Any charitable donation with your name on it is a Veblen good that (hopefully) becomes socially useful. If people donated out of a genuine sense of charity they would donate anonymously.
Many people give money in a functionally anonymous way. Sure, it might be traceable, but if I go online and donate $100 to the red cross:
1) They might know my name, but they don't really know who I am
2) I don't really get any social status bump for doing this, unless I go around telling people that I made this donation (in which case, i'd agree, it's not really anonymous anymore)
Also: it's possible to make an "anonymous" donation and let your friends and family know you're doing it. That way, to the people you know and want to impress you seem both like a generous philanthropist and a humble private person.
My point is, it's possible to read any action in a bad light and assign a bad motive to it. In my view giving money to worthwhile causes is good, even if you're doing it to rehabilitate your image or make yourself look good
Agree. Perhaps SOMEONE somewhere knows that you gave a donation, but functionally, many donations are as good as anonymous. If I give $300 (or even $3000) to a food bank, no one is calling to give me a congratulations. Do they have my name? Yes. They might send an automated thank you. And they DEFINITELY will reach out for future donations. But it doesn’t have a meaningful effect on my reputation.
Donating anonymously is a way of avoiding ending up on the mailing list of every charity in the country.
While it wasn't so important in this case because as a former billionaire I assume he had people at a foundation who's job it was to handle his correspondence, but if you are a regular person looking to make a donation it's often a good idea to keep your name and contact info out of it as much as possible. Charities can be really bad about selling your name.
This is mostly irrelevant. Pretty much every traditional value system values anonymous donations more, but few people actually do it in a completely anonymous way. I.e., the article isn’t about real anonymous donors, it’s about pseudo-anonymous donors which outnumber the real ones.
A lot of wealthy people donate anonymously so that they aren't harassed or labeled for whom they donate money to and some just don't like drawing attention to their personal lives.
Normally, organizations accept anonymous donations from people because of modesty or privacy -- the donors don't want their name on the wall or in the press. They have a mechanism for that called "anonymous donations", but the mechanism isn't meant to guarantee that no reputational benefits at all can be gotten by the donor.
In this case, several people knew he had donated to MIT and he invited professors to his dinners to show off to his friends, so there were substantial reputational benefits.
Lessig's utilitarian calculus doesn't convince me it's OK to take money anonymously from villains.
Not directly answering your question, but something I thought was relevant.
I recall some years ago, there was a movement to encourage large donors and philanthropists to make themselves more visible, rather than donating anonymously, in the believe that this would encourage other wealthy people to contribute as well, a kind of peer pressure or leading by example.
I don't think that works in practice. If you donate money with the goal of advancing some agenda, and it's officially anonymous, you'll find a way of letting the right people know it was you.
Just as many people would only donate to organizations where they can be anonymous. For example, if you were a gay man and wanted to send money to Russia to help fight the anti-gay sentiment over there, you might not want to do it with your name easily traceable.
And this is why all my personal donations are in cash and anonymous. It's no one else's business, I'm not going to be pretentious about it, and receiving "services" from an organization will not be predicated on how much I give.
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