When tainted money should fund public goods: fundraising professional and public moral preferences

Philanthropy is essential to public goods such as education and research, arts and culture, and the provision of services to those in need. Providers of public goods commonly struggle with the dilemma of whether to accept donations from morally tainted donors. Ethicists also disagree on how to manage tainted donations. Forgoing such donations reduces opportunities for societal well-being and advancement; however, accepting them can damage institutional and individual reputations. Half of professional fundraisers have faced tainted donors, but only around a third of their institutions had relevant policies (n = 52). Here, we draw on two large samples of US laypeople (ns = 2,019; 2,566) and a unique sample of experts (professional fundraisers, n = 694) to provide empirical insights into various aspects of tainted donations that affect moral acceptability: the nature of the moral taint (criminal or morally ambiguous behavior), donation size, anonymity, and institution type. We find interesting patterns of convergence (rejecting criminal donations), divergence (professionals’ aversion to large tainted donations), and indifference (marginal role of anonymity) across the samples. Laypeople also applied slightly higher standards to universities and museums than to charities. Our results provide evidence of how complex moral trade-offs are resolved differentially, and can thus motivate and inform policy development for institutions dealing with controversial donors.