In Defense of Harvard Senior Gifts, Cont'd

Matt Yglesias’s critique of Harvard’s “Senior Gift” provoked an interesting debate across the Ivy-league-osphere. I responded here; Emma Saunders-Hastings, a PhD student in the philosophy department, out-classed us both at The Utopian; then Yglesias responds; and now, once more, I offer my thoughts. Here’s a copy of my response, cross-posted from The Utopian:
Matt Yglesias and I agree that giving $10 to OXFAM advances worldwide social justice more than giving $10 to party funds at Harvard University. We also agree, I gather, that students should spend the marginal $10 they’ve pegged for charity (the money “that’s burning a hole in their wallets”) on advancing social justice, rather than not. To the more expansive claim at stake – that we have an ethical obligation to use mostly all of our money to advance social justice – we are not arguing one thing or another.
None of this agreement, however, is inconsistent with my original claim that Harvard students should not be condemned for giving Senior Gifts. But there seems to be confusion here. After reading my post, Matt Yglesias tweeted (half jokingly, for sure) that he is “proud to see Kirkland house being so stingy with its donations.” His implication is clear: donations that don’t maximally advance social justice are bad; and stinginess, therefore, is good. But is this so? If it were, we’d have to conclude that birthday gifts and donations to the local community center are also “bad,” also worthy of our stigmatization. Is that warranted?
In the real world – where arguments about resource allocation should take place – money not spent on Harvard Senior Gifts is not money we spend on OXFAM donations; it’s money we spend on ourselves. In other words, Senior Gift dollars don’t “crowd out” dollars for life-saving malaria nets; they crowd out private consumption dollars for burritos and t-shirts. To believe otherwise – and to condemn Harvard students for exactly this reason, for screwing up, as Yglesias says, the “trivially easy” task of finding a better charity to give to – is to totally misconstrue the role gifts play in our society.
Yglesias declares that a donation to Harvard doesn’t rise to the level of charity. He’s right; but one wonders, Does anyone disagree? The Crimson merely said that one reason among others to support Harvard is because of its strong commitment to making the world a better place. In my original post, I analogized this to a thought-experimental-Matt-Yglesias’s-dad who justifies his iPad birthday gift by saying that one reason among others he supports Matt Yglesias is because of his commitment to making the world a better place. This is a reasonable ex-post justification for giving gifts. It’s also reasonable to call them “luxury consumption dollars,” if you’re an accountant. But any accurate depiction of why we actually give gifts must also include a host of non-instrumental, social-psychological factors, like ritual, group identity and pride, as well as things like love, affection and fellow-feeling – none of which can simply be argued away by pointing out resource allocation inefficiency. Gifts are the stuff of community, not “charity”; they advance social cohesion, not socialjustice.
If Yglesias agrees, I’m happy. But if he acknowledges that gifts don’t normally advance social justice, then he can’t criticize Harvard students for not using their gifts to advance social justice. It’s one or the other. To get out of this, he could conceivably say that we should always be advancing social justice with our money, and that we shouldn’t carve out any categories of dollars not intended for that purpose, but apparently that’s not Yglesias’s position.
It’s not mine, either. Though gifts fail as “mechanisms of social justice,” I do not believe this is wholly bad. In fact, I suspect (though I haven’t been able to find any data) that groups which value gift-giving at the local level create the conditions for a humanitarianism at the non-local level. Gifts are an affirmation of our connection to the world beyond the ego. They inculcate a sense of shared obligation and shared responsibility. As Bernard Williams has pointed out, utilitarians should want to keep utilitarianism a secret, for utilitarian reasons. It’s a testable hypothesis, but I suspect it’s true: a world without gifts would be a more, not less, selfish world.
Behind these claims, it must be said, is my broader skepticism about the value of ethical argument. We’re left to embrace the social benefits of gift-giving for the same reason we ought to be skeptical of logic employed by those who attack it: our world is, as a matter of fact, a product of our “common-sense moral intuitions,” derived from the various groups to which we belong, beginning with our family, extending to our school, and ending, for most, with our country. Utilitarian arguments that counsel the moral irrelevance of families or local communities will simply be ignored; by disregarding the brute facts of how our world actually works, such arguments will continue to fail at affecting the change they seek.
By contrast, institutions that promote gift-giving at the local level are manifestations of a type of human kindness that might actually be achieved. It’s a limited sort of kindness, for sure, but it does more good for our world than it does bad, by a long shot. Kindness of this sort should not be laughed away, especially by bloggers like Matt Yglesias, whose worldview – American liberalism – seems utterly dependent on it.