Blog/2025-11-22/Smart Charities Tax Non-Believers

A big difference between my personal belief system and that espoused by many online is that I think charities should accept the money of people they dislike. This allows them to trade their reputation (ultimately a substitutable and cheap quality) for money that can achieve the outcome they desire. A highly effectively altruist organization should attempt to transform even an opponent's money into progress on the organization's aim assuming, of course, that the limiting factor here is resources.

Often, people online share their opinion that some person giving to charity "doesn't really care about its mission; they're just doing it for the reputation of being philanthropic". But that's how you know a charity is doing a good job. The true believer in a charity's mission is going to assist with that mission nevertheless - that's what makes them a true believer. It is the non-believers that you have to extract money from in pursuit of your mission. The Catholic Church understood that it's useful to reward the doing of good works even by bad people and constructed a mechanism to do so. And most modern charities also understand this.

I suspect the top charities specifically target those who will be soon in need of reputational assistance. Having acquired their money and spent it, the charities can then disavow them as required, allowing them to have their cake and eat it too. Alternatively, an organizational structure can be used to both extract money and retain reputation as in the case of Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital where nameless figures accepted the money on behalf of the organization in exchange for the naming of the hospital. Then, nurse organizations repudiate the name thereby allowing the hospital to get both the money and retain the reputation.

But this also presents itself as a reasonable attack vector against charities. If you dislike their cause, you only need to require that they be pure and do things correctly. This also provides some heuristic to detect these kinds of saboteurs. From the charity's perspective, non-participants who decry donations from the unworthy are more likely to be attempting to sabotage you (either intentionally or through stupidity at the behest of the malicious).

So, I'll say this. If I ran a charity that aimed to fight cancer, and Adolf Hitler himself offered money I'd take as much as I could. Far less of it will go to his terrible causes, and far more of it will go to fight cancer. This is as close to an unalloyed good as the world allows.