---
title: The Single Lens
number: 13
summary: Charitology hypothesizes that considering several moral frameworks can reveal choices a single framework misses. It has not measured how many givers use only one.
evidence: hypothesis
node: work
flip: Givers see their choices through several moral frameworks at once and know where those frameworks agree and where they part.
sources:
  - title: Moral Uncertainty
    publisher: William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord, Oxford University Press
    year: 2020
    url: https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198722274.001.0001
---

## What it looks like

A giver might compare gifts only by lives saved, institutional fairness or obligations within a tradition. Each question can reveal something useful, and none exhausts the possible reasons to give. These are simplified examples; welfare, justice and religious traditions all contain diverse views.

## Why it happens

Every moral framework makes some kinds of good easy to see and others hard to see. Organizations specialize in one way of thinking, and donors find the organizations that already agree with them. Comparing those frameworks is a task in moral philosophy as well as a proposed part of Charitology. Philosophers have a name for the problem of choosing well when you aren’t sure which framework is right: *moral uncertainty*. William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord wrote a book about how to reason under it.

This is the condition Charitology was founded to treat. Its whole method is to look at giving through all the lenses at once and report where they [agree and disagree](/record/disagreements/).

## This is a hypothesis

Charitology’s claim is that single-lens giving leaves large, valuable opportunities unfunded because none of the dominant lenses can see them. The sources here do not test that allocation claim.

## No one is to blame

Having a moral point of view isn’t a failing. It’s what makes giving matter. The point is to see the other views too.

## What we don’t know yet

How should a real donor allocate under moral uncertainty, and do different methods give stable answers? That is [Open Problem 16, Moral Parliament in Practice](/open-problems/moral-parliament-in-practice/). Try it yourself with the [Portfolio Builder](/tools/portfolio-builder/).