The Compassionate Instinct

But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man’s inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, “Why is there war?” we might ask, “Why is there peace?” If our behavior has improved so much since the days of the Bible, we must be doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, that is.

THE MORALITY OF GLOBAL GIVING: AN INTERVIEW WITH JAN EGELAND

Jason Marsh

BEFORE DECEMBER 2004, few Americans had heard of Jan Egeland. But after the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami killed more than 225,000 people in 11 countries, all eyes were on the humanitarian response to the disaster, and this was Egeland’s job. As the United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, he had to coordinate the international aid for the tsunami’s victims.

But what launched Egeland’s name into international headlines wasn’t just his work for the U.N., but an offhand comment he made the day after the tsunami struck.

“It is beyond me why we are so stingy, really,” Egeland told reporters. “Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least how rich we have become. And if—actually, the foreign assistance of many countries is now 0.1 or 0.2 percent of their gross national income. I think that is stingy, really. I don’t think that is very generous.”

At the time, the United States had pledged just $15 million in tsunami relief; later, it upped its pledge to $950 million. But Egeland later said he was criticizing levels of foreign aid from developed nations in general, not the international response to the tsunami or the response from the United States in particular.

It was too late. American officials interpreted Egeland’s comments as a jab at American generosity and shot back that the U.S. government leads the world in foreign aid donations. President Bush charged that Egeland was “very misguided and ill informed.”

Except Egeland wasn’t misinformed. While the United States does lead the world in the total amount of money it gives to developing countries, it ranks last among developed nations in the percentage of its national income—the total value of all the goods and services it produces—that it devotes to foreign aid. That figure is 0.18 of 1 percent in the United States, and the median among developed nations is about 0.4 of 1 percent. The country that gives the highest share of its national income, Sweden still gives less than 1 percent.

Some critics responded to Egeland by saying that private donations from U.S. citizens and corporations make up for its shortcomings in public aid. “We open our wallets for private groups that are better at targeting money where it’s needed,” said an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. “When it comes to this sort of giving, nobody beats Americans.”

In fact, at the time the United States ranked second in the percentage of its national income that went toward private charitable donations, and the combined amount of public and private donations from the United States still placed it in the middle of the international pack.

But no matter how much individuals and corporations give each year, do these types of donations have the same practical effect or symbolic significance as the aid that comes from governments?

Indeed, Egeland’s comments may have put a lot of people on the defensive, but they also raised some challenging questions. We might be giving billions of dollars each year in foreign development aid, but is that adequate? And why should we give more? Do we really have such a great collective moral obligation to strangers who live halfway around the world, especially when there are so many people in need in our own country?

Social scientists have continually found that people are more likely to demonstrate altruism toward members of their own social group, with whom they share a sense of identity. While there might be some fluctuations in the amount we give as a nation or as individuals, perhaps there’s a limit to how much empathy we should be expected to feel and how much money we should be expected to give to other nations.

These aren’t questions we usually like to confront, partly because their answers seem so elusive. It’s hard to say what would constitute enough foreign aid. No leader or nation is capable of fixing the world’s inequities, so talking about them may seem only to induce guilt and resentment.

But Egeland at least succeeded in instigating an international conversation that was long overdue. (He also arguably incited governments to do more for the tsunami victims: donations shot up shortly after he made his controversial remarks, in what Egeland dubbed a display of “competitive compassion.”)