Compassion and Free Will

My jumping point for this post comes from an article titled "Foreign Policy: The Poor Have Preferences, Too" by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel:

"...the word "poor" has lots of opposites, and not all of them have to do directly with money. "Healthy," "well-educated," "having access of clean water" and "nourished" are among the many opposites of "poor," and when we think about the relative merits of antipoverty programs, we have to weigh each of these things — and more — against each other. But how do we compare the importance of, say, health versus education versus housing? And how do we make tradeoffs between them? One approach is to apply our own values and priorities, but this ignores the preferences of the very people for whose benefit these programs are designed. This happens often in the world of development aid; a donor focusing on education, for example, might care more about classroom quality than hospital beds. But wouldn't it be better if we could instead ask the people receiving our help what they want?"

One of the things I find challenging about poverty is how widespread and complicated it turns out to be.  I've heard of great charities that provide clean sources of water, sustainable agriculture, food for children in orphanages, hospital services, and so on, not to mention mission efforts that focus primarily on meeting spiritual needs.  And they all sound like a good idea.  The authors of this article point out the importance of matching gifts with needs - for instance, if someone is given a mosquito net but desperately needs food, they may be able to barter it, but it's of limited value.  But how can we prioritize our charitable giving when it's not obvious what is needed most?

The strategy mentioned at the end of the quote was to simply apply the values and priorities of the donors.  This is pretty standard among Christians, I think; we believe that
the gospel is top priority, for instance, so we pay close attention to our church programs and mission efforts to make sure people are getting spiritual help.  I know some Christians object to supporting programs and charities if there's no clear presentation of a salvation message to the recipients.  Is this in keeping with Christ's example of ministry?  I think of the healing of the ten lepers, only one of whom returned to Jesus with thanks and was commended for his faith. Presumably the other nine missed out on what they needed most, but Jesus didn't deny them the physical healing. He left the recipients of his ministry room to use their free will.

One of the fascinating things about Kantian ethics is the emphasis on respecting others because of their autonomy:

"we owe to ourselves moral respect in virtue of our autonomy. But insofar as this capacity depends in no way on anything particular or contingent about ourselves, we owe similar respect to all other persons in virtue of their capacity. Hence (via the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative), we are obliged to act out of fundamental respect for other persons in virtue of their autonomy."

It makes sense to me that true ministry requires seeing the recipients of ministry as human beings equal in value to ourselves, and that this may well extend to leaving them the dignity of exercising their free choice to refuse our efforts or reject our values and priorities.

Sometimes what people do with the help they're given is pretty hard to swallow, though. In our previous apartment, the student in the downstairs of our duplex lived on student loans, didn't have a job or a car, and was on food stamps. He and his girlfriend smoked a lot, out in the garage; our half housed our car, and their half housed a couple of lawn chairs and a tower made from empty cigarette boxes. It was symmetrical, and you could count the boxes in a layer and the number of layers pretty quickly (I'm sure I had better things to do, but this shows you how mature I was about it).  Then if you took note of the price of cigarettes at the corner gas station and did the math, you'd end up with a figure big enough to pay for the beater of a car my husband was driving. It got me pretty riled, the way our neighbor took advantage of food stamps while smoking enough money to get a car (and then, presumably, a summer job).

Another complaint along these lines is about the folks who receive welfare money and spend it on Dish TV or  alcohol. I've been mulling that one over lately; if you can't get work, does that mean you shouldn't be allowed to relax at the end of the day? I'm not debating the merits of alcohol or TV at the moment- just puzzling over what it means to acknowledge all humans as creatures with free will.

I'll end this post with one more story that really got me thinking: apparently there are shelters in the Twin Cities for homeless alcoholics called "wet houses", where individuals who have been through multiple detox/treatment programs with no change are allowed to live safely off the streets and given spending money, which, not surprisingly, they often use to buy more alcohol. One of the arguments in favor of the wet houses is that it costs the public twice as much for the police pickups, detox programs, incarcerations, hospital treatments, etc. as it does to just give these homeless alcoholics a place to stay and an allowance. Watching the video, I saw a surprising sort of dignity in the possibility, and yet this quote from one of the residents was heart-breaking:

"It gets to where you almost feel afraid to quit drinking because it's like sometimes, it just seems like that's all there is."