my english class was recently assigned an essay on whether we felt that incentives for charitable acts/donations are morally wrong. as i sat listening to the class debate that no incentives should ever be given for charitable donations, i began to think...is the youth of today really that steeped in disillusionment that we don't realize that we are not living in a perfect world. im not a pessimist and i absolutely love the idea of everyone giving freely for the pure satisfaction of putting a smile on someone else's face, but have we not yet realized that charities and non-profit organizations struggle just to do their job...helping people. honestly, do the charities really care whether a student donated for "fun" or if he/she received bonus points for each donation? the morality of it is questionable, but the outcome is the same...people are helped. and while incentives erode the idea of selflessly giving, if we are looking to teach people how gratifying that can be, then just preaching at them isn't going to do the trick. if they are motivated by an incentive and actually donate, chances are they will experience that self-gratifying feeling of service. while this feeling may have come about by an incentive, the person would've have never experienced it in the first place without the will to do so, which is where the incentives come in. if only we lived in a perfect world....
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I completely agree.
I see no rational/logical reason why it's wrong for charities to give incentives for donations.
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Please see my recent blog post, "Genocide and Student Activism": http://www.progressiveu.org/041447-genocide-and-student-activism