Why is Helping the Homeless Important?

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Getting to work on time so that you don't lose your job is important. Remembering to turn off the stove so that your house doesn't burn down is also important. But why is helping the homeless important?

Both getting to work on time and remembering to turn off the stove directly benefit yourself.

Helping the homeless, however, does not. Sometimes, no personal benefits exist for doing anything good for anyone. So sometimes helping the homeless isn't beneficial to you. After all, probably nothing that you do to help the homeless will be repaid. Never likely will it be that you will need food from the homeless.

If no direct benefits exist for you or me, then why is helping the homeless important?

Turning off the stove at your mother's house is important. If I do not do that at her house, she or all her stuff might catch fire.

While it may be of no direct benefit to me to prevent your mother and her stuff from burning, doing so is important because it benefits your mother. Your mother will remain unburnt and so will her possessions.

That's a good enough reason for me. That's good enough for me to not leave the stove on at your mother's house.

Therefore, sometimes doing something is important, not because it's personally beneficial to you or me, but because it's beneficial for the person it affects.

Helping the homeless is like that. It is important because it is beneficial to the person who is homeless.

Rob, the homeless man in front of Starbucks needs food. He needs money to buy toothpaste and deodorant too. Not helping him out is unethical. It is unethical regardless of whether it is unbeneficial to me. The same goes for everyone.

In addition, helping the homeless is important because it is a virtue, we may one day need help ourselves, and the world is better off if we all do. Let us now explore each of those points in depth.

HELPING THE HOMELESS IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE IT IS VIRTUOUS

Not only is helping the homeless important because it's beneficial to the homeless person who is helped but helping the homeless is also important to the helper because it is virtuous.

A virtue is a good character trait that a person ought to possess. Aristotle, the great philosopher of ancient Greece thought that virtue is a mean between two extremes. Helpfulness to other people, for example, may be thought of as a means between stinginess and self-destructive generosity.

While it may be good to not be stingy, and it may be bad to be too generous, somewhere in between stinginess and self-destructive generosity is the sweet spot for being a good person.

A person ought to be the best person he can be because an excellent life lived is one in which a person is most good.

While it may be advantageous for the stingy to keep everything he owns to himself, never sharing or sparing a single possession to those in need, compared to a man who lives his entire life generously, at the moment both lie awaiting death, the more generous man is the man who lived the better life.

Living a life most good is important because excellence in life is valuable.

The reason why helping the homeless is important, then, is because a life well lived is a life spent helping.

Given the example of the two men lying on the deathbeds again, if one of the men spent his life helping other people, and the other man not at all, as they both take their last breath, the man who spent his life helping others lived a comparably better life.

The reason is the generous man acknowledged the value of his own life and the effects it creates.

He capitalized on his potential to positively affect others with goodwill.

When asked by a reporter why he went out of his way to help other people, why he had done so when it was sometimes disadvantageous to be generous, he might reply, "why show up to the most important game to ever be played, and try not to play my best?"

The reason why helping the homeless is virtuous, then, is the homeless need our help. A virtuous person recognizes that. And because he is virtuous he helps them with his generosity.

So one reason why helping the homeless is important is because it is virtuous.

HELPING THE HOMELESS IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE WE MAY ONE DAY NEED HELP OURSELVES

What if tomorrow you are hit by a bus. You wake up in the hospital and are paralyzed from the waist down. The doctor says there's no chance of regaining mobility.

Disability is now your only income. You find out quickly though that disability doesn't pay the rent. You try downgrading to a cheaper apartment, but you still cannot make ends meet.

Then, something happens to your disability checks. The social security office says that you failed to file a new claim for an extension. So you find yourself homeless with no money or food.

The only option you have is to beg for a sandwich. While apprehensive about panhandling, no other choice you have.

Would you deserve the food that you beg for?

Are you the kind of person who deserves help since you have helped others? Unless you have fed the hungry yourself, you deserve to starve.

To deserve something, one must be rightfully entitled to it. Good deeds or character is the only way to qualify for that.

If you are virtuous, then when someone needed help you helped them. Chances are you've run across a homeless person or two who needed a dollar and you gave it to them.

If you are not a virtuous person, then chances are that homeless person starved due to your inaction. I'd feel especially apprehensive handing out my last dime to you. I'd probably do it but I'd wish you were good. I'd wish you were the type of person who deserved it.

Be the type of person who is worthy of my help. You never know when you'll need it.

While it is true that may I never know that you don't deserve my help, and when I see you on the streets begging for it I will help no matter what, being the type of person who deserves help makes doing what I do for you fair. For those of us who have a conscience, we like to feel that justice is served.

I would hate to think that if the roles were reversed, and I was out there begging for your help I would be denied. For you, I would give my last loaf of bread. And for you to leave me to starve is just not right.

Be the kind of person who deserves my help, not only for you but for me.

Of course, the situation just presented may seem like an improbable one. It may seem like one that would never happen to you, but in the advent that it does, be the person who is worthy to ask. Be the person who is worthy of me. Homelessness is for anyone, but one misfortune away.

Tomorrow could be the day that I need your help.

So, helping the homeless is important because you may one day need help.

HELPING THE HOMELESS IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE IT IS CHEAPER

Finally, helping the homeless is important not only because it is virtuous, and beneficial to the person being helped, but it is also important because it is good for the community. Helping the homeless by housing them saves society money.

The reason homelessness is expensive is that it is unhealthy.

It is unhealthy for the person who experiences it. The homeless have no choice but to live unsanitary. They lack access to proper hand washing facilities and showers. As a result, they often suffer from infections.

Additionally, the mere situation of homelessness is unhealthy. Lacking protection from the heat and cold, the homeless suffer from high rates of pneumonia and heat stroke. On an average year, a person who is homeless visits the hospital five times. The annual cost for that is roughly $18,000 per person!

What makes the prevalence of homelessness so expensive to society is that most of the homeless have no medical insurance. They can't afford it.

The homeless also live shorter lives due to the unhealthy conditions caused by homelessness.

Morality rates among the homeless are much higher than the general population. A study by Washington University, for example, found that homeless individuals live on average 30 years less than the general population.  Thus, bad health conditions caused by the unhealthy situation of homelessness shortens lifespans.

Besides medical costs, temporary shelter and food for the homeless are expensive. In Los Angeles for example, sheltering the homeless saves taxpayers over $80,000 per year.

If we would just put the homeless in houses instead of ignoring the costs of letting them remain, we could improve the quality of their lives significantly. As demonstrated, most of the homeless life is spent in unsanitary, conditions, inhumane conditions. Putting them in a home would solve that problem.

Why not house the homeless then if it's better for them, and cheaper for us?

While critics suggest that housing the homeless is not our responsibility, it is not because the homeless are so due to personal choices, personal choices that taxpayers take no part in, society ought to house the homeless because it's cheaper. Even setting aside morality, housing the homeless seems necessary.

So the final reason why helping the homeless is important is because it is cheaper.

FINAL THOUGHTS

It also might be said that helping the homeless is not important. If the homeless are houseless because they refuse to work, then helping them remain so only be a disservice to them.

What we ought to do instead is teach them to fish for themselves. Instead of feeding them or housing them, we ought to provide job training. We could additionally even increase mental health treatment for those who need it.

If so we don't teach the homeless to fish, if we always fill their hands when they reach for a handout, then the homeless will remain houseless indefinitely.

What we ought to do instead is teach the homeless how to help themselves.

While this view may seem convincing and helping the homeless may indeed encourage the homeless to remain houseless, helping the homeless is important because we must. Never is it right to deny the person who truly needs, help because it is their fault they need it.

Imagine the evilness of a man, upon noticing a frantic young lady threatening to jump off of a bridge, thinks to himself, "Ahh, let her jump."

"If I were to help this young lady, and she was to listen to me and step off this bridge, she would never learn to get off the bridge herself. So let me not do a disservice to her, and let her be."

She ought to be talked off that bridge.

Though it may be true that many of the homeless refuse to work and so their hunger is a product of their own doing, just like the young lady is responsible for threatening to jump off the bridge herself, the homeless need our help. And whether it is a product of their doing does not matter.

summary

So helping the homeless is important for four main reasons.

First, the homeless need it. Sometimes what one ought to do has nothing to do with whether it benefits the self. Helping the homeless benefits the homeless. And so we should help them because they need it.

Second, helping the homeless is important because it is virtuous. Virtuous people are neither stingy nor too generous. But they always help the needy when they can.

Third, helping the homeless is important because you, yourself may one day need help. Who knows what misfortune might the future behold you. If I were to help someone, I'd feel better if they deserved it. Be the person who deserves my help.

Finally, in terms of what we should do as a society, helping the homeless is important because it is cheaper.

Providing housing to the homeless would eliminate thousands of dollars of medical bills that the homeless accrue each year.

conclusion

So the next time you are in the cereal aisle of your local grocery store, think to yourself, "is the extra dollar or two spent on the name-brand cereal worth the money?"

If not giving it to a local homeless person may be more important.