> The idea is that when you donate to charity, the money is never “yours” - you never benefit from it.

Of course you do. If you didn't benefit from the donation, you wouldn't have made it.

Just for clarification, do you mean this tautologically? As in, if I produce examples of people not materially or socially benefiting from their charitable donations (such as by donating anonymously in countries without charitable tax deductions) would your argument reduce to "They only give to charity to feel better about themselves, therefore they benefited and would not have made the donation otherwise"?

I'm willing to give up the tautological definition in the edge case of "donated food anonymously to the poor" type cases. But I think that the number of ways of selfishly donating are both the vast majority and far broader than "material or social" benefiting.

Okay, now I'm more interested. Your original claim was;

>If you didn't benefit from the donation, you wouldn't have made it.

If I understand you correctly, you are claiming that the vast majority of charitable donations a) do not materially or socially benefit the donater, b) are still selfish (in that donating the money offers greater personal advantage than using the money in other ways), and c) would not be given if those benefits were not received in return. Could you give some examples of what kind of donations you're talking about, because I'm not sure we're communicating from the same basic understanding of what a charitable donation is.

That would be true if people only do things that benefit themselves.

But that’s just not how humans are.

Soldiers volunteer to throw themselves on grenades.

Humans are social creatures who have evolved to be willing to sacrifice for others.

>Analogously, if part of your compensation was a donation to charity, you wouldn’t be taxed on it.

Which is basically how corporate gift matching works.