...and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.
This kind of moralizing about other people's choices leaves me very cold. It's their money; they can spend it as they see fit.
The point about the insecticide nets being more effective per dollar than antimalarial drugs is better taken; in that case the goal is the same, and only the means are in question. But if people want to give their money for an entirely different purpose, such as keeping a painting in a museum, that is their choice.
Moralizing isn't the point. The point is that, for a given value system, there is one charity that best optimizes for those values. The vast majority of the people who donated to that museum would agree that the thousand lives are more important than the painting, yet they donated to the museum instead of the third world anyway. This isn't because they're immoral, it's because they're irrational: they're not optimizing with respect to their own value systems.
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 17.1 ms ] threadThis kind of moralizing about other people's choices leaves me very cold. It's their money; they can spend it as they see fit.
The point about the insecticide nets being more effective per dollar than antimalarial drugs is better taken; in that case the goal is the same, and only the means are in question. But if people want to give their money for an entirely different purpose, such as keeping a painting in a museum, that is their choice.
So no, there is not only one best charity.