How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time by King Iain;

Author:King, Iain;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

21 The New Ladder to Humility

Helping people isn’t just a transaction. It is about kindness, generosity and sometimes humility. But should it be? Is helping other people with humility any better than helping people with brashness?

This question was the topic of a ladder of charity, drawn up by a Jewish theologian in the twelfth century called Moses Maimonides. Maimonides examined help to others, ‘tzedakah’ as he called it, and ranked different forms into eight levels. The lowest form of help involved giving grudgingly and immodestly. Help improves, moving up the ladder, if it is given anonymously, and if the benefactor does not know the recipient. Help given without a request is even higher up the ladder. The highest form of help, according to Maimonides, is to form a partnership with the person in need, strengthening them on a sustained basis until they are self-sufficient. By Maimonides’ analysis, a blood donor who donates anonymously, not knowing who she is helping and not expecting any sort of commendation for her efforts is giving a much better quality of help than someone who reluctantly puts money in a tin rattled in front of her to be rewarded with an ‘I gave money to charity’ sticker.

Maimonides’ ladder seems to rise above the crude Help Principle, which just compares the value of help between two people, donor and recipient. Modesty, anonymity and all the other important qualities identified by Maimonides seem to be ignored. We need to know whether the Help Principle and Maimonides’ ladder can be reconciled.

The answer emerges from a slightly odd phenomenon: when you apply the Help Principle, you change the situation you are in. Imagine I have lots of potatoes and you are very hungry. Both of us apply the Principle to each other. The Help Principle says I should give some of my potatoes away, because each one will be worth much more to you than it is to me. So, I give you a potato, then another, and another, and so on. As I give you more and more potatoes, each extra potato will be worth less to you as you become less hungry (generally, the more you have of something, the less valuable you find each item of it to be). At the same time, as I give my potatoes away, my remaining potatoes will become more precious to me. After a time, I might be in danger of becoming hungry myself. Eventually, the next potato I’m about to give away will be worth about the same to you as to me, at which point the Help Principle no longer applies, and I should stop giving them away. Giving away potatoes once reduces the case for giving away more potatoes because each remaining potato becomes more valuable to me and less valuable to you. Applying the Help Principle changes the relationship between two people and reduces the case for applying it again in the future.

If we help each other in line with the Help Principle but fail to complete the full process, one or other of us may feel our generosity had not been reciprocated.

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