Ethics of Charity Relief

Charity relief in a disaster context means assisting disaster-affected people through donations of money, goods, or services, including volunteers' time and skills. Many ethical approaches accept the necessity of charity relief and see it as an ethical action, while recognizing that on occasion, charity relief can cause more problems than it solves. No fixed rules exist to make charity relief more [Page 168]effective or more ethical, but some guiding principles support efforts to avoid creating more problems.

Charity donations can be organized—such as through governments, nongovernmental or international organizations, or the private sector—or conducted in an ad hoc manner by individual donations of money or goods, or self-deploying into a disaster-affected area to try to assist. Often, individual-based charity relief is directed at one's family and ...