If You're an Egalitarian About Taxation, How Come You Don't Donate Your Own Money?

With apologies to G.A. Cohen

Many advocates of raising taxes on the rich to help the poor are themselves rich and yet donate little to the poor. For instance, millionaires like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders give less than 5% of their earnings to charity.

But is this morally objectionable? You might think something like the following: “Egalitarians are making claims about public policy, not personal behavior, so it’s not a problem when they fail to donate a significant amount of their own money to those in poverty.” I disagree.

To start, let’s look at a couple of cases where this style of response is persuasive. First, you might not be obligated to comply with a rule when others aren’t doing the same because it could put you at an unfair disadvantage in a competition. For instance, I think it’s fine to accept big private campaign contributions while at the same time advocating for a policy that restricts them. If you alone complied with your favored rule, you’d decrease your chances of winning the election and, plausibly, you aren’t obligated to do that.

Now, it’s true that donating to the poor does make you economically worse off than those who don’t donate. But distributive justice isn’t a competition like an election. Rather, the point is to give people what they’re entitled to and egalitarians argue that those with less are entitled to the excess resources of those with more. On this view, objecting that donating to the poor makes you worse off than those who don’t donate is like objecting that returning a piece of stolen property makes you worse off than those who don’t return stolen property. It’s true, but also morally irrelevant.

The second kind of case involves huge collective action problems where individual behavior doesn’t make a difference. For instance, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues in favor of government restrictions on carbon emissions (because such restrictions would be consequential) but denies that most of us are obligated to reduce our carbon emissions (because, individually, our emissions are inconsequential).

Here again, redistribution is different. While donating to the poor won’t do much to alleviate poverty on a national or global scale, it will make a difference to individual people in poverty. Saving an individual person from drowning doesn’t put an end to drowning worldwide, but you’re still obligated to do it.

Now consider a different sort of case. Suppose there were no legal restrictions on fraud and someone argued for institutionalizing such restrictions partly on the grounds that fraud violates people’s rights. It would clearly be objectionable for that person to commit fraud in their personal life despite the lack of a law. Why? Because the reason for the law against fraud—fraud violates rights—is also a reason for an individual to not commit fraud.

Redistribution is like this case. Suppose the reason to transfer resources from the rich to the poor is that the poor need it more than the rich. If you’re a particular rich person, then a particular poor person will need your excess resources more than you do. So the reason that speaks in favor of state-enforced redistribution also speaks in favor of individual giving.

(This post borrows from ideas in a paper that Jason Brennan and I wrote titled, “If You’re an Egalitarian, You Shouldn’t Be so Rich,” as well as our Reason article, “Against Champagne Socialists.” See also G.A Cohen’s classic take on this issue, “If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?”)