There is a big difference between giving a hand up, rather than a handout. In today’s society there are many people that need help all around the world. With this, comes many people that think they need help but really they just don’t want to help themselves. For the people that truly need help, many of these people would like to provide for themselves and their family but don’t get the opportunity to do so. Since most of these people would like to provide for themselves, why do we have organizations and individuals giving a hand out instead of a hand up? Providing food and water to people in developing countries may not be a good long term solution. Instead, people can help them by providing them with something that does not require dependence …show more content…
This is why giving a hand up instead of a handout came to be.
A hand up rather than a hand out can mean different things to different people. Giving someone a hand up means helping
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This in turn can help the other person in more ways than just what the person is giving them. This would be like giving them the tools needed to eat and not just giving them the food. This can improve their confidence and they will feel better about themselves. A handout is much different than a hand up and has a less meaningful impact on the individual receiving the gift. A handout may help someone for a short period of time but in the long run they will just continuously need handouts. Giving someone a handout does not give them any tools to better themselves and it will not give the individual any sense of self fulfilment. This would be like giving someone a fish instead of a fishing pole. When the fish gets eaten then they will have to work to catch another fish. This is not only getting them a larger supply of food but it is also giving them self confidence and the feeling of providing for themselves. Numerous people in todays society truly believe that giving items like food and water to people in developing countries will help the countries improve. Sure, this may help them for a short period of time but it will never help them move past the hard economic times. A more realistic solution to
In his 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Poverty”, Peter Singer tackles what seems on the surface to be a fairly simple debacle. He opens his essay by discussing the lack of food, shelter, and medical care in East Bengal. It is a given that every human deserves, in the very least, food, a place to sleep, and basic medical care. Singer claims that the problems involving poverty around the world is not an inevitable problem. He alleges that if we all pitched in what we can, these problems could be abolished. But unfortunately many people do not want to give up what they have for the sake of others. For these people, Singer put forth his seemingly obvious argument. It goes as follows:
This is why I have worked at a local homeless shelter for the past two years. I feel like I can do the same thing -- help a person or two merely on the basis of our shared humanity. I enjoy paying back some of the help society has given me. I teach a computer class at the shelter, but everyone gets free therapy on the side. Most of those people aren't different in some essential way from the homed or those who have jobs, but life has often dealt them a losing hand to begin with. I tell them that I also had a losing hand, but I never gave up hope. Often, hope is all I had -- but it was enough to keep me pressing onward.
To begin with, halachah aleph (א) states that it is a positive commandment to give tzedakah to the poor and we should open our hands to them. We should let them live with us as if they were our brothers. In this part, Rambam is discussing that if someone is in need, we have the obligation to help them. This is a general claim; we need to be generous and help someone who is in need. This halachah relates to what was said by Professor Twersky when he discusses that we must help the poor, even though it doesn’t directly state how. Twersky is telling us that we must give to the poor; only he is being more specific in how we must feel while giving...
...nd usually the institutions and churches do not have the resources to provide a safety net for starving people. What we have found when working with the World Bank is that the poor man's safety net, the best investment, is school feeding. And if you fill the cup with local agriculture from small farmers, you have a transformative effect. Many kids in the world can't go to school because they have to go beg and find a meal. But when that food is there, it's transformative. It costs less than 25 cents a day to change a kid's life.” (Sheeran)
How much money is one morally obligated to give to relief overseas? Many In people would say that although it is a good thing to do, one is not obligated to give anything. Other people would say that if a person has more than he needs, then he should donate a portion of what he has. Peter Singer, however, proposes a radically different view. His essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” focuses on the Bengal crisis in 1971 and claims that one is morally obligated to give as much as possible. His thesis supports the idea that “We ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility – that is, the level at which, by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift” (399). He says that one's obligation to give to people in need half-way around the world is just as strong as the obligation to give to one's neighbor in need. Even more than that, he says that one should keep giving until, by giving more, you would be in a worse position than the people one means to help. Singer's claim is so different than people's typical idea of morality that is it is easy to quickly dismiss it as being absurd. Saying that one should provide monetary relief to the point that you are in as bad a position as those receiving your aid seems to go against common sense. However, when the evidence he presents is considered, it is impossible not to wonder if he might be right.
Donating various goods and services can eventually aid the homeless with getting their lives back on
Most people feel that they should help the needy in some way or another. The problem is how to help them. This problem generally arises when there is a person sitting on the side of the road in battered clothes with a cardboard sign asking for some form of help, almost always in the form of money. Yet something makes the giver uneasy. What will they do with this money? Do they need this money? Will it really help them? The truth of the matter is, it won't. However, there are things that can be done to help the needy. Giving money to a reliable foundation will help the helpless, something that transferring money from a pocket to a man's tin can will never do.
helped would likely help their helper “in the future”, which goes to show that “generosity” does ...
In Pygmalion, the only reason the two professors helped Liza out was to get something out of it themselves. The professors decided to help Liza out with her grammar and becoming more like a lady. In the end though, Liza was not happy. In Androcles and the Lion, Androcles genuinely wanted to help the lion. He helped the lion get a thorn out of his foot. In return, the lion helped Androcles from being killed along with others. In conclusion, when you genuinely want to help someone, you may have that good luck returned to you, but if you do something nice for someone just to get something in return, you might not be as
Giving to others through humanitarian projects is not only inclusive of providing monetary solutions for food. Philosophies and intention to reach specific goals are also associated with the needs of others. The Hunger Project is designed with the central goal of eradicating poverty. However, it is found that this is not done only by feeding the poor, but instead through empowerment initiatives that allow others to change their lives. When looking at the approach used to The Hunger Project, it can be seen that the ability to provide empowerment to others will assist in changing lives through donations. The impact which is made by making a donation creates an initiative not only through the power of changing lives of those in need. It also alters the socio political landscape and the global society at large. This impact is one which can redefine the overall functions in the globe, specifically by eradicating poverty.
Poverty has conquered nations around the world, striking the populations down through disease and starvation. Small children with sunken eyes are displayed on national television to remind those sitting in warm, luxiourious houses that living conditions are less than tolerable around the world. Though it is easy to empathize for the poor, it is sometimes harder to reach into our pocketbooks and support them. No one desires people to suffer, but do wealthy nations have a moral obligation to aid poor nations who are unable to help themselves? Garrett Hardin in, "Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping The Poor," uses a lifeboat analogy to expose the global negative consequences that could accompany the support of poor nations. Hardin stresses problems including population increase and environmental overuse as downfalls that are necessary to consider for the survival of wealthy nations. In contrast, Peter Singer's piece, "Rich and Poor," remarks on the large differences between living conditions of those in absolute poverty with the wealthy, concluding that the rich nations possess a moral obligation to the poor that surpasses the risks involved. Theodore Sumberg's book, "Foreign Aid As Moral Obligation," documents religious and political views that encourage foreign aid. Kevin M. Morrison and David Weiner, a research analyst and senior fellow respectively at the Overseas Development Council, note the positive impact of foreign aid to America, a wealthy nation. Following the examination of these texts, it seems that not only do we have a moral obligation to the poor, but aiding poor nations is in the best interest of wealthy nations.
The homeless can be seen everywhere. The man pacing back and forth holding a sign that reads Anything Helps, God Bless, or the woman sitting outside the store with a 7/11 Slurpee cup hoping to collect enough change to buy a sandwich and a bottle of water. Society as a whole is faced with the sometimes hard decision of putting something in that cup or pretending to not see it and go on about their day. Deciding to toss some spare change into that cup isn’t as easily accomplished by people who believe hand-outs aren’t helping these people but rathe...
If these developed countries continue to prejudge underdeveloped countries by wealth or other conditions, when people are faced with serious problems in society, these problems become global. By helping each other, all countries offer hope and compassion, and share new knowledge with each other. Therefore, people all over the world suffer less, because they know they are not alone.
In fact, in my own experience, I notice that the government of my country fail to provide adequate needs to homeless people because they saw that an issue of the individual and from charities organizations. Though the work of charities organizations is admirable, having these non- profit organizations take care of social and political issues however can be problematic, since often these charities societies have biases toward people in need which can prevent them from extending their help for all people suffering from social issues. For example, because the organization that my mother work was religiously founded, they only focused their help to homeless children suffering from mental illness and not all people suffering from the same conditions. Thus, like most government assistance, profit organizations can also make a distinction when offering their help to worthy and unworthy individuals. Also, because these organizations are fueled by an American belief on self- achievement, they tend to emphasize the individual role in poverty and see poverty rather as a character and not a social defect. Thus, as a result, charity organizations can advocate for individual relief and change to stop poverty. Finally, charities organizations can also cause major issues in the way that countries assessed and measure poverty. For example, it can give the impression that the individual is at fault for their own living conditions and second, it can cause major devolution of federal and governmental social programs. In other words, the presence of charities and other societies can cause the government to indirectly decrease its political participation in social issues by turning this a responsibility of local communities and entities. This in turn can affect the variation and diversity of social programs in the US, while reflecting the current predominant view
Through individual, national, and global aid, we can take steps to decrease the overwhelming amount of poverty in less-developed countries and even in our own lands.