Nada bahlas
Dilemma
You have twenty dollars. You meet a homeless person who tells you that, for that money, he could afford food for the next week. However, giving him the 20 dollars will mean that you cannot get to a meeting with a close friend you have not seen for several years, and who needs to speak to you about a personal matter.
Should you give the person the money, or keep it for yourself? Is it more important to help other people who are in need, or to live one’s life as fully as possible? No-one will blame you if you do either option, but in either case harm will befall the person you do not expend the twenty dollars upon.
Solution
As with most real-word ethical problems, there is no ‘right’ solution to this dilemma, only justifications for taking either path. This is because life is a zero-sum game – that is, in order for someone to gain something, someone else must lose something. There are many ways to perceive the problem.
There is, of course, a third option, in which one gives enough to the homeless person that their immediate needs are met, and still leave enough money to get to the friend, or at least a significant part of the distance, relying on the fact that you have a support network that will provide the additional resources that you require. This is a lateral solution, where you rely on facts not stated within the dilemma itself but reasonable to assume.
Exploration
This dilemma is one of the basic questions of philosophy, and has been explored from every angle throughout history. Every society comes to its own broad answer, and every individual must also come to theirs. There is a natural human tendency towards altruism – it is the existence of social behaviour that led to our success as a species, after all, and gave us language and communication.
As with many functional ethical dilemmas, it does not fare well when considered in the world. In the idealised realms of philosophy, arguments are made based on theory alone. In the…