| To your credit, though, I don't think even the thought you had of offering a homeless person a bed has crossed the minds of all that many people, at all. It is also very easy to become desensitized to homeless people in New York, and perhaps someone more nuanced than I can broach the topic from a race perspective. It's not even a question of whether we would give more money to the young white female asking for money to go home in Bryant Park than the homeless black man asking outside of Appletree Market; it's whether certain types of people even register. Honestly, I was stricken by the sight of a girl sitting cross-legged in front of NYPL's Bryant Park Branch in the cold, with a sign asking for money so that she can go home, and the arguments against giving money to people who ask ("improper uses," fraud, availability of homeless shelters, etc) did not even across my mind. Though, later, the thought that she might have been a college student conducting a social experiment did.
Anyway, I was working on an essay about this and then I remembered I got the whole idea from this discussion. In high school Ayn Rand was very popular and sometimes I still catch myself remembering her rhetoric, such thoughts as: at what point of doing good does the benefit to someone trump the burden to me? The answer to that question is always be very selfish because it would be centered on some concept or another of deriving happiness from having done a good work surpassing that of the pleasure of leisure. I realize now that such a answer is very wrong, because it is centered around an amorphous, inconstant thing that is the pleasure of the "good-doer." Such an compulsion cannot last through the toil of working to the best of one's abilities. At least, I don't think it can. I think far more reliable is Francisco's simple declaration that it is wrong to live a life without helping others. A duty is far more immediate and compelling, and the best answer and conclusion to thoughts about why we should strive to do good work. |