Throughout our years in college, we are taught to think critically and analyze everything to the utmost extent. Skepticism is encouraged, and idealistic tendencies, while fostered to some extent, are mostly set aside for the hopeful believers in utopia. Although it is beneficial to see the world as it is and to act accordingly, there is danger in leaning toward egocentric pretension where we are so confident in our “rightly-placed” skepticism that we are blinded to other important factors that could offer explanations of human behavior. Moreover, it seems that oftentimes our skepticism takes the form of a self-congratulatory moral high ground that we use to justify our fundamentally selfish tendencies.

This reality became clear to me recently when thinking about giving money to street beggars. I realized that our (or at least my) knee-jerk intuition when being asked for money is to feel used and suckered into giving charity. We have been taught that people should pull themselves up from their own bootstraps and work to make a living instead of relying on others for their livelihood. In order to sidestep the debate about welfare programs and mandatory social charity, I will merely note that giving is a fundamental tenant in our society and it is necessary to preserve it to some degree. Thus, what I am mostly interested in is the reasoning for and against giving money to a beggar in a direct, small-scale situation, as opposed to why we should engage in charity or welfare at all.

The usual arguments against giving that I have heard focus on the alleged harmful uses of the money collected by what I will call “the beggar” or on the effects of giving in general. People claim that beggars will use the money they receive for drugs or other “bad” ends, which they purport to condemn, as well as maintaining that by giving money to beggars, begging becomes a lucrative industry that will disincentivize capable workers from entering the job market. True to our university-educated form, we are making our professors proud and applying our analytic skepticism toward real life decisions.

But is that really what we’re doing when we question giving to beggars? And if so, is skepticism really the best characteristic to promote when dealing with issues of basic charity?

By claiming that beggars will spend the money we give them on drugs, we are making assumptions that may or may not be valid—just because we have been told that beggars use money for drugs does not necessarily make it true. While drug use is undoubtedly a problem amongst the homeless population, it may not be as widespread as we have been told. According to a National Coalition for the Homeless report, in July 2009, 38 percent of homeless people were dependent on alcohol and 26 percent abused other drugs (according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration 2003 estimates). These figures, while difficult to collect and not completely representative of what I call “beggars,” show that substance abuse is not as widespread as we may think, meaning that perhaps our skepticism is misplaced and instead should be directed at the conventional wisdom we adopt.

Furthermore, it is important to think about what is accomplished by giving charity to a beggar. Although we may be “supporting a habit” of begging by giving money, allow your skepticism to tell you that your 35 cents is not going to make or break that habit. In fact, what you are doing (and you may now need to put your skepticism in the corner for a minute) is to show another human being that people can be caring and compassionate. As masses stream by this person on the street—attempting to pretend that he is invisible—by responding to his need, you are acknowledging his existence and humanity. More than that, you are personally contributing to human flourishing in the most direct way possible. By offering a beggar a sandwich or soda, we are in effect treating him like an animal, implying that the only wants we can conceive of him having are those basic survival necessities. Should we not instead trust this human being enough to allow him to determine what is most meaningful to him instead of assuming that we understand his situation and thus his most pressing needs? Here we may leave our university-cultivated skepticism and anti-paternalist intuition to duke it out.

Now, this is not to say that giving charity to a beggar is going to save the world, increase national GDP, or even have a lasting impact on the person to whom you give the money; however, by giving, at the very least you answered someone’s plea—you responded to a call to be noticed and a desire to have just a bit more than before.

(For more information on homelessness and substance abuse, see Wincup, Buckland, and Bayliss, 2003, and the National Coalition for the Homeless at www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/addiction.pdf)