When to terminate a charitable trust?

Abstract

Utilitarianism, meaning maximizing total human welfare, faces a dilemma when it comes to charitable trusts set in perpetuity. The article discusses the difficulty of choosing a termination date for a charitable trust. On the one hand, a later termination date would result in more money and potentially more welfare due to compounding interest and persistent human needs. On the other hand, no matter how far in the future the trust is terminated, someone might have helped more people if they had picked a later date. Concluding the article with a reflection on the author and their peers’ real-life experiment of setting up a century-spanning charitable trust. – AI-generated abstract.