I don’t think there is anything wrong with you feeling bad about not helping out, because compassion is something that most humans experience atleast once. I don’t think you were wrong in not helping out, either. Since I live downtown, I see homeless people every day. I don’t give them money, because like Sinistral said, they are where they are due to the choices they have made. I’m willing to bet most of them would just spend the money you give them on more drugs to sustain their addiction and continue their slow awkward stumble into death.
Some could call it underhanded, some might see it as despicable, but you never said it was dumb, because it wasn’t. It was a smart move. If he cared about his survival, he wouldn’t give a darn about petty things like people’s mere feelings. Feelings pass away, people, and afterwards, they can mean very little in the large scope of things. A man’s life can pass away, and it will mean something. That man’s stomach is going to be bothering him a lot more often than this whole crisis of conscience will bother anyone else.
It’s not that troubling a situation anyway. If I was in his position, I’d be doing the same thing, and I probably wouldn’t feel bad about it at all. If it keeps me alive, and if it doesn’t hurt anyone, there’s no reason not to do it.
I think it’s cold and cruel to not be compassionate enough to give someone spare change. I mean jesus Sinistral, what do you have to prove to the general public? You’re no hardass because you don’t give someone a dime or a dollar. Fuck man, it’s the holidays. It makes me feel great to do nice things for people in need. When I was in San Fransisco I bought a whole pizza and a case of coke and walked down the street and feed about 6 homeless people. Why? Because I wanted to do something nice, not because I pitied them or felt they should pull themselves out of their own hole, but because to not be compassionate to ones fellow man is inhumane.
A lot of the worlds problems stem from people like Sinistral. Honestly, I used to think you were cool, but now I just think you’re full of shit.
BE NICE AND GIVE THEM SOME CASH! It won’t make you a bad person if you don’t give them money but you’re definitely not a good person because you can’t even spare a dollar for someone who’s just trying to make it through the day.
Act first, justify later. If your impulse is to give the man money, why not? We come up with philosophies like Sinistral’s to justify our impulses: to set up a moral system around our own inclinations. Can you personally justify altruism? Maybe not, but that does not mean altruism is a cover-up for weakness. Trying to do only what you can justify is responsible for much confusion and depression.
You can’t please everyone. No matter what you do, someone will either say you’re insensitive or too sensitive. I try to find a middle ground between the two, and meanwhile be tolerant of those whose inclinations differ, but that’s just me. So, give money to the poor, if that’s what you want to do, and be happy.
Sin’s take is a bit hard-assed, but generally right. It’s the old give a fish/teach how to fish problem. If you actually care about your fellow human beings, you do the second. If you want some quick, shallow self-fulfillment, you do the first. Of course, if you don’t give a shit about each other, you stare the person in the eyes while you eat the fish yourself.
The problem is that with some random beggar you don’t know what sort of situation they’re in.
How many prior days has he made it through?
Exactly. A lot.
Wow, I wouldn’t have expected this coming from you. I mean, sure, there are plenty of homeless people who are in their situation because of drug use or other things that are generally their fault. And most likely, a guy begging for cash outside of a bank is worthless trash who is the creation of his own making. But your general viewpoint is pretty insane. I don’t see how you can say this when our society is basically designed to be incredible unequal in terms of both opportunity and achievement. No free market economy has ever been able to consistently retain a lower than 5% unemployment rate. There are cases like Japan which had mandatory “total employment” laws that basically put all the dregs of society into forced menial jobs like opening bathroom doors for people and shit and paying them 30K a year, but policies like this directly resulted in Japan’s 90s fiscal crisis, and unemployment is on the rise there. Also, unemployment and homelessness rates are directly tied to shifts in the economy. When the economy goes up, homelessness goes down, and when the economy goes down, homelessness goes up. Therefore, it would seem rather unlikely homelessness is ONLY related to one’s own doing.
And besides, our society is also designed to give back what you put into it. The more you put in, the greater the reward. Even if you have screwed up before in your life and you want to get out of it, once you have nothing, it is very difficult to get your hands on anything. Poverty and homelessness is self-defeating in this way. Even if a person wants to change his position in life, what options does he have? And even then, it seems like a lot of people just make it on luck, and others don’t. Who knows why or why not. Poverty is not a hopelessly recidivist condition, but the laws of our society help it to be so. And then there is still the fact that those born into poverty are much more likely to remain in poverty than those not born into poverty. Would you argue that people born into poverty are naturally inferior? As a biologist, I couldn’t imagine you’d believe that.
Having said that, I still rarely give a bum change, esp. if he is hanging around at a bank. A few bucks is not going to turn his life around. I just wish my tax dollars went towards programs that got these people off the street instead of bombing some stupid Muslim country.
I’m ever so slightly more complicated than to find excuses to justify my impulses. I have a rather elaborate and thought-out view point on life. I’ve had to fight for every inch that got me where I am under the pressure of everyone telling me I couldn’t, directly getting in the way or double crossing me at the most convenient and often most painful oppurtunity.
My personal experiences have taught me several hard and very painful lessons and if you want to say they left me devoid of compassion for the kind of weakness where you run yourself into a hole, so be it. I know better than to give a damn about a few drones that fist-fucked themselves over repeatedly.
Zep: that’s the exception, not the rule. As I mentionned with my response to cait sith, there’s a difference between getting fucked by powers out of your own control in times of strife than screwing yourself over repeatedly. Then again, one can make the argument that to hit that low even in a time of strife, requires some kind of voluntary action in that direction, because some people make it there and others don’t, but it is a more debatable and unfair scenario.
As for people being born in poverty being inferior, you’re absolutely right: in no way do I believe that.Despite that, people end up where they shouldn’t and people don’t end up where they should. Nevertheless, someone who complacently takes the easier route and refuses to face up to reality will more frequently end up in a disadvantaged position in the long run than someone who fights for what he has. My entire philosophy has less to do with biology than it has to do with psychology. Your biology may or may not predispose you to a given set of tendencies (since biology does play a role in temperament and a variety of other traits). However, whether or not an individual fulfills those traits is up to choice. Should people be lenient towards a mass murderer that has a genetic predisposition to violence? No, because in the end he chose to kill people. Similarly, should someone be sympathetic towards people that knowingly run themselves into the ground by not overcoming their challenges? I don’t think so because as I said earlier “we’re only human” is only an excuse. People can rise out of their situation if they choose to. Its just most people do not want to do the sacrifices required to attain those goals. People who are weak have difficulties sacrificing short term goals for long term ideals because they are unable to deprive themselves of a short term enjoyment for a better situation in the future. Perfect example, the homeless parasite that will get drugs, alcohol or cigarettes (and that’s not an inaccurate stereotype) with the money you give him. In the end, people decide what’s important to them and they decide what it is that they will and will not do to achieve that goal. If someone says “my goal is such and such” and they end up taking decisions to give them short term pleasures that put achieving their goal farther away, then ultimately, they don’t care about achieving the goal. They simply like to think they do. What they care about is more immediate gratification and this takes away any validity to how they might like to think they are good people for thinking they have a long term goal they’ll never achieve.
In my opinion, if you want a good society, you need to have the infrastructure in place to help people out of this situation if they so choose. And so like you I’d rather my money go towards help programs than more cruise missiles. However, no one can make anyone make anything they don’t want to do. If you want to change your situation, that is something you have to do yourself. That’s what’s frustrating about helping people. Ultimately, people can only help themselves. Sustaining them in their complacency does not help them.
Conversely, if you have a society in which this infrastructure is not in place, then that society is inadequate. That’s why I’m more prone to be sympathetic towards people that suffer from a natural disaster in SE Asia than a few bums asking for cash at the corner of St. Catherine street.
You did nothing wrong, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason to pity the man. We unfortunately don’t live in a perfect world where everyone is clairvoyant and where everything is dictated by the choices we make. You can’t possibly know that by the time you’re finished with your degree in, say biology, that the world has been usurped by relgious fundamentalism and that biology has been declared a heresy and outlawed, or that you should be bit by a tick or stung by a wasp and be struck down by long-term disease, and you can’t possibly decide what physical and mental faults you’re born with. It could’ve as easily been you, but it wasn’t, it was him. It’s called life and there’s hardly anything we can do about it but to try and help them get up again. You wouldn’t have been able to do that by giving him a few coins to spend on coffee and cakes.
I think you should give the (wo)man some change. But it’s up to you.
Aww…I really like what Sorc did and I’ve always thought about doing something like that too. claps hands in glee I’m inclined to agree with what everyone is saying now.
Except people are pretty divided.
Nobody is beyond self-justification, except those who have given up on life, in short the opposite of yourself. Let’s not think in terms of “finding excuses,” rather in terms of establishing an ethics. You, more than nearly anyone here, have struggled to put forward your own ethics: to justify your own system of reactions that you believe has worked so well for you. You argue that people “deserve” what they get, and others call your attitude “cruel.”
This moral argument, however, merely veils the real conflict: multiple people putting themselves forward as exemplars of a successful existence. To put it differently, you do not ignore the poor because they “deserve” one thing or another, but because you know that if you allowed the altruistic impulse to affect you, you would no longer be able to succeed on the terms you have set out for yourself. Pity for others rapidly becomes pity for yourself, and time spent worrying about others and yourself is time lost from your daily labors. So, your ethics are a guide to successful striving.
My dispute is this: Your ethics do not account for real human weakness. The harder you strive, the more tired and pitiful your sleepy state will be. On an individual scale, this means that self-pity is necessary to <i>recover</i> from your own weakness. On a broader scale, it implies that treating the weak mercilessly is <i>exactly the worst thing we can do</i>. A society without mercy will grow weaker and weaker in its own exhaustion until it collapses. When a symptom appears, the answer is not to ignore it and continue striving, but rather to treat it, pamper it even, until it is healthy. Then you can force it back to work.
That I agree with.
Not quite. I observed and rationalized how things worked in society from my perspective and I drew conclusions as to what that implies and what I thought about those implications. From there, I did what I believed was right and logical. So really what I disagree with is the “for you” part of your statement.
Not bad Xwing. I don’t translate pity of others unto myself but I refuse to let myself be caught in self pity. Therefore, I do not believe it is valid other people do so. Its backwards what you presented, but the end point is the same where “time spent worrying about others and yourself is time lost from your daily labors. So, your ethics are a guide to successful striving”.
I abhor weakness for many reasons and therefore I refuse to accept it.
I think what I specified in the last part of my big post reflects a bit what you have to say in your 3rd paragraph.
“In my opinion, if you want a good society, you need to have the infrastructure in place to help people out of this situation if they so choose. […]Ultimately, people can only help themselves. Sustaining them in their complacency does not help them. Conversely, if you have a society in which this infrastructure is not in place, then that society is inadequate. That’s why I’m more prone to be sympathetic towards people that suffer from a natural disaster in SE Asia than a few bums asking for cash at the corner of St. Catherine street.”
I think a system devoid of oppurtunity is disadvantageous for everyone. I don’t think people are trash for being in a bad situation. I think badly of them for doing nothing to improve it. Its like how I’ve had students say something like “damn I’m dumb” and my answer is usually “you’re not dumb for not knowing; people are dumb when they don’t try to learn or if they blind themselves”. The point is that I refuse to accept that such weakness is valid.
You know what, it could be worse than you thought at the moment. It’s a common trick for thieves to ask you some money as if begging - then the moment you pick your wallet, they grab it and run. You could have gone into your stuff to pick one dollar and end up with nothing.
Also, there are others who ask for some money to see if you’ve got any, and if you do, they might even steal you the more violent way.
Many (if not most) people who ask you money claiming they need it for food are really after a grab-and-run chance. It’s obvious that a beggar needs money for food, the real ones don’t bother explaining it.
Now, you might think that the life of a beggar is a really bad one. I’ll tell you something, in some countries you can make more money by begging than by actually working. I could give you more details on that if you want… But to make it brief, I myself have already done statistical work on it (even interviewed some people who make a living out of it), and in the city I live I’ve watched a boy make what would convert to 30-something US dollars in a day. Doing it 5 days a week, he could raise 600 bucks in a month. The average low-class hard worker here makes about 120 dollars a month if he gets minimum wage.
I don’t have a wallet. I keep money in my pockets, so they’d have to take off my pants and run away with them. 
I still don’t understand why it’s so terrible for a beggar to beg outside of a bank. Everyone keeps saying how “despicable” it is or how much they “abhor” it but no one is really saying why it is such a bad practice to do so. At least, not in anyway that satisifies me. Finding it despicable because it “puts people into these kinds of situations” does not satisfy me. What kind of situation? A situation where he asks you for some money? Please. That hardly seems offensive to me. If your talking about the moral “crisis” it might impose on someone as a result of the situation, that crisis can only occur if the person the beggar is asking allows it to erupt.
Also, what if the poor people are due to a weakness htat’s not their own fault? I have a mother who suffered from mild depression. Now something like that could impose a fair amount of “weakness” couldn’t it? That’s a mental thing though, it’s not a choice. There are probably tons of poor people out there who are there for a reason that is beyond their control.
It’s not the concept of not giving money to the guy that interests me, it’s the whole philosophy of designating pretty much the whole population of folks who are living on the streets as people who got themselves due to their weakness. Well, if their weak, why not try to help them by shelling out a few bucks? There’s always the chance that some of them really are going to buy some food, and not spend it on drugs or alcohol. It’s like your saying since most of them probably use the money to buy drugs and such you might as well act like all of them do. That’s a matter of thinking that benefits no one and fosters apathy I think. Heck, someone could use that same line of thinking and say “Since I only see black folks getting arrested on TV, all black folks must get into trouble with the police” and we all know that’s ignorance.
Well, they are trying to improve it, aren’t they? They beg for money so they can try to improve their fortune. If they didn’t want try to improve their current state of poverty, they wouldn’t be begging for funds, would they?
“Well, they are trying to improve it, aren’t they? They beg for money so they can try to improve their fortune. If they didn’t want try to improve their current state of poverty, they wouldn’t be begging for funds, would they?”
I wish I lived in your bubble. You should come live in the city and spend a lot of time downtown. You’ll see what the reality of the situation is. You are naive if you believe that people actively work towards improving their situation. You obviously don’t understand the difference between “helping” people by giving them cash to go on living and “helping” people by making them help themselves. One is superficial, short term and meaningless. The other is long term and useful.
And I answered your question earlier.
It’s a bastard thing to do because it forces people to either give money or be assholes and blatantly lie that they don’t have money, rather than the “polite” way of denying them funds. It basically forces people against a wall when it comes to giving money.
And this may just be welfare state and never-leaving-my-house speaking, but in this day and age, there are a LOT of things you can resort to, wether government-funded or not, before you go around harassing people trying to get on with their business for money.