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to give or not to give
Gim
a tall glass of waterRegistered User regular
a tall glass of waterRegistered User regular
There are two people. Let's call them Person A and Person B.
Person A has just emerged from a half-assed run video game outlet with a video game in tow and is on his way home. Person B is homeless and panhandling so, well, it doesn't matter why. He's just asking for money so at some point later on he can buy himself something. Person B approaches Person A and asks for some of this money. Person A has a few options. Well, probably infinite options, but here are a couple of them.
A) Person A can give Person B money and be on his way
Person A can refuse to give Person B money and be on his way
Option A is more likely to be seen as more noble; a person who has enough in life to purchase an expensive toy giving to a man who has little. What he spends the money on, you can't be sure. Person A hopes it's food or medicine or something that will improve his quality of life. If he spends it on something bad, oh well, at least he tried.
Ah, but option B. Does a person need a reason to hold onto his money when faced with someone who is not as well off? Is it greed, selfishness, uncertainty, a strong ethical stance, disgust, or something else? Should Person A feel bad for clearly having more than those less fortunate and not giving when he can?
And just why don't all the poor people get jobs?
The homeless person is a pretty easy, quick, and personal encounter. How about the people around the world, whom you are very unlikely to ever see or come close to, who have little. Is it fine to ignore them as well and live your, for the most part, comfortable life, or do you feel a moral need to give to them, giving what you feel you can or should?
And how do you feel about charities in general, whether they be local, national, or international? Do you generally trust them or have you heard enough stories about unwieldy overhead and overall misuse of donated money to have any amount of good faith in them?
Go nuts.
Guilt-trip or something worth considering? Rand or Altruism? Poorly worded thread topic to clear the [chat] of madness? Discuss.
Person A has just emerged from a half-assed run video game outlet with a video game in tow and is on his way home. Person B is homeless and panhandling so, well, it doesn't matter why. He's just asking for money so at some point later on he can buy himself something. Person B approaches Person A and asks for some of this money. Person A has a few options. Well, probably infinite options, but here are a couple of them.
A) Person A can give Person B money and be on his way
Person A can refuse to give Person B money and be on his wayOption A is more likely to be seen as more noble; a person who has enough in life to purchase an expensive toy giving to a man who has little. What he spends the money on, you can't be sure. Person A hopes it's food or medicine or something that will improve his quality of life. If he spends it on something bad, oh well, at least he tried.
Ah, but option B. Does a person need a reason to hold onto his money when faced with someone who is not as well off? Is it greed, selfishness, uncertainty, a strong ethical stance, disgust, or something else? Should Person A feel bad for clearly having more than those less fortunate and not giving when he can?
And just why don't all the poor people get jobs?
The homeless person is a pretty easy, quick, and personal encounter. How about the people around the world, whom you are very unlikely to ever see or come close to, who have little. Is it fine to ignore them as well and live your, for the most part, comfortable life, or do you feel a moral need to give to them, giving what you feel you can or should?
And how do you feel about charities in general, whether they be local, national, or international? Do you generally trust them or have you heard enough stories about unwieldy overhead and overall misuse of donated money to have any amount of good faith in them?
Go nuts.
Guilt-trip or something worth considering? Rand or Altruism? Poorly worded thread topic to clear the [chat] of madness? Discuss.
Gim on
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In other words, what does this thread mean for ElJeffe?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I rarely carry cash and I don't know many homeless people that take debit cards so he's SOL.
edit@ Feral: burn
Shogun Streams Vidya
Not enough
You are far better donating to the salvo's or some other organisation that help get people off the street rather than to give them to someone on the street that will piss the money away.
Satans..... hints.....
A man once asked me for some money and I could smell cheap liquor on his breath. I'm hardly in desperate financial straits but it didn't seem proper to buy him booze.
On that note, I shall sleep now.
I hope you don't give any money to those damm "living statues" wow, they get paid for doing fuck all. Hey everyone come by my place at 5 in the morning and put money in a hat! I'm not doing much then either!
If I see a living statue and a real busker nearby I will always give money to the person actually doing something.
Satans..... hints.....
I've known homeless people and I've dealt with these systems and I can say that there is a huge chasm between being "homeless for a reason" and "don't deserve your money." The 'reason' a given homeless person is homeless might simply be that there wasn't enough room at the shelter (the shelters around here run on a waiting list basis), or because he's mentally ill and has problems dealing with bureaucracy (doesn't mean he's a bad person, it just means that you hand him a pen and a form to fill out and he thinks you're handing him a fishing pole and a picture of his grandma) or he's not technically homeless but is fleeing an unhealthy/abusive home environment or he simply doesn't know whether the homeless shelters are or what to do to get on social services (it's not like they have billboards that say, 'Starving? Come to the county soup kitchen and 5th and Mission!').
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The homeless person is a pretty easy, quick, and personal encounter. How about the people around the world, whom you are very unlikely to ever see or come close to, who have little. Is it fine to ignore them as well and live your, for the most part, comfortable life, or do you feel a moral need to give to them, giving what you feel you can or should?
And how do you feel about charities in general, whether they be local, national, or international? Do you generally trust them or have you heard enough stories about unwieldy overhead and overall misuse of donated money to have any amount of good faith in them?
Go nuts.
Edit: Added to the OP.
Further, there's a whole lot of presuppositions you have to make about what constitutes improvement and 'a good life' when you turn down a person's plea because you don't think it'll "better them." A few of these become double-standards, I think? I don't know, it's 3AM and hard to think through.
I'm fine with denying people because you have your own creature comforts you want to get and at the same time I think it's marginally better to give what little you can when you can. The margin isn't wide enough, though, to feel bad ourselves for not giving. I don't think.
As for why 'the poor don't just get jobs,' that's a very complexicated issue and I'm not really up to weighing in on it now.
again a problem, because most of these people are irrationally biased against what they feel got them where they are.
I really wish they had these billboards, or more thorough and accessible information. I got a list of homeless shelters from the county, and all but two of the twelve numbers and addresses listed were now defunct. I don't understand the mechanics of shelters and I'm wary of dealing with them because I got very intimidated by the welfare agreement I signed (but was later declined for anyway, due to being homeless. Wait, what?)
EDIT: Fuck beat'd.
Well, that's worded poorly, but you get my drift. Whether someone asks you directly for money or there are organizations for people in other parts of the world asking you for money, do you or don't you? Do they have to seek you out for money or do you seek them out in one way or another?
Apparently something like 40% in the US at least are war vets.
I'll offer to buy food, but that's as good as it gets - the homeless people hanging out in the city are the homeless-for-a-reason types, barring a few kids. The homeless who don't 'deserve' it (although deserve is rather a problematic term when you're mostly talking about the mentally ill), like the literally thousands of families on the waiting lists for government housing here, don't tend to make a habit of begging or sleeping on park benches. They're actually in shelters, or couch-surfing with friends and relatives.
As for charities... I'm picky. I've seen too many reports of the money never turning up where its needed. I donate to some closer-to-home funds when I pay my bills - there's an option on the internet banking doodad where you can donate whatever change rounds your bill up to the next dollar, or opt for more. The skin cancer research fund is my usual.
I have no guarantee that investing in a hobo is going to improve the individual's life, or that of those they associate with. As far as I know the hobo is abusive, or a preacher, or will not seek better help that handouts when handouts are still available. I don't know the factors, and I don't have the time to find out if my money will help or harm.
So I invest it where I KNOW it will do good, rather than gambling on it.
Same thing extends to larger groups of people, and gets worse when charities are involved, since so many are horribly corrupt in structure or message (this being subjective, of course).
I have no guarantee that my money won't just help make the world worse (see all those charities who go around causing sex ed nightmares in the 3rd world), even if it actually gets used as intended (save Child X today so that their ten offspring can suffer, YAY).
So it's just no a sound investment. I can't control it, and I don't have the time to investigate it, so I put my money elsewhere.
More controlled situations, like animal shelters, provide a much more comfortable investment opportunity. While abuse can still occur, there's a much smaller range of negative consequences, and the research is easier to pull off.
So, sorry Joe Hobo and Jill 3rd World, my money's probably going to cutting off cat nads.
A lot of people, through their daily lives either at home or work, spend a lot of time and money and energy taking care of others. Maybe your job is as an underpaid case worker in a county social services office. Maybe you support a sick significant other who would be homeless without your help. If there is an ethical mandate to donate to charity, does that apply to these people, who sacrifice so much of their lives already to help other people?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think its worthwhile to point out here that AFAIK, charities started as a strictly upper-class affectation, and one that emerged prior to a large middle class. Extending them to the point where everyone who doesn't obviously appear wretched is expected to give strikes me as pretty silly.
Locally, there's this guy who hangs out in front of large stores like Wal-Mart, Dominion, etc, and finds people in parking lots. He tells people as they're heading to their cars after shopping, fresh change in their pockets, that his car ran out of gas on a highway on-ramp, and his daughter's still inside it while he's gone in search of gas, but alas he has no money. He tried his grift on my Mother and I, but instead of handing cash over to him out-right, we decided we'd drive by the on-ramp and check to see if a car was there, and if one was we'd return and help him out. There was no car. That must have happened a year ago, but just last week a friend was telling me about the guy, so he's still doing it.
Seems to me that some people really do need money, for survival or whatever. In some cases, these people might consider survival to be something more than the basics. In the case of the employees at that charity, they were making money off the good intentions of donors, money they had only needed some of, but had kept more of to buy things they don't really need. In the case of the grifter, who may or may not have been homeless (and by his appearance, he may well have been) he used people's best intentions to get them to give him money that would not go towards helping him and his daughter, just him, a cheater. In both cases people are being helped, but not the people the donor had intended to help.
The people who are being helped are using the money they cheated towards attaining what they probably think of as necessities - things they need to survive. So ya, you've helped people - they will look at it like they've gained something from you, something they need. Only problem is you have no control over it at all, and maybe helping them isn't something you want to do.
In short, helping people with money never guarantees you're helping them the way you want to help them, and whether the help you're giving is, in the grander scheme of things, really helping them at all.
I fell for that one. I think it's a common ploy. That was actually one of the final nails in the coffin for me - the conclusion I came to is that charity doesn't have to have anything to do with money. Community service is probably a better investment any way I can think to look at it.
I find the whole notion of giving to charity as extremely impersonal.
I do give to charity from time to time, but if I'm going to help somebody I'd rather send a care package to a friend or relative I know is down on their luck. There are plenty of people close to me who need help.
I'm trying to tie this into the idea that people are becoming less connected with their communities over time; urbanization and industrialization making it less so people live in a village where everybody knows everybody to people living in tiny boxes where they may not even know their neighbors' names; not to mention the transition from extended families to nuclear families; but I'm not finding the words for it right now.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I think I have fallen for that too. But being out like two bucks really isn't that big of a deal either way, and grifting on that level is going to be meaningless for most people who would fall for it.
Amen to that.
Friend of mine once mentioned off-hand that her neck was sore and it was cold.
A week later, she had a plug-in heater and Icy-Hot patches.
Cousin of mine needs encouragement to get back into art?
So he's getting a Wacom tablet for Christmas even though we don't do exchanges.
Good investments.
Yes, and that money is -- from their point of view -- helping them, so your charity is going towards something. It's just not going to what you wanted it to.
Its a good theme to riff on. A hard one to argue against though, because everyone has their stories about roomates/neighbours from hell that caused them to withdraw from the local community in the first place. Its hard to combat that tendency to politely run away without implying that modern people are pussies...
they cannot be satisfactorily objectively informed about any of the options.
begs the question of whether we have the right to dictate what other people do with money we give away, although I don't neccessarily disagree with you. I'd love to be able to force my supermarket to be more efficient and stock less horribly unhealthy things, I'd love to be able to force my rental agency to hire staff that made it through 8th grade, and I'd love to force my gym to kick the people who hog the hand weights...
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Well, I'm not dictating anything. It doesn't get to that point. I'm not giving him some cash and saying, "you can only buy X, Y, and Z with this money!"
I mean, when homeless people ask you for money, the assumption that they will use it to try to offset their situation is implicit. Nobody gives money to them so they can go buy booze. People give money to them so they can get by for another day, and maybe take the bus to the unemployment office downtown where they can start applying to jobs.
The main difference is you're not giving money to your supermarket, rental agency, or gym. You're paying for goods and services they provide.
If you're giving money away, though, I think you have every right to dictate the eventual distination of it if you choose. Although there's not much point since you can't enforce it anyway.
I reversed you because the fact that I'm acquainted with someone doesn't make them more deserving of a decent life.
A modest monthly donation to Oxfam over a reasonable period of time can do a great deal of good. This is within the reach of anyone who doesn't obviously appear wretched.
Not to actually help people? So, it wouldn't matter if it were the case that the Red Cross spent your money on cheap hookers, so long as you didn't know, and hence felt warm and fuzzy about giving? It's fine for people to feel good about giving, but the reason they should feel good is because they're doing something good for the world, and furthermore, the reason they should give should be to do something good for the world.
As for my ethical obligation... fuck it. I mean, I don't feel obligated to do anything, ever, but these are children who's entire future is starvation and scabies. I don't owe them my banana, but I'd owe myself a kicking if I didn't give it to them.