10. Free, Active, Valued, and Effective — the measures of giving
What makes some acts of giving better than others? Or, in other words, how can the quality of one act of giving be measured against another?
This is a complex question, because giving is a complex and multifaceted subject. There are many different types of giving — the giving of gifts, the giving of time, philanthropy, giving back vs. paying forward, etc. We also value gifts in different ways — Some acts of giving are valued because of the sacrifice they entail, some for their rarity or monetary value, while others come at no great expense (a heartfelt hand-written card, for example), but are considered valuable all the same. Giving also impacts various parties — the giver, the receiver, and the outside observer — and has various types of impact — some gifts transfer material resources (capital value), some carry emotional weight, and some especially powerful acts of giving can affect change at the very core of our selves, re-shaping the way we see and interact with the world.
With all of this in mind, one might wonder whether the quality of an act of giving can be measured at all. Perhaps the concept of giving is so broad in scope that there is no way that any two gifts can be fairly compared. Perhaps like beauty, we must simply say that giving is “in the eye of the beholder” — that it is unreasonable to claim that one act of giving is better than another.
I think this conclusion is overhasty, for a few reasons. First, we seem to carry around with us an intuitive scale by which we make moral judgments about acts of giving all the time. We consider some gifts to be deeply laudable (e.g., an anonymous kidney donation), some gifts to be morally reprehensible (e.g., a bribe given to a Supreme Court justice), and other gifts to be somewhere in between. We wouldn’t be able to attach strong, bi-directional moral feelings to gifts in this way unless we believed in some sense by which gifts can be placed on a comparative scale.
Second, we would do well to understand what makes for good giving, if we would like to become better givers. If we choose to claim that there can be no true comparison, then we forgo the opportunity to learn to give well.
Finally, the contributist is uniquely invested in understanding the metrics of giving, because the goal of contributism is to ensure that everyone has the right to give. If we were to concede that there is no way to compare two acts of giving, then we would face a problem: we would be unable to distinguish between better and worse forms of giving, and thus unable to endorse some types of giving over others. We could not, for example, claim that one should have the right to donate their kidney but not to bribe the supreme court, or argue that a policy that incentivizes giving to the poor is better than one that incentivizes giving to the rich. Or, to take the problem to its most extreme end, we would not be able to say that it is better to volunteer one’s labor than to be forced into slavery.
On the other hand, if we can understand what makes for good giving, we can hone our understanding of the right to give, and aim to enable people to give in the best way possible.
So how can we go about trying to understand what makes for good giving?
One way of approaching the question is to take a practical, quantitative approach: we can identify the qualities that are present in the best acts of giving (and to what degree they are present), and those that are present in the worst. If we do this carefully, referencing many acts of giving, we can begin to categorize the qualities that are consistently associated with good giving, and those that are consistently associated with bad giving. Then, we can say that acts of giving are better when they have the good qualities in greater measure, and worse when they have the bad qualities in greater measure. For example, we know intuitively that slavery is bad and volunteering is good, and the key difference between the two is that volunteering is done freely, while slavery is forced. This leads us to believe that the more free an act of giving is, the better it is.
A more philosophical way to approach the question of the quality of giving is to think in terms of Plato’s forms. If one can strive to imagine the “ideal act of giving,” then one can think about the ways in which any particular act of giving deviates from that ideal. The “quality” of an act of giving can then be measured in terms of how many detrimental features or constraints are present in a particular act of giving (bogging it down and away from the ideal), and in what measure. For example, if we believe that the purest form of giving is devoid of all coercion, we can say that slavery is worse than volunteering because it involves more coercion.
I will note that this philosophical way of thinking dovetails particularly well with the contributist understanding of the right to give. The contributist believes in the right to give because the act of giving humanizes — that is, it increases dignity, connection, and fulfillment. But to the degree that any particular act deviates from the ideal form of giving, it becomes something other than pure giving, and thus is less effective at humanizing. It becomes clear, then, that the contributist’s goal is to provide the right to give in as ideal a form as possible.
Either approach is reasonable, and, done properly, both should arrive at similar conclusions. Because of this, the most effective approach would actually be to combine the two approaches — to begin with one approach, and then use the other to evaluate the conclusions of the first.
I have spent considerable time thinking through the question of “measuring giving” using both methodological approaches, but as a writer and communicator, I am conscious that you as a reader are perhaps best served if I take an altogether separate approach in the course of this essay: something I call the get to the point already method. In order to save your time, I will work backwards, first presenting to you the results of my investigation, then describing each measure through philosophy and example. I will then leave it to you to check my work, so to speak, with your own practical or philosophical analysis, if you are interested.
Now, to get to the point. I have come to understand that there are four essential measures of giving. The best acts of giving are free, active, valued, and effective. No act of giving is ever perfect by any of these measures, but an act of giving is always made better when it is improved by one of these measures, and always made worse when its quality by one of these measures is reduced. All four measures matter — no measure can be simply ignored — but excellence in one measure may outweigh a deficit in another, and by the same coin, negligence in one measure can outweigh abundance in another.
Free
The first measure of giving is the most obvious, but it is also a bit more complex than the others, because the word free has multiple layers of meaning. Giving should be free in all senses of the word: free of coercion, freely chosen, and free of charge. In other words, the act of giving is purest when we give of our own free will, when we give what, how, when, where, and to whom we want, and when we give without expectation that we will receive something in return.
When we give out of coercion — because we are forced to — we usually don’t think of it as giving at all. Instead, we think that we have had something taken from us. Slavery is the most extreme example of coerced giving, but there is a wide spectrum of coercion, and it is not all so bad. Sometimes we are coerced by authority, as when a parent tells a child to apologize to their sibling. Sometimes we are coerced by social or moral pressure, as when we are shown pictures of starving children and then asked to donate to a cause. Sometimes we are coerced by incentives, as when our charitable donations are deducted from our taxable income. At times, these tactics are justified — sometimes a bit of “carrot or stick” prompting is what it takes to lead us into decisions that we are ultimately glad to have made. But even still, we intuitively feel that coercion operates in inverse relation to the quality of the act of giving — the heavier the coercion, the less pure the act of giving.
Restrictions on how we give are also a type of coercion. When we are given limited choices, the choice we do make becomes less meaningful than if we had been given a fuller set of options. As a salient recent example, under a wave of calls to step down from the 2024 presidential race due to concerns about his re-electability, President Biden took to asserting that he should remain the nominee because 14 million people voted for him in the primary race. What he failed to mention is that he ran virtually uncontested in the primary race — for the vast majority of voters in the primary, his name was the only recognizable name on the ballot. I’m not saying that his 14 million votes mean nothing. But the fact that 14 million voters chose to give their vote to him would have been far more meaningful if those voters had been presented with more than one viable option. The more options we have, the more meaningful and important our choice becomes — we become agents, rather than pawns, able to claim dignity through our role as givers.
Finally, when we give something in the expectation of receiving something in return, we usually don’t call this giving either; we call it a trade or a transaction. Technically, it still is a form of giving — that is, one party gives something to the other, and the other party gives something in return — but we tend to avoid the word giving because the expectation of receiving something in return all but erases the moral value of the act. But keep in mind that there are degrees of “expecting return.” The more we expect in return, the less pure the act of giving, and vice versa. If, for example, someone chose to sell you a luxury car for a hundred dollars, you would say that they “all but gave” it to you. On the other hand, if they tricked you into paying twice its value, you would say not just that you engaged in a trade, but that you were “stolen” from.
Remember, no act of giving is ever perfect by any measure. But the more free the act of giving is — the less coercion, restriction, or charge involved — the closer it is to the ideal.
Active
This second measure of giving is perhaps the least obvious, but is still, like the others, in some way intuitive to us. We assess the quality of an act of giving by how active it is — that is, how much time, effort, and attention it requires. And we feel this way as both the giver and the receiver. As a giver, we feel that we have given more when we spend a day volunteering with Habitat for Humanity than we feel when we donate a day’s wages to the same organization. And as a receiver, we are more grateful to a friend who takes the time to write a hand-written birthday card than the friend who simply buys one from CVS on the way to the party, even if the sentiment of the cards is the same. When two gifts are of equal monetary value, but one requires more time, effort, or attention from the giver, we consider the active gift to be the better act of giving.
To be clear, this is not to say that we see no “activity” in a monetary gift. To the contrary, we intuitively understand a gift’s monetary value precisely in terms of the time and effort it must have taken the giver to attain that sum. Seen purely as capital, money seems fungible — a hundred dollars is a hundred dollars is a hundred dollars. But to the rich man — who is repaid that sum in an hour of desk work — a hundred dollars has a very different meaning than it does to the poor man, for whom it represents the sweat of dozens of hours of toil, if it can be attained at all.
For this reason, a day of volunteering is not equivalent to a specific monetary sum, but is roughly equivalent to a day’s worth of the giver’s wages. (This is assuming that the effort required by the giver’s day job is roughly equal to the effort involved in the volunteer work.) But even still, the one who gives a day of volunteering wins out in terms of activity, because in addition to the time and effort expended, the volunteer also gives a day of their attention to the cause, while the donor only gives the few minutes of attention it takes to write the check.
Famously, Jesus once watched a poor widow give two small coins into a temple offering after some wealthy temple-goers had thrown in large sums of money. He remarked to his followers that she gave far more than the others had, because “they all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.” Understanding the value of money, Jesus was pointing out that her giving was purer than theirs because it was more active.
Valued
There is a reason why a teen is often much more excited by a birthday card that has been hastily stuffed with a couple of twenty-dollar bills than one with a heartfelt handwritten note, and why a parent would be much more pleased to receive a heartfelt handwritten note from their teen than a couple of twenty-dollar bills. An act of giving is better when what is given is what the receiver values. For the teen, money provides a form of autonomy — something that is desperately wanted and hard to come by — so the money is a very valuable gift. For the parent, who has invested so much in their child, genuine words of affirmation can mean the world.
But the act of giving what is valued is not only — or even primarily — beneficial for the receiver. The sense of being of value is perhaps the most profound effect the act of giving can have on the giver. When an audience applauds an artist, when a patient thanks their physician, when a child hugs their parent — these are all signals sent back from receivers to givers to indicate gratitude for what the giver has provided. When we feel that we are valued by others, we feel that we belong — and the feeling of belonging is correlated with many aspects of well-being. In fact, it is such an enormously good feeling that many people spend much of their lives seeking it.
Of course, on the other side of the power of belonging is a danger — sometimes we come to feel that we can only belong if we continue to give to our community in a very particular way, and then the weight of belonging begins to feel oppressive. In this case, our giving is valued, but it has ceased to be free from coercion — we no longer give because we want to; instead, we give out of obligation. This is why no one measure of giving can be ignored in favor of another; our giving can only affirm us when it is both free and valued.
Effective
Finally, a gift is measured by the amount and quality of the change that it effects for the receiver. This one is perhaps nearly as obvious as free, though it is important to point out that it should not be confused with valued. An act of giving can be deeply effective but undervalued (as is acutely understood by any social worker, or by the parents of any teen who does not respond to their caretaking with hugs or handwritten cards), and an act of giving can be overvalued but low in effectiveness (as, I am told, is the case with much of the philanthropy that targets the Global South). In some cases, an act of giving that is ineffective might still be laudable in spite of this fact — as in the case of a child who tries to help with cleaning but ends up making a worse mess of things — but never because of it. Ineffectiveness makes an act of giving less than ideal.
And it is important to recognize that effectiveness is not just about scale, but also about direction: if an act of giving effects major change, but the change is actually harmful rather than helpful, then it is worse than having no effect at all. This is why we condemn members of vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan rather than praising them for selflessly volunteering their time. If someone’s version of “giving” involves anything like acts of racist violence, then its effectiveness dives deep into the negative, and it becomes about as far from a pure act of giving as is imaginable.
What it means to be truly helpful is, of course, a topic that is often debated. Is it more effective to give someone a dollar now, or to give them two dollars tomorrow? Is it more effective to increase happiness by some measure or to decrease sadness by an equivalent measure? I cannot answer these questions, and perhaps there is no one right answer. But each observer has his or her own understanding of effectiveness, and it is by this standard that the observer will decide if one act of giving is better than another. To the contributist, the most helpful impact one can have — the most effective change one can make — is to provide for another the right to give, and to thereby connect them with their own humanity.
As I understand it, these four measures combine to represent the entire spectrum of quality of giving.1 The better an act of giving is across these measures, the purer it is — that is, the closer it is to the Platonic form of giving.
And as I noted earlier, since contributism asserts that giving is the humanizing act, the contributist also believes that the purer the giving is, the better it humanizes. This means that part of the work of the contributist is to always try to seek to improve the quality of giving. Sometimes this is as simple as making improvements in one metric, but often it means wading into the complexity of comparing trade-offs and trying to choose the overall good. For example, maybe you would like to donate your time to Habitat for Humanity, but you're recovering from knee surgery, so you wouldn’t be very helpful as a volunteer. So you choose to donate money instead. Here, you are choosing a less active act of giving, but you believe the increase in effectiveness makes it an overall better act of giving.
Or here’s a policy example. From a contributist perspective, it is a fundamental good for people to be free to give money to political campaigns. But the rich give too much, causing a profoundly negative effect on our political system overall (and lessening the effectiveness of the political donations of the working class). Plus, the poorest are denied the right to give outright, because they don’t have enough excess money to give to politicians. In order to solve this problem, some politicians and policy researchers have advocated for a voucher system, in which campaign donations are heavily restricted, and in their place, donation vouchers are provided to every citizen, allowing them to allocate a fixed amount of money to their preferred candidates. This is essentially a wonky, contributist idea — it asserts and expands the right to give, while adding corrective restrictions in places where the right to give is, as is, deeply impure. In 2017, Seattle implemented a voucher program based on this idea, and one study found that it increased voter turnout by 4.9% and made political candidates more reliant on small-dollar donations.
When we can measure giving, we gain the language and framework to improve our own giving, and to better advance the right to give throughout society.
Read next: 11. The Capitalist's Secret
If you disagree, please leave a comment to enlighten the rest of us!