º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍø

The Ladder of Charity was the brainchild of one of Judaism’s  greatest scholars, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (“Moses the son of Maimon,� Hebrew acronym “Rambam,� “Maimonides� in Greek). Maimonides was born in 1135 in Muslim-ruled Iberia and lived in what is now Morocco, Israel, and Egypt, where he died in 1204. He wrote dozens of works on logic, metaphysics, medicine, and astronomy (including a debunking of astrology); distilled Jewish faith into thirteen principles; served as the court physician of the sultan Saladin; wrote The Guide for the Perplexed, which tried to reconcile scripture with reason, and Jewish theology with Aristotelian philosophy; and codified Jewish oral law into his Mishneh Torah (“second Torah�), the work in which he presented his ladder.

According to Maimonides, the righteousness of a charitable gift cannot be reckoned by the size of the donation alone but depends on the circumstances of giving, particularly the state of knowledge of the donor and the beneficiary. Here’s the ladder, in descending order of righteousness, with the levels of knowledge appended:

1. A person who strengthens an impoverished member of the community by giving him a starter loan, entering into partnership with him, or finding him work so that he will not have to ask for alms.

2. Someone who gives charity to the poor without knowing to whom he gave and without the poor person knowing from whom he received. This type of giving was exemplified by the secret chamber that existed in the Temple. The righteous would make donations there in secret and poor people would derive their livelihood from it in secret. A level close to this is giving to a charity fund. (Private donor, private beneficiary)

3. The giver knows to whom he is giving, but the poor person does not know from whom he received. An example of this were the great Sages who would go in secret and throw money into the doorways of the poor. (Private donor, known beneficiary)

4. The poor person knows from whom he took, but the donor does not know to whom he gave. An example of this were the great Sages who would bundle coins in a sheet and hang them over their shoulders and the poor would come and take them so that they would not be embarrassed. (Known donor, private beneficiary)

5. Giving to the poor person in his hand before he asks. Common knowledge (Donor-initiated)

6. Giving to him after he asks. Common knowledge (Beneficiary-initiated)

7. Giving to him less than what is appropriate, but cheerfully. Common knowledge (Willing)

8. Giving to him grudgingly. Common knowledge (Unwilling)

As an 11-year-old utilitarian, I could appreciate why Rung 1, which delivered a lifelong stream of benefits, was at the top, and why the rungs with paltry donations (Rungs 7 and 8) were on the bottom.

But why, I wondered, should anyone care about the mutual knowledge of the donor and beneficiary, which laid out the ordering of Rungs 2, 3, 4, and 5–8? If you’re poor, you can buy the same amount of food whether the coins are taken from a community chest, picked up off a doorstep, pulled out of a rich person’s backpack, or placed in your hand.

And it being a perquisite of youth to call out the hypocrisy of elders, I demanded to know why, if anonymous giving was so righteous, our very own Temple Beth Sholom was studded with plaques identifying the donor of every pew and fixture.

It being an obligation of elders to prop up their culture’s moral norms, my long-suffering teacher conceded that Temple members were only human and should try to do better. Had she been a more erudite talmid chochem (wise scholar), she might have explained that another sage of medieval Spain, Rabbi Shlomo ben Avraham (Solomon the son of Abraham, acronym Rashba), had endorsed a mitzvah l’farsem, “commandment to publicize,� which commends spreading the word about good deeds so that others might be inspired to do the same. But that would only have highlighted the contradiction between the Rashba’s call for righteous publicity and the Rambam’s call for righteous anonymity. No doubt centuries of rabbis have debated the paradox.

Yet another Jewish sage, Larry David, brought the paradox to life in an episode of his comedy series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” David, playing himself, donates money for a wing of a nonprofit building, which is named after him. The other wing displays only the inscription “Donated by Anonymous.â€� At the ribbon-cutting ceremony he is chagrined to hear people gushing over his rival Ted Danson, because word had leaked out that Danson was the anonymous donor, earning him the reputational advantages of both the generous gift and the self-effacing anonymity. (“Nobody told me that I could be anonymous and tell people! I would’ve taken that option, OK?â€�)

The states of knowledge surrounding donations are not just a matter for Talmudic disputation and streaming comedies. In real life, people often criticize donors who seek too much credit for their munificence, as in the outrage directed at two philanthropists who rescinded a three-million-dollar gift to a zoo because the plaque showing their names was too small. These judgments are no small thing now that charitable institutions are increasingly charged with solving some of the world’s most pressing problems, including hunger, disease, natural disasters, economic development, and political instability. Attitudes about the incentives for giving can determine how much good philanthropy can do. For instance, the entrepreneur Dan Pallotta organized fundraising events like AIDSRide and the Breast Cancer 3-Day that raised more than three hundred million dollars for charities. But his organizations collapsed after complaints that they earned a profit. Pallotta said, wistfully, “People continue to die as a result. . . . This we call morality.�

As philanthropy scales up to the gigadollar potential of tech moguls, the scrutiny intensifies. Bill Gates, perhaps following the Rashba, has not been shy about the massive resources he has put into the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But the Foundation is laser- focused on the measurable benefits it delivers in reducing global poverty and disease, and the publicity is itself a part of this effort: Gates has leveraged it to inspire his fellow billionaires to sign the Giving Pledge, a promise to bequeath the majority of their wealth to philanthropy.

In contrast, his opposite number in the Windows–Mac war, Steve Jobs, was excoriated by the New York Times because he had not signed the Giving Pledge, and “there is no public record of Mr. Jobs giving money to charity. . . . Nor is there a hospital wing or an academic building with his name on it.� This led to suggestions that Jobs was in effect a follower of the Rambam, keeping his largesse anonymous. And the final laugh must go to Rabbi Larry ben David, because after the Times takedown, examples of Jobs’s quiet philanthropy were outed by his family and friends, including the musician Bono, whose (RED) charitable project, he suggested, had been a beneficiary.  (“I’m proud to know him; he’s a poetic fellow, an artist and a businessman ... You don’t have to be a friend of his to know what a private person he is or that he doesn’t do things by halves.�) As with Ted Danson, the revealed anonymity burnished Jobs’s reputation as a philanthropist (in his case posthumously), despite his having given away at most a thousandth of what Gates did.

In sum, the more that donors are in a position to be paid back or admired, the less righteous they will appear, because the gift becomes less diagnostic of an underlying disposition for pure altruism. When charitable gifts are judged as windows into the giver’s soul, the welfare of the beneficiary can slip out of sight.

Maimonides’ Ladder, then, may be seen as an assay for the dispositional generosity of a donor. In that way its ethos is different from Effective Altruism, the ethical movement inspired by utilitarianism, which valorizes only the benefit to recipients.

In a modern context, this is a big reason why the Effective Altruism movement has not taken off. EA advocates have shown that different charities for a given cause — saving lives, educating girls, furnishing clean water — vary wildly in their efficacy, and recommend that donors exercise due diligence in selecting the most effective ones. But research into the efficacy of charities is private knowledge, and no one gets plaudits for selecting the charity that saves the most lives per dollar donated.

This may explain why even a charity famously driven by hardheaded evaluations of efficacy, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, publishes annual reports with photographs of the eponymous donors mingling with beneficiaries in the poor countries they help. 

Excerpted from “When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows ... Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life” by Steven Pinker. Copyright © 2025 Steven Pinker. Published by Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.