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Do people deserve help?

Re: Do people deserve help.

^ That only applies if all humans can survive on pure food alone.

Humans can't survive on only food. We also need clean water, medicine, and shelter. And not all of these are spread out fairly all over earth; parts of Russia, for example, are just pure ice and pretty much nothing grows there; parts of Africa are swampland where tropical diseases run rampant. Making and transporting all these necessities costs a lot of resources and energy, possibly more than the earth can provide right now.

And that's only the bare necessities. If everybody wants luxury items (like, say, meat, or books, or the internet), then we'd have to expand more energy and resources that we simply do not have. The world can support more than 7 billion people if everybody lives in little shacks and eats soybeans. But I'm pretty sure most people would prefer to live a life better than that.

Tarvos said:
And like I said, if you work harder, you earn more resources - such is life.
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Not true. I'd say that the struggling farmers in developing nations are working a lot harder than we are, but we definitely have more resources. I, for one, don't have to walk miles everyday to get clean water.

On topic: Not all people who needs help asks for help because either they don't know that they can get help, or they want to do it all themselves. Not all people who asks for help deserves help, because some may just be trying to cheat the system.

...You know, this sounds suspiciously like an SAT essay question.
 
Re: Do people deserve help.

I thought of something. What if you only consider the question in a relavent context.

What I mean is, comparing only those who have the same opportunities. For example, the kinds of choices and opportunities a third world farmer has are obviously much more limited than the average modern urban person. So consider the question in context. Do people, in the group of modern urbanites, who don't seek help deserve help from other modern urbanites? Or, alternatively, do the people, in the group of third world farmers, who do not seek help deserve help from other third world farmers.

Basically, do people deserve help when they have the same opportunities as their helpers?
 
Sometimes helping someone too much is a bad thing. They become dependant. That whole story about giving a guy a fish vs. teaching him how to.
 
I don't think that's something that can be judged on a large scale, though.
 
It becomes somewhat ambiguous in the more extreme cases, too. For instance, I know several people who, unfortunate as it is, do depend on me; I know that without me several of them would be dead several times over.
But they and I both agree that it's preferable to letting them die, at the very least, even though it means dependence. I don't know if we're just odd, but I wouldn't want to let someone die for any reason. :/
 
Hawke said:
Sometimes helping someone too much is a bad thing. They become dependant. That whole story about giving a guy a fish vs. teaching him how to.
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I don't think it's a problem of helping someone too much as say helping someone the wrong way. Giving someone a fish is helping them as much as teaching him how to fish, perhaps even less because giving them a fish involves less effort than going out to teach him. I don't think there's such thing as "too much" help; just things done in good intentions but doesn't really solve all of the problem.

This applies Squorn's case as well. The best sort of help would be some sort that makes the people both independent and alive, but if that's unavailable/impossible to do in the circumstances, solving some of the problems is preferable to not solving any.
 
Minnow said:
How can you judge something like that?
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You can't, since the consequences of the act of helping someone are, at best, "uncertain". Let's say you find someone on the street and you help the person. You don't know beforehand if the person is good-natured or a douchebag, but you help anyway. It's, as Lost's John Locke put it, a "leap of faith". You hope the help will be good for the person, but you'll never know.
 
nobody deserves help; giving help in any context is evidence of a moral failing
everything is meritocratic, right down to the social class you are born into
this is not what I actually believe
 
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