This report maps out the roots in the United States of the long-standing commitment to charitable cause pluralism, defined here to mean a belief that the wide diversity of causes supported by donors is itself a good that should be defended and preserved. Among those roots are the foundations of federal charity law in the United States, the support provided by cognate ideals of religious, political, and philosophical pluralism, and the norms surrounding the stewardship of large-scale wealth, developed at the turn of the last century, which placed a value on the personal preferences and prerogatives of donors. The report next highlights some countercurrents which encouraged charitable prescription and cause prioritization in the first half of the 20th century, including the scientific charity and scientific philanthropy movements, but shows that by the final decades of the century, the commitment to charitable pluralism had reached its apex. During this time, pluralism served as a unifying principle to promote the consolidation of a recognizable nonprofit sector, and also became a lodestar of the conservative countermobilization against a surging progressive movement in philanthropy. Philanthropic cause pluralism also received a boost from the rise of engaged living mega-donors, a product of the massive, concentrated fortunes produced by the finance, high-tech, and real-estate industries in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But over the last few decades, the embrace of charitable and especially philanthropic cause prescription and proscription, the insistence that some causes are more worthy of charitable support than others, grew notably stronger. Several developments over the last decades contributed to this shift by providing the grounds for individual giving decisions to be understood—and judged—in reference to the broader giving landscape, whether national or global; among these is the rise of equity as a primary consideration for many progressives in the philanthropic sector, which helped to erode the presumption toward cause agnosticism, in which a gift should be appreciated in isolation as the expression of a donor’s prerogatives.

The prescriptive turn in philanthropic and charitable discourse can be appreciated clearly with reference to two specific examples: the push toward racial equity philanthropy and the effective altruism movement. These two are not often regarded as closely allied—and perhaps are more often seen as antagonists. But a common thread runs through them both: each has pushed back against an understanding of charitable cause pluralism that is inhospitable to prescription. Yet each in turn has also invoked a form of pluralism to license prescription. This can be seen in what has become one of the most prominent tropes in philanthropy discourse in the new millennium: calls to direct funding to (often identity-aligned) cause areas deemed to be underfunded. This synthesis of pluralism and prescription depends on the implicit—and sometimes explicit—argument that given the current distribution of philanthropic and charitable resources, the next philanthropic or charitable dollar should be directed to a putatively underfunded but essential cause—and should therefore be withheld from “rival” cause areas. The effective altruism movement, for its part, similarly calls for the need to reject merely “good uses” of money in favor of what its adherents believe to be the “highest and best” uses, pushing against prevailing pluralistic norms. Yet its leaders also seem to appreciate how alienating unalloyed cause prescription can be and often leave room for a deference to pluralism. Thus, we are now left with an uneasy accommodation between the advocates of pluralism and prescription, which is best reflected in the controversy surrounding an April 2023 op-ed in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, in which a group of six philanthropic leaders, representing wide swaths along the ideological spectrum, jointly reaffirmed their commitment to philanthropic pluralism, which they believed to be under attack from the forces of prescription and proscription.