Title: BBC - Ethics - Charity: Arguments against charity
Headings: Arguments against charity
Arguments against charity
What's wrong with charity
Thinking too small
Charities often target symptoms, not causes
Charity may become a substitute for real justice
Failing to change society
Charity may not provide the best solution to a problem
Charity may benefit the state rather than the needy
Technicalities of giving
Charity may lead to favouritism, not fairness
The relationship between charity and the tax system can do harm
Our charitable giving is often inefficient
What charities do with their funds
Charities may not make best use of their funds
Charities are often accountable to the givers not the receivers
Is it ethical to give with strings attached?
Fundraising

Content: but they do not make a frontal attack upon the social injustices from which the Negro suffers. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932
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Failing to change society
Charity may not provide the best solution to a problem
Let's agree that the purpose of giving to charity is to solve particular problems and choose the problem of world poverty. Let's also agree that we want to do the most effective thing to help reduce world poverty. Charitable giving may not be the most effective way of solving world poverty. Indeed charitable giving may even distract from finding the best solution - which might involve a complex rethink of the way the world organises its economic relationships, and large-scale government initiatives to change people's conditions. If that is so, then the effort put into charity might be better devoted to pressuring governments to bring about needed change. And governments might be more likely to focus on dealing with poverty if they weren't being helped by charities. This isn't a new argument: It is more socially injurious for the millionaire to spend his surplus wealth in charity than in luxury. For by spending it on luxury, he chiefly injures himself and his immediate circle, but by spending it in charity he inflicts a graver injury upon society.