On my walk back to the hotel this afternoon, I stopped outside the hotel for a smoke.  While I was there, I was approached by a woman.  She told me that her and her alcoholic boyfriend (husband?) had gotten into a fight and he had left her stranded in the city.  She needed to get home to her two kids in Chesterton or some such suburb.  She already had $15 and the bus ticket would be about $30.  I gave her the money.  Am I a sucker?

As synchronicity would have it, I ran across an article from Freakonomics when I returned to the hotel entitled How Pure Is Your Altruism?

Mostly it talks about donating to disaster victims, but also:

We’ve had a lot of conversations on this blog about charitable contributions. For instance: where people like to give, and why; how a young philanthropist should disburse $70 million; whether to give to a street beggar, a hot dog vendor, or neither.

And from the Economics of Street Charity, I relate to this part:

Although I’m atheist, I defer to Jesus on beggar-related matters. He said, if a man asks for your coat, give him your cloak too. (Actually, he said if a man “sue thee at the law” for the coat, but most beggars skip the legal process.) Jesus did not say: First, administer a breathalyzer test to the supplicant, or, first, sit him down for a pep talk on “focus” and “goal-setting.” He said: Give him the damn coat.

What would you do, confronted by the hot dog vendor and the beggar situation?  What would you do in the situation I just found myself in?

Continuing with the ethical theme of this post, here’s a cute video about doing the right thing.  It’s a little long (10 minutes), but worth it.