I don’t have much money. Is it okay if I don’t give to charity?

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. This unconventional column is based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Here is a Vox reader’s question, condensed and edited for clarity.
As a low-income person, I’m on government assistance and I have government health insurance. My situation makes it so that I cannot donate to others, eat organic, buy slow fashion, etc. I try to thrift and eat organic when I can, but I can’t always ensure that the food I am consuming is being grown or raised in an ethical way — it’s too expensive. And I can’t donate to people. I feel guilt about genocides and wars in other countries, but I cannot afford to donate money to others, not in other countries, and not even in my own country. I am barely above water, but I feel guilt for not being able to do things to better my community, society, and world. Is it okay that I don’t donate because I can’t?
Dear Barely Above Water,
We live in a consumer society, where there’s a lot of focus on how we spend our money. That can trick us into thinking that our spending is the number one reflection of our moral character — as if buying cheap food or clothes automatically means we’re bad, and donating to charity is the only way to do good.
The reality is more complex. For starters, if you really can’t afford to buy things that are ethically sourced, that says more about our society than it does about you. It’s an indictment of our factory farm system, which produces cheap meat at a horrific cost to animal welfare, and of our global supply chains, which are still tainted with forced labor. It’s not an indictment of you as an individual.
The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant famously said “ought” implies “can.” That means that if you’ve taken a hard look at your finances and concluded that you genuinely can’t afford to buy this or that, then you aren’t morally obliged to.
But there’s a bigger point to be made here, which is that spending is just one aspect of moral behavior — it’s not the only aspect or even the primary one. You write that you can’t afford to donate money, which makes you feel guilty for not being able to improve the world. To which I would say: Donating money to charity isn’t the only way to improve the world!
A handy way to remind yourself of this is to think of the slogan “solidarity, not charity.” The concept of solidarity became very popular against the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, when modern capitalism was emerging and political theorists like Karl Marx began pushing back. In 1902, the Russian anarcho-communist philosopher Peter Kropotkin published an essay collection titled Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Pointing to examples of cooperation between and among different species, he argued that’s what really enables a species to survive through evolutionary history, and developed the idea of mutual aid as distinct from traditional charity.
Whereas charity involves a giver and a receiver, and implicitly sets up a hierarchical relationship between them, mutual aid is a voluntary exchange among equals. There isn’t a giver and a receiver, because the assumption is that every single person has something to give others — whether it’s money, a meal, a word of wisdom, or a warm smile. The ways people help each other might be different, but that’s okay, because we all contribute in different ways.
Kropotkin made such a compelling case for solidarity — or, as he put it, “the close dependency of everyone’s happiness upon the happiness of all” — that it became a mainstay in communities neglected by the state in Europe and the US. The Black political organization known as the Black Panthers, for example, had a robust mutual aid program that included free breakfasts for Black children.
But it would be a mistake to assume that a focus on solidarity just popped into existence ex nihilo in the modern era. The core insight here — that monetary charity is only one small part of solidarity — has been around for ages.
You can find a great example of this in the Islamic tradition, which goes back to the seventh century. The religion places a very high premium on charity — it’s one of the five pillars of Islam. Every year, Muslims are supposed to donate a fixed portion of their wealth to charity; it’s a monetary form of giving known as zakat. But there’s another form of giving, called sadaqah, which isn’t necessarily monetary.
The Hadith, a collection of the sayings and traditions of the prophet Muhammad, contains a beautiful explanation of sadaqah: “A sadaqah is due for every joint in each person on every day the sun comes up: to act justly between two people is a sadaqah; to help a man with his mount, lifting him onto it or hoisting up his belongings onto it, is a sadaqah; a good word is a sadaqah; and removing a harmful thing from the road is a sadaqah.”
In other words, sadaqah comes in many shapes and sizes; what seems to unite them is a desire to help others. This is broader than mere charity. It’s what I would call solidarity. And notice how it’s arguably even more morally demanding than monetary charity. All charity requires is writing a check — an action that can be done dispassionately, and even effortlessly for someone lucky enough to have money. It doesn’t require commitment to a broader project of solidarity or justice. In fact, a common critique of charity is it can serve as a distraction from the unjust ways that wealth is created. But sadaqah requires you to be engaged, emotionally and often physically, too.

There are probably lots of ways you’re already expressing solidarity with others, maybe without even realizing it. As my colleague Rachel M. Cohen reported, acts of service for family, friends, and neighbors are typically not counted as volunteering, and opening your home to relatives or sending remittances to them is not counted as charitable giving. But they arguably should be. Informal caregiving and aid are expressions of solidarity, too.
So, for starters, I’d encourage you to make a list of all the ways you’re already bettering your community. Do you occasionally keep an eye on your neighbor’s kid, or help care for an aunt, or bring over a meal to a friend? Those things count!
Doing more formal volunteer work or organizing requires a currency that may be hard to come by: time. But to the extent that this is feasible for you, consider ways you can make an impact both locally and globally.
Can you volunteer one hour a week to help low-income kids in your community develop their literacy skills? Can you join a labor union? Can you spearhead a petition to get your school or workplace to offer more meat-free alternatives in the cafeteria?
Since you mentioned that war and genocide in other countries weigh heavily on you, can you organize on behalf of, and vote for, politicians with a good stance on foreign policy? Given what an outsized role the US plays in the world, that’s one of the biggest levers you can pull if you’re in America.
You’ll notice that none of these options requires monetary giving. They’re all forms of sadaqah. That said, I wouldn’t entirely ignore the zakat part of giving unless you clearly have to.
Some people do have to. There isn’t much sense in donating money if you can’t afford to cover your own basic needs, because then you yourself will be in need of donations. When people give and give until they’ve got nothing left, it becomes unsustainable and doesn’t end well, sometimes leading to burnout or collapse. Even Islam, with its heavy emphasis on charity, recognizes this: that’s why only those who have money over and above a certain minimum amount of wealth are obligated to pay zakat.
But if you’ve got even just a few extra dollars here and there, don’t underestimate the good they can do. For instance, Miriam’s Kitchen, a DC-based nonprofit with a mission to end chronic homelessness, can serve a full meal to a person experiencing homelessness for just $1.25. And in poorer countries, your money can go even further. If you donate to GiveDirectly, they will straight-up give your cash to people living in extreme poverty in Africa — where a dollar can buy much more than it can in the US — with no strings attached. I like donating this way because it’s highly cost-effective and it avoids the paternalism of more traditional charities, since it trusts people to make their own decisions about what to buy and how to improve their lives.
Donating doesn’t just help others — it also helps you. Research shows that giving money away actually makes us happier and enhances our well-being. I suspect it’s because it transforms our own consciousness, reminding us that we are connected to others in a vast web of interdependency.
In fact, I’ve seen this firsthand. I grew up in a family on welfare. We always had housing and enough to eat, but we couldn’t afford frills. Yet whenever my dad and I went downtown, he always made sure to carry a few bucks in his pockets, just so he could hand them out to people experiencing homelessness.
To be honest, my child-brain whined with anxiety when he did that: What if we need that money? But I saw how happy it made my dad. He knew it wasn’t enough to transform life for the people we encountered. But by giving them what he could, he was living out his values — caring for people, respecting their autonomy to spend money however they think best — while reminding himself that he’s connected to others.
As an adult, I was lucky to get jobs that paid decently, but I kept grappling with money dysmorphia — feeling nervous about money even after becoming financially stable. Donating felt scary to me, so I started small: $10 here, $50 there, and eventually much more. My initial fear soon gave way to a wild, leaping joy. As weird as it may sound, Giving Tuesday actually became one of my favorite days of the year. Just like my dad, I had discovered the psychological benefits of standing in solidarity with others with whatever resources one has.
I don’t want you to miss out on those benefits. I hope you reap them at every turn: by counting all the ways you already stand in solidarity with others, by contributing emotionally and physically, and — to whatever extent possible — by giving financially, too.