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Comment by herodotus | Hacker News Reader

In my experience with local philanthropy, there are donors who have no interest in "naming opportunities" and those for whom it is all about the name. To me it says a lot about the character of the donor if they specifically want as little fuss as possible about the donation, and especially if they do not want something named after them. It is the cause they support, not their own egos. Personally, the more often I see a particular donor's name attached to a building, the less admiration I have for the person. So for me the ethical defects of the company are consistent with the desire for the family name to be emblazoned everywhere.

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Reminds me of the quote by George Steinbrenner[1].

"If you do something nice for somebody, and more than just the two of you know about it, maybe you're doing it for the wrong reason"

[1] https://tree.mindbloom.com/apps/inspiration/detail/quote/563...

The Bible teaches this too.

Yes, but it's tied up in a bunch of other bits like not eating pork and worshipping a particular deity.

The secular quip raises the same questions about human motivations without the other baggage.

Because clearly George Steinbrenner is a better moral teacher than Jesus.

Jesus didn't talk about eating pork or not though.

True, but he did teach about not doing good deeds just to show off, which was the original point.

If GS taught the same without claiming to be the son of god, then yes.

Please keep HN threads free of religious flamewar. The parent comment wasn't particularly substantive but veering into general litigation of (biblical) religion definitely leads nowhere good. All such discussions are the same and therefore off-topic here.

This quote really irritates me; if we don't allow people to be judged by the good they do, more people die, because fewer people give. It's as simple as that. People shouldn't just feel free to talk about how they are contributing to saving lives, they should be encouraged. Introducing a social stigma that one isn't allowed to be publically happy or proud of doing good is cruel and counterproductive.

I have personal cynical hypotheses about why the state of affairs is as it is. None of it has to do with the qualities of those who donate.

Many people are recognized for doing good without needing to tell people they're doing good. If you feel you're doing good and not being recognized for it then maybe the kind of good you're doing isn't really necessary.

It's called being humble.

I'm sure all those people who didn't die of malaria but otherwise would have disagree on whether said intervention was necessary. If the virtues of being "humble" mean another billion people die of easily preventable diseases, fuck being humble.

Are you Bill Gates? Then by all means use your high profile to promote your cause.

If you're joe millionaire the only reason you're putting your name on something is because you have status anxiety. You know it, the people you're giving the money to know it and the public knows it. This goes 1000x more for the $20 donation you brag about on facebook.

Or maybe people want to be allowed to talk about the charity they do because it's important to them and talking about it encourages other people to join in.

Painting givers who want to discuss as selfish narcissists, as you have, is unkind. More importantly, it means more people die preventable deaths.

A more measured argument than my own is at Giving What We Can: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2016/08/its-good-to-tal....

Notice that these are two distinct things; talking about a charity (even saying you gave) and telling people how much you gave. Sometimes you don't even have to say how much you gave because your name on the Harvard dining hall speaks for itself.

It's not exactly a secret that donating money is often about more than altruism or stopping "preventable deaths."

Even if you believe in the cause you're donating to in the purest most altruistic sense you should know that the conversation is tainted for any rational person living in the real world. No one but people either kissing your ass or trying to get their hand in your pocket is going to hear "I give 10% of my income to save lives" no matter how dignified you think that sounds.

Or as your link says:

>You can't have a good friendship if you hide your true beliefs or feelings, including about effective giving.

I wouldn't be a good friend if I didn't say everything I said above about the "10% donation" proposal. The question is would you be a good friend to someone who disagreed? Or are your friendships predicated on "when I share something I feel strongly about you either agree or are basically complicit in killing 40 people?"

> you should know that the conversation is tainted

By no means do I think people should pretend the stigma isn't there. What I take issue with is the George Steinbrenner quote that's pasted every other discussion on charity, as if there was anything remotely noble about constantly reminding people that if anyone else so much as happens to hear about their actions, people would judge them for it.

It is hard to take your last question in good faith. Why do you still feel the need to paint me with that brush?

Sometimes buildings are named after folks just because they were awesome. Too bad it's not easy to distinguish between awesome people who had buildings named after them from the much less awesome people who essentially bought the naming rights to a building.

One indicator is whether the person was still alive when the building was named. Naming stuff after yourself when you're still alive (https://chanzuckerberg.com) is a good way to cheapen it.

No, naming it after yourself cheapens it, dead or alive. Someone else has to do it.

Kinda hard to name something after yourself when you're dead.

You could add it to your will.

"From the time of my death, my compound that I leave to my yorkie shalt be known forever as rhiz(h)ome"

It’s easier - I don’t need my stuff and the proceeds from selling it can pay for really big letters on the building.

Personally, a bigger issue is the level of control the donor requires over the activities of the donation.

Cf. the Peter O'Donnell building at UT Austin. (https://research.utexas.edu/acesit/aces-building/)

I agree, and I feel the same way about other public figures. Anytime I see a famous actor/actress that live a mostly private life, I immediately start thinking of them in a positive light.

Just know that many times a family has done it on behalf of someone deceased. A name on a plaque doesn’t mean that person said, “put my name on it!” Although it can mean that, and when it does I agree with your assessment.

Of course, when Larry David is involved, things can get a little more complicated:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De90ozOOquY

I see where you're coming from, but consider the effects public philanthropy has.

Bill & Melinda Gates, for example, have become role models, changing the cultural norms of behaviour for the super rich. Warren Buffet's addition to their foundation can be directly linked to their efforts, but there are without a doubt hundreds more following their lead less explicitly. Zuckerberg comes to mind (although I'm not sure how 'real' his efforts are).

That's far better than what previously defined that slice of society, i. e. golf, private jets, and faux-gold interiors.

I thought it was Buffet that helped bring Bill Gates around to charity rather than vice versa, with Melinda the primary driver in the Gates' philanthropy.

Steven Spielberg rarely gives his name to donations and philanthropy because, as he said in an interview years ago why he lent his name to the Shoah foundation, to the Jews god does not recognize a good deed unless it is anonymous. Meaning it has to be done with humility and doing it for name sake is a matter of pride so it goes unnoticed by god.

I believe this is true for most religions. It should also be part of "common decency", for lack of a better word.

Of all the ways a person, especially a rich one, can stroke their ego, philanthropy is probably one of the better ones.

IMO "Ego" should not be considered a bad word. We all have one, and we all enjoy stroking it. It's human. For some reason we have a hard time acknowledging that.

And it went well beyond the names, to financial gain as well as "personal favors".

People who donate anonymously still get a reward - they feel good about it.

I’m more of a consequentialist; I consider a larger philanthropist who cares about public attribution to be more admirable than someone who is a smaller philanthropist but doesn’t care about public attribution. Personally, I would absolutely like to have my name on something if I were to donate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars towards it.

In my opinion the intention or ego of a philanthropist is approximately negligible when it comes to their charity and donations. If a billionaire wants to solve a problem out of a sense of personal grandiosity, or in a vain attempt at figurative immortality: so be it. At least they have the capability to do something good and are actually following through with it. In a vague sense there might be more nobility in anonymous charity, but nobility doesn’t contribute real resources to a problem.

Phrased another way: if a billionaire donates $100M to a charity and a pauper donates $1 to the same charity, but the billionaire requires his name to be affiliated, which of the two is doing more “good”? If you believe the answer is the poorer person, your axioms are fundamentally incompatible with consequentialism, because you’re incorporating selflessness into your definition of good. But if you believe that the billionaire is doing more good in this example despite his vanity, you’re a consequentialist - as they say, we’ve established terms, and now we’re just haggling.

It is not a question of "good" it is a question of my admiration of the donor. On my organizations drives, I completely supported the naming campaigns because I accepted the view that some donors generosity is tied to their naming. I am happy that those named people chose to support a cause that I care about. But I always instructed staff members to honour the small donor as much as the large - it might be as much of a percentage of their net worth in both cases. And I will always have respect for the donors of large amounts who do not need to be named.

You seem to be implying that philanthropists who don't do naming rights only give smaller donations. Any evidence to back that up?

If Philanthropist A donates $10 million and asks for his name on the building, while Philanthropist B donates $10 million and requests no name on the building, I will absolutely have much more respect for Philanthropist B.

> You seem to be implying that philanthropists who don't do naming rights only give smaller donations.

No, I’m not. I constructed extreme upper and lower bounds as a baseline for comparing axioms. That was the purpose of my reference to the apocryphal, “now we’re just haggling over price” quote.

Axioms that don't exist in the comment you replied to, so I'm unsure why you're bringing them up here.

Of course they do. Axioms are inherent to all positive statements, even if they’re implicit. And you can’t construct (coherent) normative statements without positive ones.

It's not about doing "good," they're both doing "good." It's about milking the charity like you can't give money away without getting something in return.

My point in this line of questioning is purely dialectic; in essense, I am indirectly targeting the question, “Why is something undesirable, if it is not bad?”

So we have a few possibilities:

- Is demanding attribution in philanthropy bad? If it’s bad, how does it decrease the concrete “goodness” of the philanthropy?

- Is it not bad? Then why is it undesirable?

- Is it neither bad nor undesirable? Then why is it relevant?

People have (normative) reasons for personal admiration, and they can’t really be right or wrong. I’m interested in digging at the normatives.

Generalizing this further, we can say that people are easily offended by grandiosity and vanity, or at the very least find it distasteful. As a philosophical question I consider it interesting to wonder why that is the case, in a scenario where that person is not doing anything “bad” from a consequentialist perspective. As it turns out, anonymity and attribution in philanthopy seem to be a good real-world setting for this question, because narcissism appears to become invalid as a signalling heuristic.

Charitable gift exchange is a zero-sum game between giver and recipient. On the table is the money in question, attribution, tax relief, future control of the money, and the conditions for future gifts.

Attribution is essentially a public statement on behalf of the recipient that the giver is a good person. These statements have a value. You could not pay me $10 to say that Bill Gates is a good person, but you could probably pay me $100,000. However if Bill Gates wanted to give me $100,000 without attribution, I would be spared the cost of saying I thought he was a good person in public.

I think the answer to your question relates to the ability of the billionaire to do what he wants on his terms.

You have to ask yourself what are the implicating consequences of this kind of concentrated influence?

So I think in terms of consequentialism, you need to look bigger. Should the billionaire be further rewarded for philanthropic actions? What else would he have done with the money without those rewards? How do the rewards to big donors affect the donations and volunteering of smaller participators? What was the long lasting consequence of the big donation which awarded rewards to a big donor?

The answer to that is complicated, but could change the consequence of the system, so are relevent to a consequentialist perspective.

Of most noteworthy to me, I think is the idea that a single entity can have so much concentrated wealth in the first place, where we now need to put motivations in place for them to give it away. Why award so much wealth to that entity to begin with? What consequences does this has on the moral objective you're looking to get as a consequence of our system?

And so, if you believe having billionaires generates overall bad consequences, then you'll want to demotivate people to become one, thus you might start by shaming them for their wealth, by conveying to their ego that they are not special, loved or admired for those traits, and that their big donations is frowned upon, that we'd rather they just volunteered their time, because no one cares to know how much they were able to donate.

But, if you frame the problem in the small, and don't explore alternatives, or quesrion the consequences of the given frame, ya, a billionaire which gives hundreds of million to charity in exchange for a thousand of dollar statue is an all around good deal for the charity in terms of consequentialism.

In the context of Hegel's dialectic, my understanding is that "undesirable" would be the synthesis of "bad" and "something that tempers the badness," which could simply be "low intensity." Said another way, I don't think your question is all that valid, it's like asking "Why is something pink, if it is not red?" Which if you ask me sounds like a pondering from a pre-Socratic also-ran, and at any rate the question can be dispensed by saying that pink is a less intense red. All in all, they're all value judgments, so the good-faith answer is: like all value-judgements, it's because the perceiver says so.

I’m interested in digging at the normatives.

Assuming this isn't to indicate a search for consensus where there isn't any, the "normative" is that someone donating $1 can't make these demands, so maybe a better question would be why do rich people demand namings, and could it be merely a personality flaw to force people to use their name to refer to something oriented around their donation (building, fund, etc.)? That is, rather than right or wrong, can we ask whether it's selfish? Immature? Something else? Fire up your dialectic if you like.

How ridiculous would it be to create "The Barney Google Fund for Helping People Reach a State of Getting Things Named After Themselves?" I'd say if you think, "say, that's not a bad idea!" then you probably don't see a problem with donations purchasing naming rights. Plain and simple, no dialectic necessary.

But we can come up with reasons not to do something all day. So, assuming for simplicity that naming is optional and the money would be given regardless, in what ways are named donations a good thing? I find this approach more readily exposes the details.

A better comparison may be, (a) $100M for a museum named after the donor, versus (b) Elon Musk spending his last $100M on SpaceX.

Donor (a) seems long on ego, short on imagination and ability.

We wouldn’t have the same view of the person donating a dollar to the same museum.

I agree. For example, the consequence of the Koch brother’s philathropy is the normalization of their radical (belligerently anti-democratic) political agenda.

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