caryoscelus:~#

This may sound counter-intuitive, but the reason is pretty simple: i want to be reasonably sure that for every donation i may receive, nobody (including me, donor and possibly others) gets upset or regrets about it. It is unfortunately not that uncommon for donations or their handling to result in heated arguments, break-ups and other nasty stuff. I don’t want that to happen to or around me.

But more to the point of this particular post, lets consider why do people donate at all? There might be lots of different reasons, including pure utilitarianist reasoning (“if i donate now, they will create more cool stuff for me to enjoy”), personal sympathy, self-importance, gamification elements etc, but ultimately i believe that for most people there’s at least some degree of what can be called “desire to make world better”.

If that’s the case, the natural questions arise: does particular donation make world better? Could this money be spent in more effective world-bettering way?

I believe that it might often be the case that donation is indeed sub-optimal and the better alternative would be to save the money and leave anti-social, exploitative or in other way bad job instead. Why? Because if we are serious about making world better, throwing money around (even for the good) will never be enough. The argument about place of money in society is too long to be put here, but i would suggest that generally if you’re getting money in unethical way, you’re unlikely to balance that with then donating its fraction for the good.

For example, consider programmer who makes proprietary software and then donates some fraction of their salary to free software development. If you agree that proprietary software is bad and unethical, you might also agree that such a programmer would do world a better favour by finding more ethical way to sustain their living, even if that means they could no longer afford donations.

With all that said, i do not want to imply donations are generally bad. Rather than merely discouraging people from donating i want to encourage them to do more direct change. Furthermore, if you look a bit deeper into the argument, you may see that most of what i say about donations can be applied even stronger to other forms of payments for non-material rewards (e.g. “buying” copyrighted materials).

Essentially, it can be boiled down to this: consider minimizing negative impacts of your job on the world before attempting positive impact via money. You may still arrive at conclusion that you would prefer to donate, and that’s fine; but i hope next time you do it, you’re doing it having considered alternatives.