Last month, negative public reaction was catalysed by statements from an Indonesian Member of Parliament. The legislator questioned the prominence of private donations for flood victims in Aceh and Sumatra, arguing that media coverage had exaggerated these efforts while overshadowing the government’s trillion-rupiah aid package (Kompas, 2025). He later apologized; still, it raises a deeper moral question: should private donations be disparaged?
This article does not assess whether government action deserves more media attention. Instead, it addresses a more essential issue: whether private donations are morally insignificant. Drawing on the theory of praiseworthiness, I argue that private donations are not only morally right but also morally praiseworthy. The statements that underestimate such efforts are, consequently, misleading.
Private donations are praiseworthy
Praiseworthiness is a moral concept used to evaluate whether an action goes beyond duty and therefore deserves praise (Archer, 2015). An action is praiseworthy when it is supererogatory, that is, performed beyond duty, and involves genuine effort and sacrifice (Massoud, 2016; Nelkin, 2016). In addition, most contemporary accounts require two further conditions: the agent must act with the right motivation and must act voluntarily (Constantinescu, 2022).
Private donations for disaster relief satisfy these conditions. Citizens, companies, and civil society organizations are not obligated to fund or directly manage disaster relief. They donate money, organize logistics, distribute aid, and make themselves accountable to the public. These are not undertaken out of legal obligation, but out of a moral concern for others, encapsulated in the phrase “people help people” (BBC News Indonesia, 2025). Such motivation is morally benevolent.
Moreover, these actions are voluntary. Donors and volunteers act freely, without coercion, and with the understanding that their actions aim to alleviate suffering. They sacrifice money, time, and personal resources to reduce the social and economic burden. Because these actions go beyond duty, are motivated by concern for others, and are undertaken voluntarily, private donations are morally praiseworthy.
Government aid is a duty
Government aid, on the contrary, stands on a different moral appraisal. Disaster response is a core obligation of the state. Funds distributed by the government are derived from taxes and national revenue, and the deployment of civil servants, police, and military personnel is part of institutional responsibility. As such, they cannot be classified as supererogatory and therefore do not qualify as praiseworthy in the same moral sense. As a result, the assumption that government aid should be valued more highly simply because it involves larger sums of money is mistaken. Moral appraisal is not determined by scale alone but by the nature of obligation behind the act. Only those who act beyond duty, thus, deserve praise.
The issue becomes even more concerning when viewed from the perspective of blameworthiness. When an agent fails to fulfil a duty, that agent may be blameworthy (Poel, 2015). In the case of floods in Sumatra, for instance, deforestation has been identified as a contributing factor linked to government policies that allowed commercial activity in protected areas (Kompas, 2025). If state policies contributed to ecological damage that intensified the disaster, then the government failed in its duty to protect both the environment and its citizens. Given that the government transgresses its duty, it is blameworthy.
Blameworthiness, in addition, carries appropriate reactive attitudes such as guilt, resentment, and indignation (Carlsson, 2017). In this context, the morally appropriate response from the government would include acknowledging failure, apologizing, and making credible commitments to policy reform. Government aid, viewed in this light, can be understood not as an act of virtue, but as a partial response to prior failure. Seen this way, the attempt to elevate government aid while overlooking private donations is counterintuitive. Private donations represent morally praiseworthy action beyond duty, while government aid represents the discharge or partial discharge of obligation.
In conclusion, people often conflate private donations with government aid. Although private individuals and the government may perform similar outward actions, they bear different moral status and responsibility. Private donors and volunteers act beyond the call of duty and thus deserve praise. The government acts from duty and therefore does not. Hence, to underestimate private donations is not only misleading but also morally puzzling. Worse still, when structural failures contribute to disaster, government assistance should be understood as retributive responsibility, not generosity.
