Charity: Does Apple do its share?

Forget what your accountant tells you is tax-deductible. What counts as a charitable donation, ethically?

There have been a few rumbles around the Internet recently about the lack of corporate philanthropy at Apple Computers, and about now-retired CEO Steve Jobs' own lack of philanthropic donations. See for instance by John Cary and Courtney E. Martin on CNN: Apple's philanthropy needs a reboot

Apple's...charitable identity—or egregious lack thereof—disappoints us. It's time for Apple to start innovating in philanthropy with the same ingenuity, rigor and public bravado that it has brought to its every other venture....

Cary and Martin acknowledge Apple's participation in the Product Red program, which has raised tens of millions for relief of AIDS in Africa, and for which Bono recently praised Jobs. But Apple made $14 billion in profits last year and Cary and Martin think it's pretty clear that Apple is obligated to give some of that away. They're not so clear on where that obligation comes from, except to point to precedent within the computer industry. Both Google and Microsoft have well-established philanthropy programs—both of which, as Cary and Martin note, have drawn fire. Hmmm.

The interesting thing here is that Cary and Martin's criticism implicitly raises interesting questions about what counts as philanthropy.

Take, for example, Apple's sizeable donation to the fight against Proposition 8, California's anti-marriage-equality effort. Was that a charitable donation, or a piece of political activism? Is there a difference?

Apple has also been known to donate computers to schools, and regularly gives students (and, ahem, professors like me) a discount on computer purchases. Of course, critics will propose that those are really marketing gimmicks. But then, no sane person thinks that corporate philanthropy stops being ethical when it's a win-win proposition.

But then, back to the issue of why. Why are corporations obligated to give to charity? One group of critics is fond of pointing out that profits belong to shareholders, and when corporate execs donate corporate funds to charity, they're giving away other people's money. Even within the modern Corporate Social Responsibility movement, the saner folks are at pains to emphasize that CSR isn't about charity. It's about making some sort of social contribution, preferably one that makes use of a company's special capacities and core competencies.

And as a recent piece in The Economist pointed out that, if you're talking about doing good in the world, you really must look at what Apple has done to put beautiful, highly-functional, productivity-enhancing devices in the hands of millions of consumers. That's not exactly the same as feeding the world's starving masses, but then neither is a corporate donation to build an opera house or to get your company's name on a plaque in the lobby of the local business school. The questions we ought to be concerned with are questions about a corporation's net impact on the world, and the methods it uses along the way. A focus on corporate philanthropy risks obscuring both of those questions.