As participants in contemporary society, each of us is in some sense complicit in a wide variety of harms to others. In light of this, a common argument – for example, from the work of Thomas Pogge and John Broome – claims that each of us has a strict duty to compensate the relevant people who are harmed. I argue that these arguments are unsound, but that conclusions in a somewhat similar direction can be grounded in a more secure deontological foundation. I argue that this more secure foundation implies that we should do the most good we can for disadvantaged people in discharging the debts we have in virtue of our complicity in harm. This is in contrast to the implication of Pogge and Broome’s conclusions, which imply that we should often invest in altruism that is known to be highly suboptimal.