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Dwight: In that model, no - it's something that can be describeds as charity, or as charitable, but does not have the involvement of a charity. It's village-green socialism, essentially - people contributing time and resources to helping their family and friends, and receiving time and resources from their family and friends in turn.
Money Shot:
I also question the notion that giving money to the church automatically equates to supporting local charity and the homeless one might encounter in one's locale
I think that's absolutely a questionable notion, but has anyone actually expressed it? Giving money to a church can probably be seen as comparable to giving to any other institution - some goes on running costs, the rest on what the organisation wants to do with it, which aims may coincide with yours.
So, anyway, meaning in charitable action is created by the giver? That's interesting, not least because it gives the giver great power to decide the significance of his or her actions. Next question revolves around the question of "meaningful, positive" rather than simply "meaningful". That's going to be a difficult one to quantify. For example, you gave this individual homeless person attention, company, tobacco and rolling papers. None of those cost very much to you and, in a Mister Wendell stylee, they may have meant a big deal to him. Are they more or less meaningful and more or less positive than contributing a chunk of income to your local church, which then runs a centre where that homeless man can have a meal, a place to sleep, and so on? That becomes a judgement call, and also a question of what is meaningful to both giver and recipient. So:
But surely this is to ignore the actual situation in front of you - a human being asking for your help, directly. Face to face. Want, give. Help.
Question is, does that model of "want-give" favour an uncomplicated relationship with purely personal charity, which has its uses but also its demerits? You can look at this in the context of the prevalence of addiction to alcohol and drugs among homeless people, if you like - as discussed above, in fact - where giving money to an individual "want-give" might actually be a meaningful negative impact on their prospects for life, as against giving money to a charity or other organisation with different priorities. So, if you give money to an individual, you accept that you have no control over what that individual spends it on. You can get around that by providing some other perishable good - tobacco, food, hot beverages - but by doing that you start to control what you feel that individual should have access to - in effect, that you don't trust them to use your gift responsibly, and you want them to use it the way you think they ought to, so you have to lock down their options. Then there's the question of the comparable virtues of spending, say £1.50 on a cheese and tomato sandwich for an individual, and the amount of bread, margarine, cheese and tomato it could buy, minus administrative expenses, at a shelter.
So, bit more complicated than it first appears. One way of getting around that is to accept that charitable donation is ultimately about caprice - it's a pleasurable way to spend your money, and as the person spending that money you get to decide how to do it to maximise your own enjoyment of charity - whether that is a grateful look from your individual recipient or the comfy knowledge that a fiver is going from your bank to Shelter every month.
Which leads perhaps to Archraven's:
I really don't warrent chapter and verse about how evil I am and there are people staving because of my cruel actions.
One of the joys of charity is that it makes you feel good when you give - that's the pull model. The push model is making you feel bad if/when you don't. Many causes requesting charity, from individuals to organisations, depends on a combination of pull and push models. Is either of these "better", practically or ethically? |
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