, he examines certain actions to see how well they support the acceptance of that assertion. For example, if you are walking by a drowning child, even if you didn’t push him into the water, do you have a moral obligation to save him, assuming it would be easy to do so? Most of us would say yes. Well, what about if saving him would ruin a pair of $200 shoes (he used $90, but I know you guys)? Still, the answer would be yes. Well then, if there is an inoculation that would save the life of a child in a developing country that costs LESS than $200 and there is a way to ensure that by supplying the cost of that inoculation, the child would receive it, are we any LESS obligated to pay for that inoculation than we are to save the drowning child and ruin our shoes?

I'm not going to try to answer that question for anyone but myself, but no harm can come from each of us considering it.

Needless to say, there’s a lot more in the article, and you can reads the whole thing here if you like: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/magazine/17charity.t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin .

I just thought I’d throw that out...we should always be aware of how good we have things, and always be on the lookout for ways to make the world a better place, but now is traditionally a time for this sort of reflection, and, well, what can I say. I’m a sucker for tradition.