Is Giving Incentives for Participating in Charity Immoral?

Committing charitable acts is one deed that many people out there ponder. However, getting someone to participate in an act of kindness is at times a struggle. Thats why it is common to use incentives such as a grade boost or even things such as being printed as a donor in the newspaper. Because funding for charities is highly competitive, incentives are used in a moral way to create brand recognition, hook potential donors and retain them in the long term. Since all human beings are motivated to do good and in my view are acting in good faith by taking these incentives as they are usually quite small in comparison to the donation they are making so the result is still a great act of giving even in the case of those who are motivated more by self-interest, one could argue that the incentive helps move the person doing the good deed into an act of selflessness. In both cases the donors feel reward in multiple levels from personal joy to more public notoriety, but in all cases those human emotions and validations do not breach moral code.

The use of incentives are debatable whether or not they should be used or not, however it is proven that in some cases it does work. With teenagers if a teacher says that we will get a grade boost by donating money, or time it it PROVEN (word choice) that we will feel more obligated to participate knowing that it will in some way benefit us. As much as we are being selfish and only thinking about how the outcome will benefit us, we still are committing a good deed. And should’t it just be about what the outcome is rather what gets you to the outcome. In the long run, you still end up helping and being kind even though you are doing it only because of the incentive. An incentive is defined as a th...

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The practice of offering incentives for charitable acts is very common because it is an effective way to get people to donate time and/or money. Although I grant that the idea that incentives are morally wrong because people are acting out of self interest rather than out of wanting to do the right thing, I still maintain my view that self interest is a natural part of being a human and it is inevitable that we will take into consideration how things will benefit ourselves as well as others. The exchange of donations for grades or any other kind of reward is what I may argue ethically and morally correct because humans are not only motivated to do good, but we are also acting in good faith by taking the incentives because normally they are minimal in comparison to the donation they are making so the result is still greatly an act of kindness.