We are all rich. Totally, and absolutely mind-bogglingly rich. There are times when we forget it. Student loans melt away like ice sculptures at May Balls. That Week One spending spree turns into a healthy dose of Week Eight scrounging.

And yet, earn minimum wage in Britain and you’re a millionaire to half of the world.

I’m not trying to trivialise our money troubles closer to home. One in five inhabitants of the UK lives below the official poverty line. Many have it rough, and the need for significant and far-reaching domestic change is undeniable. It’s just that it is equally undeniable that an awful lot of people have it much, much worse than that. And this is where Giving What We Can comes in.

By now, you’ve probably all heard of the initiative Giving What We Can (GWWC). If you haven’t, I’d direct you to a recent article in Varsity online by Zack Hassan. In fact, you could probably set a clock by the regularity with which articles on GWWC (and the merits of effective altruism in general) pop up in Cambridge student news (this, of course, being no exception).

There’s still no Cam consensus, however, over the extent to which we ought to incorporate new ideas on charity into our lives, and a lot of discussion of the topic is mired by misconception. Recently, Amy Hawkins has put forward one of the most forceful summaries of arguments against the effectiveness of the pledge – a central tenet of GWWC’s philosophy. I still believe, however, that the ideas of this organisation cannot and should not be so easily dismissed.

It can be argued that while the pledge does good, the good it can do is limited: organisations like GWWC make minor changes within a framework that continues to perpetuate underlying inequalities. As Amy puts it, they effect “small adjustments within a system that still works to keep people poor”.

To a surprising number of people, the pledge seems like the ultimate example of throwing money at a problem. It seems like a flimsy scam, like giving money to a corrupt priest in order to erase your sins. As soon as we treat money as a solution, these people say, we become unable to deal with causes, and occupy ourselves solely with symptoms and the ways they can be treated on a surface level.

But this is to conflate the pledge with ‘earning to give’. Earning to give is a strategy where people deliberately choose a high-income career in order to increase their donations to charity. GWWC’s pledge and the earning to give strategy are categorically not the same thing. When taking the GWWC pledge, members promise to donate a fixed proportion of their income (currently at least ten percent) to effective causes. Takers of the pledge are given no advice as to the source of their income, or how much they should be making.

If GWWC constituted the sum total of all altruism in the entire world until the end of time, and all of its members donated to the same two or three symptom-treating charities, I’d have to come down on the side of Hawkins. The pledge would be supplanting more effective and meaningful expressions of charitable impulses. But it’s not.

The use of the pledge comes not from seeing it as the be all and end all of your altruistic action, but as the beginning. There is nothing in the wording of the pledge which limits the potential causes to which the money is donated, as long as they are effective. The idea is that members choose where to donate the money themselves. If a convincing case is made for donation to a charity whose aims are to alter the system, then it is that charity that will receive the donation.

Furthermore, joining GWWC does not preclude altruism of other sorts. An example is GWWC’s sister charity, 80,000 Hours, which gives students advice on maximising the good they can do with their choice of career, among other things. There’s nothing about taking the pledge which means you can’t pursue other, more systemic methods of change, such as political campaigning.

Moreover, the pledge ought to be seen as a sort of systemic change in its own right. The average person donates under one percent of their lifetime income to charity. In a country as wealthy as Britain, this is unacceptable. Already, GWWC has nearly a thousand members, each pledging at least ten percent. There’s an instinct, when you hear someone has donated, to praise them for their sacrifice.

Natural though this reaction is, it misses the point. GWWC is not about a few ethical superheroes fighting against a tide of inequality. It is about recognising that altruistic impulses are pretty much universal, and trying to find a way to use them to the best effect.

The pledge is a way of ensuring that the hardships we face in our day to day lives don’t interrupt the translation of altruistic impulse into altruistic action. Ultimately, GWWC is seeking to create a culture where charity is the norm.

We are all rich. It’s unavoidable that at some point we’ll come to notice it.