Distance doesn’t matter morally
A life is a life wherever it is. If the same money does far more good abroad, that is where it should go.
Proximity creates duties
We have special obligations to family, neighbors and community, and local giving builds the trust a good society needs.
It depends on what you are fixing
Local knowledge and institutions can matter to changing a local institution or national law. Distance matters for some problems and not others.
The debate
In 1972 Peter Singer argued that if you could save a child drowning in front of you at the cost of ruining your clothes, you should, and that a child dying far away has the same claim on you. Many people find the argument hard to refute and hard to live by.
The other side is just as serious. Some care-based and religious accounts hold that the people closest to us have special claims: we owe our children more than strangers, and communities are built by people who show up for each other.
Where Charitology stands
Charitology doesn’t settle this for anyone. It treats the information gap as the problem it can fix. Comparisons should make their evidence, uncertainty and assumptions about special obligations clear. The sources here do not establish how many donors lack such information. See the Proximity Pull and Open Problem 18.
The cruxes
What would have to be true for each side to change its mind:
- Whether special obligations to people near us are real moral duties or a bias we should correct for.
- How big the cost difference between near and far giving really is once the counterfactual is counted.
- Whether local giving produces community benefits, such as trust and civic strength, that cost-per-outcome comparisons miss.