Is it Morally Regrettable to Tip?

A core practice in America is tipping. Servers are, outrageously, paid less than minimum wage. It is expected that tips compensate for the rest. And tipping is in many ways morally coded — those who do not tip are seen as stingy, cold, and selfish. Those who tip beyond the customary 20% are seen as especially good people.

In the spirit of this blog, however, I want to explore a bit of an extreme idea: might it be morally regrettable to tip? While I do tip, it seems to me that there is a really powerful argument that this practice isn’t great. I hope you set aside 5-10 minutes to explore it — it might just change how you act the next time you see this:

Okay, this post will proceed in 2 parts:

1. The Argument

2. Addressing Objections

1. The Argument

Imagine the following:

Waiter and Child: You and your lovely family have gone out for a fun dinner at a restaurant. You have a nice meal, terrific vibes, and good service. As your waiter comes to get everyone’s plates, you get a call, and you step outside to take it. Turns out it was just spam, and you end the call and are about to go back into the restaurant to pay the check and tip the waiter 20%. But just before you open the restaurant’s front door, you notice something. Sitting on the ground is a 7-year-old child. His clothes are ragged. He has no home. His parents were killed at his birth. The child is starving. He hasn’t had food in days, and tears can barely run on his cheeks because of his thirst.

Your heart instantly melts. The child has done absolutely nothing to deserve this. This could have been you. You open your wallet, and all you have is a 100 dollar bill and a 20 dollar bill. No credit card. The check waiting for you at the table is 100 dollars — your plan was to tip the waiter with the extra 20 dollar bill. But you know that you could use this 20 to buy the child his first meal(s) in days.

What do you do? Speaking for myself, I find it unbelievably clear that I should give my 20 to the child. The 20 will do so much good if that is where it goes. It could breathe something as beautiful as life! into a completely innocent child. Indeed, if I did not give it to the child, I don’t know how I could ever shake that guilt. To not feed the child is to act in a way that strikes me as insensitive to goodness: it is to be insensitive to the badness of premature death, the badness of a cruel existence, and the goodness that comes with alleviating this.

But … Waiter and Child is essentially exactly the situation we all find ourselves in, every time we tip. The child I described exists. And he is not alone. There are millions living like him, or in conditions much worse. Just take the child and move him a little bit (in particular, move him to sub-Saharan Africa) and, voila, the man in Waiter and Child describes all of us.

Allow me to paint the picture a bit more vividly. In 2023, well over one hundred million people in Africa faced chronic malnourishment. Just last year, in Sudan, literal famine hit over 400,000 displaced people — women and children scarred by war and with no permanent shelter. In Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, two million children are facing drought and require treatment for the deadliest form of hunger. The rampant starvation has led to increases in child labor, rape, sexual violence, and female genital mutilation.

This is not even to mention the unbelievably dire conditions of mass multidimensional poverty, nor the mass torture, rape, sexual slavery, and ethnic massacres that have taken place in various parts of the world.

In short: all over the world, at this very moment, as you read this text in comfort, are millions of children agonizing in starvation, poverty, and much worse.

You might be thinking right now: dude, what the hell does this have to do with tipping?

My point is simply this: Waiter and Child is not really a thought experiment. It is pretty much the reality that we all find ourselves in. It’s just that when you and I go to eat, rather than the children being on the street of the restaurant, they are a couple (thousand) miles away.

But surely this difference is completely irrelevant.

Here’s one intuition pump for this: imagine that you had a specific kind of super vision. In particular, you could, if you squint your eyes really hard, see the suffering children that exist thousands of miles away. Now, imagine that you also had a specific kind of arm. If you extend your arm, you could reach all the way to these children. If this were you, every time you go out to eat, you are the man in Waiter and Child. You can, with the squint of an eye and the extension of an arm, breathe life into a starving child’s eyes with the 20 you would’ve otherwise tipped.

But surely our moral reasons should not be drastically affected by the flexibility of our arms or the number of retinas in our eyes.

Furthermore, because of modern technology, these superhumans are basically who we all are anyways. With the click of a button my money can reach starving children. With a quick Google search, I can see what is going on (at least in part) elsewhere in the world.

All of this is to say: every day, when you are faced with the prospect of tipping, you find yourself in a similar situation to the man in Waiter and Child.

Now, even if you agree with me in all of this so far, it is still not enough to establish that it is morally regrettable to tip. All I have shown is that there are better uses of your tip money. But this is true of most of the ways you spend your money! Also, unlike the man in Waiter and Child, your tip money is not the only money you have in your wallet. You can donate to starving children and tip. So why is tipping morally regrettable?

To establish this, I will need you to bear with me a bit more and imagine one further situation:

Charity on Fire: Bob has been working hard and saving money. He has managed to save 1000 dollars from his income this year, which he plans to give away to charity. Bob goes up to the local charity, but at the last minute decides to set 900 of his 1000 dollars on fire. He then gives the remaining 100 to the charity.

It seems as though there is something morally regrettable about what Bob has done here. To be clear, it’s not as though Bob is a bad person for what he’s done — he saved up his own money to give away, he seems like a great person! Nevertheless, it is regrettable that this happened. These 1000 dollars were dollars already set aside to help others. Bob was not going to use them on himself. In a world where humans (myself included, of course) struggle to give away much of their income, it is a real shame that these 1000 charity dollars only ended up being 100. When something is about to go towards the good, and instead gets significantly reduced, that is really very sad and regrettable. The fact that 1000 dollars, which were about to go to those who need it, ended up being only 100 dollars is not a fact we should be happy obtained.

So, Charity on Fire is morally regrettable. Again, that’s not to say Bob is bad for having set his 900 to fire. It is simply to say that we should be sad that this has happened.

The problem, though, is that it is very difficult to distinguish Charity on Fire from tipping. When I choose to tip — especially when I tip beyond customary rate — this is money I have already decided to spend altruistically. It is money I have already decided to use towards the good. And rather than use that money to give life to a starving child, I have decided to give it to someone who is richer than 98% of the world’s population (indeed, the average American is in the top 1%).

This is a bit like if I had just worked up the altruistic energy to tip my server 30%, and then, just before I do it, I see a multimillionaire walk in and give me a high five, and I decide to instead give my tip to him. That is morally regrettable! What a waste of money that would have done so much more good for my server than for Musk. Just as it is regrettable to spend your limited altruism on America’s wealthiest 1% rather than the average American, so too is it regrettable to spend your limited altruism on the world’s wealthiest 2% rather than children in literal famine.

Indeed, the analogy to Charity on Fire might be too generous. If I work up the altruism to tip a server 50 dollars, and then instead gave that to someone worth hundreds of millions of dollars, it probably would have been better if I literally set to fire 45 of the 50 dollars and then gave the remaining 5 to the server. Ipso facto for tipping.

Now, since this is a philosophically inclined blog, I guess this is the point where I have to give a syllogism? So here you go:

(1) If it isn’t morally regrettable to tip, Charity on Fire isn’t morally regrettable;

(2) But Charity on Fire is morally regrettable;

(3) So, it is morally regrettable to tip.

I simply struggle to see how tipping isn’t like Charity on Fire in all the ways that matter.

Before considering objections, though, I want to paint one more picture. I want you to just imagine what the world would be like if, every time you were about to tip, you instead took that tip and gave it to an effective charity. Americans spend roughly 131 billion dollars on tips every year. If, instead, 100 billion dollars went to effective charity, the world would be ridiculously better. It is far above my paygrade to project what the impacts of that would be, but at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives could be saved or significantly improved. [1] Of course, there are also ripple effects to consider. But these needn’t all be negative: for instance, if Americans really did opt to turn their tips into donations, restaurants might no longer be able to get away with paying servers below minimum wage.

Hundreds of thousands more smiles. More life. Less hunger. Less starvation. When I really reflect on this when tipping, the fact that I am no different from Bob in Charity on Fire does not strike me as so crazy. Someone should make an app that does this automatically — sends your would-be-tip as donations.

2. Objections

Objection 1: This isn’t an argument against tipping. This just entails that you should tip and donate.

While it is certainly better to tip and donate than to not donate at all, the argument here suggests more than that. For while it is true that we have enough money to both tip and donate, we nevertheless only have a limited amount of money (and a limited amount of altruism). That is why it is ‘morally regrettable’ whenever we do tip: because that is money that could have instead gone to donation.

If you’re still not convinced, simply consider the analog response in the case of you giving money to Elon Musk. Isn’t it still morally regrettable for you to spend your altruism and money on Musk, when you could have instead given it to someone who needs it? This is so even if it’s true that you can both give money to Elon and donate.

Objection 2: Tipping isn’t about altruism. It’s about paying for the service experience. If we didn’t have tipping, we wouldn’t have energetic, highly competent servers. So tipping is a purchase, much like when I buy a toy for myself.

I could dispute the substance of this objection — many object that servers could still be motivated to be similarly energetic and competent without tips if they were compensated fairly, as in European countries. But this is a tricky empirical debate. Let’s set it aside and assume the objection is right.

Nevertheless, there still is value in considering these arguments — for it will apply to tipping when it is in other contexts that are altruistic rather than about purchasing an experience. For instance, when one is asked to tip at a coffee shop, at a sandwich shop, or any other instance where the tip isn’t going to someone managing a dining table. Additionally, the arguments here apply to anyone to the extent that they tip for altruistic reasons — which I know many people do.

Objection 3: But, unlike the beneficiaries of a would-be donation, the server deserves this tip. He is entitled to it, unlike the starving children.

One could also dispute the substance of this objection — either by arguing that desert might not be a moral ideal, or that, even if it is one, the server is not necessarily entitled to my tip, or that, even if the server deserves it, so too does a starving child, since they are only in their position because of cruel genetic lottery. But let’s grant the substance of the objection.

Even so, desert is but one moral ideal among others. While it matters that people get what they deserve, it also matters that … people don’t die of starvation. That people get their life extended by multiple years, and live beyond poverty. Just consider Waiter and Child again. It seems silly to me to object that you shouldn’t give the child the 20 because of the waiter’s desert claim — even if the waiter has a desert claim to your 20, and the child doesn’t, nevertheless the mounting famine the child faces clearly outweighs this desert claim. Sorry, I won’t let an orphan starve.

Objection 4: Doesn’t this just generalize to everything? What’s so special about tipping?

True, there is a sense in which the argument here generalizes — we make massive mistakes in how we spend our money, at least when viewed from a moral lens. But my point isn’t merely that tipping is a grossly morally inefficient way to spend your money. My point is that it is particularly morally regrettable: because tipping, at least sometimes, is done under the auspices of altruism. That is the lesson of Charity on Fire. Whenever we don’t give money to charity, there is something sad about that. But there is something especially regrettable when Bob works up the altruistic energy to give, and then decides to burn away 90% of his donation money before giving it away.