Help with a Calculator

Public morality offers a choice between a warm heart and cold calculation. But help without an understanding of the consequences can sustain harm, and calculation alone, without sympathy, easily forgets who the counting was for in the first place.

Pity tells us that another person is suffering and that we are able to notice it. After that we have to work out which action will actually help.

Giving money to someone on the street can be sensible, pointless or harmful, depending on the situation. You cannot reliably tell from a face whether you are looking at a professional fraudster, a person with an addiction, a victim of exploitation, or someone who genuinely has nothing to eat today.

A small handout buys a person the freedom to use the money as they see fit. At the same time we lose control over the result. Sometimes that is an acceptable trade.

Other options: food, a ticket, paying for a night’s shelter, help with documents, the contact details of a social service, and support for an organisation that works on the cause of the problem.

Refusing to give money does not make a person cruel. Giving does not prove kindness. A single gesture is a poor measure of morality, especially if the gesture’s main result is a pleasant opinion of oneself.

Help driven by pity alone can sustain destructive behaviour, addiction, or relationships in which the recipient benefits from staying helpless.

At the same time, a demand to help only after a full effectiveness analysis paralyses ordinary humanity. Sometimes a person needs dinner today, and systemic reform of the housing market will not arrive by evening.

It helps to choose the form of help according to the scale of the task.

For a chance encounter, a small action is enough. For regular help you need boundaries and an understanding of the result. For a social problem you need an organisation, data and a long horizon.

Pity opens the door. The decision still has to be made with your head.

When help becomes regular and organised, reporting, comparison of alternatives and a check on side effects have to be added to sympathy.

Help needs management too. Unpaid labour is limited, and qualified specialists have to live on something. Zero administrative cost usually means either false accounting or an organisation that is using someone else’s resource for free.

The question is not whether there are costs, but what they produce.

Before donating, it is worth checking:

• whether the problem is clearly defined;
• whether the result is measured;
• whether accounts are published;
• who runs the organisation;
• whether there is a conflict of interest;
• how much a unit of result costs;
• whether the programme has been compared with alternatives;
• whether the help creates dependency or harm;
• whether the views of the people being helped are taken into account.

A high share of administrative costs does not always mean inefficiency. An organisation that trains its staff, verifies results and protects recipients may spend more on management than a fund that simply hands out goods with no oversight.

Low costs are no guarantee of benefit either.

International aid can sustain corruption, wreck a local market or entrench the power of intermediaries. It can also fund vaccination, clean water, education and treatment.

Geography by itself settles nothing.

Adopting a child is not a universal alternative to donating. It is a separate lifelong responsibility, not a particularly convincing money transfer. Buying shares in a pharmaceutical company likewise does not turn an investor’s profit into help for the sick.

It is not only billionaires who can help. Small regular donations from many people fund systems no single person could afford.

But a large fortune really does create the possibility of changing the scale of a problem — and, at the same time, the possibility of imposing the owner’s personal priorities on society.

Charity is not obliged to be pure, selfless and free of emotional reward. A person can help and feel better at the same time.

The scale of the task shows in how often it repeats. Lending money to a relative once is an event. Giving every month, because otherwise they cannot manage, is no longer help but a substitute income: no end date, no conditions, and no idea of what is supposed to change. That conversation usually gets postponed, because it is less pleasant than the transfer itself. A year later it turns out the recipient has built those transfers into their budget, and the giver has built them into their resentment.

Regular help without boundaries quietly turns into an obligation you cannot stop without ending up in the wrong. Boundaries are worth naming at the first transfer, while they still sound like a condition rather than a refusal.