Pluralism in Charitable Giving

I have complained bitterly about it myself, to be honest.  Wealthy benefactors giving play money [to them] to museums, opera houses and even universities and their football teams.  While people suffer in their daily lives from of poverty, homelessness or disease.  But Benjamin Soskis, a senior Urban Institute researcher has published a thought provoking essay challenging the notion that their ought to be a priority of causes in civil society, the most pressing of which ought to be funded before anything else. I’m not sure though.  Here is an excerpt:

In the wake of the fire that devastated Notre-Dame in April 2019, a debate smoldered over the ends of large-scale philanthropy. Among the responses to the news that several donors contributed large sums to refurbish the cathedral were complaints that other worthy causes had not received similar attention—both other significant cultural institutions around the world, and more broadly, causes besides the support of national cultural monuments. As the New York Times recounted the controversy, “Some attacked the premise of giving so much to a damaged cathedral when that money could better benefit social service organizations that could provide food, shelter or a better education to needy citizens.” Surveying the intensity of the critical response, the Times quoted an alarmed philanthropic adviser: “Instead of praising the act of philanthropy itself, people are saying it’s not the highest and best use of that capital…When did we get to a place where we feel comfortable criticizing other people’s altruism?”

This research report attempts to answer that question, joining a bumper crop of recent scholarship that seeks to understand the surging critique of large-scale philanthropy. It does so by looking specifically at one particular form in which such criticism has taken shape, in which giving to certain causes is deemed the “highest and best use” of philanthropic capital, with other giving, implicitly, designated as inadequate or suboptimal. In other words, it seeks to historicize the prescriptive turn in recent philanthropic discourse. This trend represents a significant shift in the dominant norms governing how philanthropic and charitable giving have been discussed in the United States over the last century. Those norms in the past centered around a commitment to cause pluralism, defined here to mean a belief that the wide diversity of causes supported by donors is itself a good that should be defended and preserved. Such a commitment has often translated into a propensity to defer to donors’ prerogatives and a general reluctance to embrace explicit cause prioritization—the insistence that some causes are more worthy of charitable support than others.

This report maps out the roots of the long-standing commitment to charitable cause pluralism, including the foundations of federal charity law in the United States, the support provided by cognate ideals of religious, political, and philosophical pluralism, and the norms surrounding the stewardship of large-scale wealth. It next highlights some countercurrents which encouraged charitable prescription and cause prioritization in the first half of the 20th century but shows that by the final decades of the century, the commitment to charitable pluralism had reached its apex. Then it discusses how the embrace of charitable and especially philanthropic cause prescription grew stronger over the last few decades, with reference to two specific examples: the push toward racial equity philanthropy and the effective altruism (EA) movement. It ends by exploring the reaction to this prescriptive turn within giving discourse and suggests how it has led to an uneasy accommodation between the advocates of pluralism and prescription.

darryll k. jones