Filed under Giving

Giving What We Can has received some excellent, refreshed publicity just after it’s first birthday, with articles in most major newspapers and the BBC news website and a slot for Toby on The Daily Politics. The result of all this so far has been a great increase in members of the facebook group, a flurry of donations and words of support on SCI’s JustGiving site, and nearly 40 new members signing up! This is amazing news and will do so much to help relieve needless suffering and loss of life in the developing world.

Here is the Daily Politics broadcast, here is the really excellent BBC article, and here is SCI’s JustGiving page with some really heartening new donations and words of support.

Let’s hope this continues to spread!

A thought-provoking article in yesterday’s Guardian raised questions about the pursuit of ethical behaviour.

The article focuses on recent research into ‘ethical consumerism’. It was expected that ‘ethical consumers’ would be more ethical in other areas of life, but researchers found that,

[W]hen people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the “licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour”, otherwise known as “moral balancing” or “compensatory ethics”.

According to social psychologist Dieter Fray, these findings fit standard patterns of human behaviour:

At the moment in which you have proven your credentials in a particular area, you tend to allow yourself to stray elsewhere.

Would you expect this to hold true for those who give large amounts of money to charity?

See here for the full article. The original research, entitled “Do Green Products Make Us Better People”, can be found in the latest edition of the journal Psychological Science.

Peter Singer has written a thought-provoking article for the Guardian, exploring the sometimes unhelpful psychology of giving. You can find it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/feb/16/haiti-aid-future-damage

The article sheds light on some of the possible reasons that:

“people give generously to earthquake victims, but not to prevent the much larger number of deaths brought about by extreme poverty, insufficient food, unsafe water, lack of sanitation, and the absence of even the most basic healthcare”

Singer also highlights some of the problems with the way we tend to give:

“The earthquake killed up to 200,000 people. Terrible as that is, it is fewer than the number of children who… die every 10 days from avoidable, poverty-related causes. Moreover… there are good grounds for thinking that disaster relief is less cost-effective than aid aimed at saving the lives of those who are risk from extreme poverty.”