If the goal is a purer form of altruism*, there is a strong argument for gifting money over time, IMO. Even in the case where time is just as (or more) efficient than money, a gift of time almost certainly provides more personal satisfaction in the form of physically seeing good outcomes from the donation and potentially building social capital.
That doesn't sound like maximizing altruism at all, it sounds like penance for its own sake. The personal satisfaction or lack there of of the giver has exactly zero relevance to the benefit received by others. If the goal is to maximize benifit, then there is a clear winner in the case where time is more efficient than money. To do otherwise to try to somehow prove one isn't doing it for selfish reasons - well, I'm just at a loss here for what the psychological analysis of that would be. Who care's what a person's "real" motivation is, or whether or not they are being a hypocrite, if they end up doing the right thing?
Of course, one of those subconscious, irrational, emotional things we humans are stuck with is an unhealthy obsession over other people's internal motivations. Hence all of our fears about terrorists and kidnappers, yet relative lack of concern over car crashes which cause 1000s of times more deaths. Why the difference? One is "deliberate", and the other an "accident". Somehow killing someone with a gun is terrible and reprehensible, but killing someone because you wanted to check your messages is just an unfortunate mistake. But both were just as much someone's fault, in in both cases the family has just as much lost someone.
Indeed, I believe that many of these so-called "hypocritical altruists" are actually "closet egoists" and simply haven't done enough introspection into why they make the choices they make. If you try to analyze human choices, once you dig down past all the layers of logic and rationalizations, you will probably find irrational feelings at the root. Why do we have such strong feelings about power and love, to name a few? You don't choose to have these feelings. The answer lies outside the context of the conscious, rational mind.
You might like (and everyone who has a human brain should follow) my favorite blog-turned-podcast:
http://youarenotsosmart.com/Why do I feel varying levels of empathy for a struggling family member, a struggling child, a struggling stranger across the street, an unseen struggling stranger on the other side of the world, a struggling kitten, a struggling cow, and a struggling mosquito?
It is, not by coincidence, roughly correlated with the degree of genes you are likely to have in common. This was of course much truer when we lived in groups of 100 or less, when our emotions formed.
The complicated answer is that it's some sort of opaque, subconscious determination based on how much I value or can relate to the subject in question. But why is that the case?
Because it gives us the best chance of maximizing the survival of our own genes (in someone else's body) into the future - which in turn means the next generation is likely to have genes that make them want to do the same
Shouldn't empathy be more consistent and not based on opaque, arbitrary, and unconscious determinations?
Only if you assume that the internal feeling of empathy has any connection or relation to objective ethics, or that its purpose is to make us behave in a way that maximizes good for all sentient beings. That was never evolution's goal though. That is a rational goal came up with by conscious humans.
http://www.randomthoughts.fyi/2016/08/your-feelings-dont-determine-ethics.html The simple answer is that empathy, like my other feelings, is irrational.
if the purpose of empathy is to motivate behavior that makes it more likely for your own genes to survive into the future, then it is actually quite rational.
So it's no coincidence that you have such difficulty rationalizing your inner motivations--they are probably irrational, and you cannot rationalize the irrational. Can you construct a rational framework of ethics that either justifies your feelings or provides clear guidelines by which you can consistently overrule them without succumbing to hypocrisy?
Probably not both. However, it only becomes hypocritical if you make the assumption that knowing what is ethical implies what action one must take. If one is not making the claim that everyone should maximize the happiness of all living things, than not doing so isn't really hypocritical. It might be unethical - but maybe thats ok. For that matter, maybe being somewhat hypocritical would be ok anyway.
Really, why should anyone care if someone is being hypocritical, if the actual actions they take are good.
In my opinion, the problems start to arise when people try to impose a rational system of ethics on top of an irrational hodgepodge of inconsistent and chaotic feelings. The seemingly inevitable result is that the system of rational ethics is unable to justify the full range of human decisions made according to irrational feelings, which leads to a collapse into hypocrisy.
1) I believe it is possible, however difficult, to become (more) aware of the decisions one makes due to irrational feelings, and choose to choose differently.
The podcast from my first link (and the blog and books from the same author) takes one very far in that direction
2) Not being able to justify a decision based on a system of rational ethics isn't necessarily the same thing as hypocrisy. That part only comes in when you add in the feeling of wanting to believe one's self to be perfect all the time in every way, including following one's own system of ethics. Even that isn't so impossible though - suppose your "system of rational ethics" is something along the lines of "do not, by your direct actions, cause immediate harm to a specific human being, outside of self defense". Or even simpler "God, Family, Country". It isn't all that hard to live a life that allows you to follow those 100%, or nearly so.
Of course, personally, I would argue that those are moral structures, not ethical ones, they merely can appear to fill the role of ethics; my point is that they are rational and consistent.
The somewhat sad truth is this, if you worry about the problems of every person on the planet, you'll never be happy, and will constantly be paralyzed between choices of who to help first. You could spend your whole life learning names of people who are in worse situations than you, and never come close to learning all of them. That's how incomprehensible these numbers are to our brains.
In some sort of ideal altruistic world, you'd work as much and often as physically possible to help the maximum number of people. Early retirement, time with your family, time with friends, a climate controlled shelter, all of these are luxuries that you're sacrificing lives to have. Imagine how many people your rent/mortgage payment could help? How many people could be fed if instead of playing with your kids you worked those hours?
I don't think this truth is sad. I think the alternative, "ideal" world is much sadder. If everyone actually prioritized every other living person (maybe animal too? they can feel pain and pleasure, happiness and depression too afterall), to the exclusion of themselves, then NO ONE would spend time with friends and family and all the other things. EVERYONE, not just rich westerners, would spend 100 hours a week working to make things better for the world, tirelessly self sacrificing for the greater good. And while we might end up with a world where everyone had enough food and more advanced sources of energy, there would always be more to do - even cheaper, greener sources of energy, even more nutritious, filling, delicious food that won't contribute to obesity, even more diseases cured - and people would still die, and there would still not be any obvious "correct" solution to the eventual inevitable problem of overpopulation.
In exchange for the slightly better conditions in some regards, every single person would never enjoy life.
What would be the point?
For me, the goal isn't to save the world by myself. It's to have an overall positive impact.
Agreed. Actually, I go a step further - its to NOT have an overall negative impact; which I think the majority of people (
all people, including charitable ones, and including poor ones) have a negative over all impact, when you add up all of their resource use and waste and pollution. If most people most of them time were just breaking even, then we would never have to worry about conditions getting worse.
