First, if you buy the arguments for giving to charity, you might want to research which charities aren't squandering their donations. Here's a link to lists of reputable charities, sorted by type of charity (such as hunger or international relief).
Next, check out The Hunger Site. You can donate food FOR FREE there! You can also donate rice for free by playing a word game at FreeRice. Links to other charitable organizations are at the bottom of this post.
The next two links will help those who can't find their Vice & Virtue textbook. This one's from Peter Singer, the same guy we read for class. It's his updated argument with some interesting specific proposals:
The next is the James Shikwati interview we read for class. (Shikwati's organization is online here. A similar organization you can donate to is online here.) The NPR program Fresh Air just aired a radio interview with someone who agrees with Shikwati's claim that most government aid to developing nations is doing more harm than good.
Here's an interesting article in which Nicholas Kristof discusses many of the concerns Shikwati raises about giving aid to African nations. I especially recommend reading the last section of the article.
Here's an article on all the reasons why we might give away the money we earn. This article even references Thomas Nagel's anti-I'M-SPECIAL-ism.
Next, here is Peter Singer's appearance on The Colbert Report. He's talking about our next topic: animal ethics.
Next, here's another short video of Peter Singer on giving to charity:
Finally, here are some cheaper charities designed for people who can't donate a lot of money:
5 comments:
i will never give my money or blood to the Rockefeller's Red Cross.
The Red Cross gets a great rating from Charity Watch. Care to explain your boycott? I hope it's less conspiracy-laden than this guy's boycott!
conspiracy? or good reason to doubt and question due to past atrocities?
why is any idea or opinion outside of the public accepted view..labled conspiracy and deviant. or un-patriotic.
it can be frustrating to be informed.
"For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. Informed that they were being treated for “bad blood,” their doctors had no intention of curing them of syphilis at all.
The data for the experiment was to be collected from autopsies of the men, and they were thus deliberately left to degenerate under the ravages of tertiary syphilis—which can include tumors, heart disease, paralysis, blindness, insanity, and death. “As I see it,” one of the doctors involved explained, “we have no further interest in these patients until they die.”
http://www.tuskegee.edu/Global/Story.asp?s=1207586
Peace, brothers! I'm sure we can all agree that that is a LOT of syphilis. o_o;
This is completely beside the point, but why have I never heard of anything good happening in/coming from Alabama? Nowadays, if someone tries to tell me about something horrible that happened, I'll express some sort of shock. But that shock immediately melts away if they tell me that it happened in Alabama, or the people involved were from Alabama.
Someone please say something to either confirm my suspicions that Alabama is an inherently evil place, or restore my faith in humanity. :P
Wait, hang on. All hope is lost:
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=34.553932,-86.994467&spn=0.005284,0.012617&t=h&z=17
REALLY? (That's the shape of a retirement home in Decatur, Alabama, so you know. They need to change the shape of it so it won't offend any flying Jewish people anymore).
You very well might have a good reason to doubt and question the Red Cross! However, you didn't present us with this reason. In your first comment, you gave us a conclusion without an argument. I'm always looking for an argument!
Leonard Horowitz's views ARE conspiracy-laden... not because they are uncommon, but because they posit secret, unethical agendas. (By the way, an opinion outside of the public accepted view is deviant... by definition.)
I'm more than OK with holding uncommon opinions. I hold several deviant views myself! What I dislike are poorly supported opinions. As it happens, many conspiracy theories are poorly supported. The evidence for them is flimsy. Conspiracy theorists often provide spurious, anecdotal evidence. It looks good, but it isn't good enough to support such large claims.
For instance, Horowitz is right that Rockefeller was interested in eugenics research. But his attempt to connect Rockefeller's interest in eugenics with his involvement with the Red Cross is not well-supported. It looks more like speculation than confirmed fact.
This is classic conspiracy theory: start with a small truth, then use it to support a large, sweeping claim. The small truth, however, isn't enough evidence to support the large claim.
Of course, there are several conspiracies with enough evidence to support them: you bring up the great example of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.
But just because one conspiracy is well-supported, doesn't mean they all are. Unless there's a connection between the Red Cross and the Tuskegee experiments that I'm unaware of, I don't see how that's directly relevant.
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