Open question: What do you think a normal person’s moral responsibilities are and why?
Some angles you can (but don’t have to) consider:
To themselves, family, friends and strangers?
Do you have thoughts about what it takes to make a good person or at what point someone is a bad person? (Is there a category of people who are neither?)
What do you think the default state of people is? (Generally good, evil or neutral by nature?)
Conversely do you believe morality is a construction and reject it entirely? (Even practically speaking when something bad happens to you?)
After a few days thinking about this, it’s still insufficient in my books.
If I have $1000 cash and give away 50% of it, I have $500 left for myself.
If I have $1,000,000,000 cash and give away 99.44% of it I still have $600,000 left.
Which of us is suffering more (in real terms, not fantasy point score) in what we’ve given? With $500 cash … I’m not buying a whole lot. What is that? Ten coffees at Starbucks? (I kid, but … it really isn’t a lot.) With $600,000 left I can live quite comfortably for a long time in a reasonably-priced town or city.
And that doesn’t address non-cash possessions. If I only have $1000 cash total, I likely don’t own my own home, don’t have much of a car if any, etc. If I have $1,000,000,000 cash, I likely have MASSIVE property and possession holdings.
Right, so I think you could push it even further than what I said. Maybe something more qualitative like “What are you willing to give up to help others?”
That said you can also go too far the other way and say that a very rich person who does or doesn’t give away things hadn’t really giving up much, but we certainly would want to say a rich person giving away 90% of their disposable income is still doing something good. (And practically speaking it’s going to have almost as good of an outcome if they gave to the point of diminishing their well-being).
Your angle here is actually getting really close to Peter Singer’s Famine, Affluence and Morality. (Personally I stop a little short of where he’s at, but I think your position more closely resembles his).
This is a very heavily qualified “yes” for me.
It depends on how they’re giving it away and to whom. If they’re doing the usual billionaire “charity”, no, they’re not doing anything good and indeed it may be worse than them just hoarding their cash. Because the norm for billionaire “charity” is to support political parties that aid them in their hoarding of riches and to “charities” of their own founding which are generally used to force their viewpoint on the world, effectively being just another source of power for them.¹ They tend to displace actual expert charities in favour of their own PR branding, their foundations tend to work on projects that mysteriously aid their for-profit enterprises and personal wealth, and tend to fund lobbyists in government (not to mention the occasional hate group or ten).
That kind of “giving away” we can do without. Just eat that kind of billionaire.
If, however, you’ve got a billionaire donating to established, experienced charities with no strings attached, that’s doing something very good. Wake me up when that actually happens.
¹ https://newrepublic.com/post/177019/billionaire-philanthropy-scam-bill-gates