I have a sister who is a recovering alcoholic - and I’m not co-dependent. If I wasn’t with her - why would I choose that behavior with a complete stranger?
ETA: its my money. I can use it to buy my own alcohol - or an expensive purse. I can give it to the Red Cross to help disaster victims. I can give it to cancer support and research organizations. I can give it to arts organizations. I can give it to Planned Parenthood or a Right to Life organization. Why does a panhandler deserve my limited money more than anyone else, including myself.
If they’d rather have drugs or alcohol than food and shelter, that’s their business. Someone having an addiction does not make surrounding people responsible for that person’s overall well-being.
Killing an ex is completely different. Suicide is not the same as murder.
If someone wants to kill themselves, I support their moral right to do so. I don’t need to know anything else about the situation.
If they want to kill someone else, I would need to know what circumstances could make this an appropriate course of action and agree, which is somewhat unlikely, but not impossible, before I’d offer my support.
It’s about choking supply. If they can’t get money from the street, maybe they’ll turn to the shelter. If they can’t find food in a garbage bin, maybe they’ll go down to the soup kitchen. Where there’s outreach, housing (at least a cot), food, doctors, etc.
Just as people enable addicts, people enable the homeless. In a certain way, it’s competition. When you give money to a panhandler, you’re competing with government or charity aid workers.
It’s the same reason churches are discouraged from helping the homeless outside of a participating program structure. It’s a bandaid on something that needs inpatient treatment.
I’m all for the existence and availability of shelters, soup kitchens, etc., but why is dependence on institutionalized aid better for the homeless person than direct help from other people?
Because they are likely to use that help in a way which is contrary to their own long-term best interest.
I’m normally all in favor of giving people the freedom to decide for themselves what to spend their money on, even when they make choices that I would consider unwise. However, a) that changes when it’s my money they want to spend – in that case I have an interest, and arguably even a moral duty, to make sure that my charity does not end up making the situation worse instead of better. And b) when you’re a drug-addicted homeless panhandler, I think it’s safe to say that the default assumption that you know better than others what’s best for you, no longer applies.
I’m curious to know for those of you who give money to panhandlers, why do you do it? I personally do not and will not, and I truly don’t understand why anyone would.
Yeah, but part if the argument, as I mentioned in my OP, is that for a good deal of the people in question, there IS no “long term”. This is it. This is their lives. So that part falls down, in that POV.
Yes. It fed me. And yes, I did use part of it for my minor vices. I was also able to find cash day labor from time to time, but at that point in my life, I was more or less content with my lot. Nothing would have assisted me out of that life until I made the decision that I didn’t want to live like that anymore.
So having people give you money helped you in the immediate moment but did nothing for the long term? So when you give someone money now you are just helping them get through today, until/if they can decide to change, is that it? That seems reasonable, I guess, although I have to wonder if no one had given you money do you think you would have decided to change your life sooner?
Drugs or alcohol could actually BE their best option. Long-term is relative – eventually they will be dead either way, as will we all. If life is so painful for them that they are desperate for a way to dull it, who am I to say I know better?
If someone is a drug-addicted homeless panhandler, the last thing I’d want to do is strip them of their autonomy and think I should make their choices for them.
What if the request is to assist in conducting some course of action which does not intend suicide, but will tend that way anyway? Like a chronic alcoholic whose whole life is messed up by alcohol, but who wants you to assist him in buying more alcohol.
IOW he doesn’t necessarily want to die; he just wants to drink. Although ultimately it will either kill him, or cause him to lead a distressingly curtailed and dysfunctional life.