Charity Goes International

I was struck yesterday by how much of a special NY Times section on giving involved giving across borders. Where the Carnegies of the last gilded age focused their charity at home, this era’s new magnates are decidedly international in their scope. But it’s not just magnates that have shifted their focus – check out this piece on the popularity of overseas volunteer travel, in which tens of thousands of Americans now do international good on their own nickel by way of a vacation.

As Julian pointed out in the spring, government foreign assistance will remain important, and probably more important than private giving for some time to come. (Although this excellent comprehensive report finds private giving to have surpassed official aid, that’s only by counting remittances, which are more by way of intra-family than foreign aid; and see this interesting country-by-country per capita comparison of private and official charity.)

But surely there are some implications to the shift towards proportionally greater private giving. It’s driving an important debate among legal philosophers between moral cosmopolitans and liberal nationalists. What happens if we stop feeling a special duty to our co-nationals relative to the rest of the world?