Response from David Brink on December 23, 2011

We need to separate the legal question of whether your ability to count your contribution to charity as a charitable contribution for purposes of tax deduction should depend on your motives for contributing from the moral question about whether the moral status of your contribution should depend in some way upon your motives. There are a number of reasons why the tax status of your contribution probably should not depend on your motives. It's more plausible to suppose that the moral status of your contribution can depend on your motives. Your motives in contributing seem most relevant to our assessments of your character and perhaps to the question whether your contribution is genuinely charitable or beneficent. The crucial question is whether you make the contribution only because of the tax deduction or whether the tax deduction is just a happy by-product of a donation you would have made anyway. If I would not have made the contribution but for the tax deduction that does seem to raise questions about whether my contribution is genuinely charitable and my motives are genuinely beneficent. But if I would have contributed anyway and the tax deduction is from my point of view a fortunate by-product, then it's harder to see how the tax deduction taints my charity or beneficence.

Of course, not everyone is purely charitable or beneficent. So we are likely to have more charitable contributions if we incentivize it, for instance, with tax deductions. A policy of deductions, rather than no deductions, will not raise the incidence of genuine charity of beneficence, but it will raise the level of contributions and aid. And presumably we care more about meeting needs than promoting charity. Charity is only a virtue because of need. Just as we should not maintain need to make charity possible, so too we should not eliminate incentives that increase aid in order to promote genuine charity and beneficence.