Beneficence,Street Begging,and Diverted Giving Schemes

Introduction

In recent years, some cities and localities in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and elsewhere have adopted or intend to adopt one potential solution to the difficulties inherent in addressing the needs of street beggars: diverted giving schemes (DGSs). A DGS is an institutional response designed to motivate people to donate money in charity boxes or donation meters rather than directly to street beggars (Hermer 1999; Johnsen and Fitzpatrick 2008; Lynch 2005; Scott 2003). Their advocates believe that DGSs are not only more efficient and more ethically permissible than direct giving to individual beggars, but also that DGSs constitute an adequate institutional answer to street begging. Although surprisingly very little empirical and theoretical research has studied DGSs, this type of institutional response to street begging has gained noteworthy political and public attention over the last few years.

This article asks whether and how a DGS can be justified. It offers a normative evaluation of the main idea behind this policy, namely, that anonymous and spontaneous donations to charity boxes are in themselves an adequate policy instrument to address street begging. Ultimately, the paper argues against this idea and develops the case that DGSs can potentially compromise our ability to act on our moral duties toward truly needy beggars. Moreover, it explains why and under which circumstances this kind of program can potentially and seriously interfere with the freedom and opportunities of individuals in the begging population. As my analysis is mainly normative in content, this paper does not pretend to offer a systematic and exhaustive analysis of current DGSs that are currently being debated and occasionally put into practice around the world. Instead, its purpose is only to draw some insights from actual policies to illustrate the normative implications of this approach.

One question that arises is why we should analyze DGSs as a unique type of public policy. The first reason is that, while we know very little about this type of program implemented in several cities across the United States and the United Kingdom, DGSs may have an important impact on the lives of many poor and marginalized people. Second, DGS programs are compatible with what has been described by others as illiberal (e.g., Waldron 1993) and “revanchist” policies (Smith, 2002). That is, a set of policies designed to regulate and control homeless and street beggars’ behavior. Nevertheless, as I will explain later on, DGSs present some particularities that make them an interesting case of policy targeted at street beggars.

This paper is organized as follows. The section “Begging and Ad Hoc Individual Beneficence” describes the challenges of one-on-one beneficence at the street level and explains why street begging requires an institutional solution. The section “Justifications of DGSs” summarizes the key characteristics of DGSs and reviews the principal arguments in their favor. The section “Normative Challenges to DGSs” presents four criteria testing the permissibility of a DGS: (1) it uses permissible solicitation strategies to collect revenue sufficient to cover the operational costs of assisting beggars, (2) it serves as a transparent and accountable mechanism of solicitation and assistance, (3) it is not combined with zero-tolerance or antibegging ordinances, and (4) under certain circumstances, it satisfies the demands of justice. The section “Discussion” is devoted to concluding remarks and discussion.

Before beginning, I will make note of a few important caveats about my approach. First, it is worth pointing out that begging is an elusive concept. It is usually associated with homelessness and others activities such as selling small items (flowers, gum, etc.). Following Lee and Farrell (2003, 302), I define begging as “a public request for money, food, or other goods with little or nothing of value given in return to the potential donor.” Thus, a beggar is “a person who publicly and regularly requests money or goods for personal use in a face-to-face manner from unfamiliar others without offering a readily identifiable or valued consumer product or service in exchange for items received” (Lankenau 1999, 187–88). ¹ Second, the goal of this paper is not to justify a moral duty to assist street beggars. ² Instead, its aim is to evaluate the permissibility of DGSs as one instrument of many to potentially discharge that duty. Thus, my argument is built on the assumption that we have a moral duty to help needy beggars.

Finally, this paper attempts to explain why DGSs may be even less efficient and ethically permissible than direct giving to individual beggars. This analytical strategy does not derive from the assumption that direct giving is preferable to other forms of institutional responses, such as redistributive policies financed through taxation. Instead, the comparison between individual giving and DGSs is solely intended to contrast two similar responses to street begging that share the same key defining elements: voluntariness and individual choice. Donor voluntariness is a crucial normative concern for DGSs advocates. The policy is defended as a better mechanism to respect and improve the efficiency and efficacy of voluntary individual donations. This concern is completely disregarded when we adopt a redistributive policy that enforces contributions through the tax system. DGS advocates could argue that a redistributive policy financed by taxes neither recognizes the moral relevance of individual choice nor upholds the voluntary nature of donations. The analytical exercise proposed in this article allows us to explain why voluntary individual donations given directly to street beggars can be preferable to DGS programs.

Begging and Ad Hoc Individual Beneficence

Begging is a phenomenon that highly varies from one context to another. Therefore, it is not the same to compare begging practices that are carried out mainly to provide funds to educate children (such as described by Swanson 2010 for the case of Ecuador), to begging practices carried out to simply survive. Since the goal of this paper is to normatively evaluate DGS programs implemented mainly in the United States and the United Kingdom, I rely on the salient characteristic of begging practices in those particular contexts. For example, different studies (Lee and Farrell 2003; Tillotson and Lein 2017) have argued that the lack of social capital (e.g., family and friends), the ineligibility for social welfare policies, and the disconnection from the formal labor market explain why some people beg. Similarly, other studies suggest that street beggars typically live in extreme poverty and constitute a highly stigmatized population (e.g., Dean 1999; Lankenau 1999). Finally, some studies reject the hypothesis that beggars earn large amounts of money and report that beggars spend their income on “food, followed by tobacco, then alcohol and/or illicit drugs” (Bose and Hwang 2002, 478). ³

From the perspective of an individual donor, it is not a simple task to determine what we should do whenever we encounter a beggar asking for money in the street. Even if one is altruistic and assumes a moral obligation to help others in need, there are three challenges that affect our capacity to act on that obligation: (1) distinguish needy beggars from those who engage in subterfuge in the solicitation of donations; (2) determine who, among the needy beggars, should receive our help in the first place; and (3) decide whether our direct aid to beggars—rather than some other form of indirect aid—is a morally desirable way to act on our moral obligations. Let us consider these three challenges in turn.

First, it is difficult for individual donors to assess and distinguish truly needy beggars from fraudulent ones. Individual donors can infer that given certain conditions (e.g., the nature of the welfare policies in place), more or less truly needy beggars are asking for money in the street. Yet this calculation is complicated by a number of constraints (Pérez Muñoz and Potter 2014). To begin, street donors do not have access to information sufficient to successfully engage in this type of ad hoc evaluation. Second, even if we solve the first problem by correctly identifying a number of needy beggars, we next have to face the difficult task of deciding who should be the recipients of our donations. Since their resources are typically finite, most potential street donors cannot help all the truly needy beggars they might come into contact with. They require some type of rule or other heuristic to guide the allocation of their limited resources.

One may object that this argument is only valid with respect to moral obligations that are more demanding or straightforward than street-level responses to solicitations from beggars. When our obligations are imperfect, we are not required to follow any particular rule that can improve the effectiveness and fairness of our donation. Any help we can provide will suffice to discharge our moral duties toward beggars. But this argument is disputable. Even if our moral obligations toward beggars are imperfect ones, we should not necessarily assume that they could be simply discharged with any type of help—no matter how scant—we may provide. Similarly, we should not assume that our obligations are met by merely helping the first beggar we meet in the street (Moen 2014). According to Bradford (2001), the main problem that arises in this situation is that it is impossible to have a universal moral principle or command that guides our actions. It seems hard, in the first place, to adopt a moral command such as “whenever you encounter a needy beggar, you should help her” or “you should always give money to the first beggar you encounter in the street.” It is easy to find situations in which morality requires us to break those rules due to considerations of scope or magnitude.

Even a consequentialist position might encounter problems in the course of elucidating this moral dilemma. There may be relevant information that is neither available nor inferable. Moreover, we may not have the time and resources to make accurate assessments of the situation (Radford 2001, 290). The very idea of including all of these calculations and evaluations cuts against the thought that street charity should be a spontaneous enterprise (Radford 2001, 291). Another possibility is to adopt the principle of never giving money to a beggar. This principle is practical and easy to follow. ⁴ However, there are many situations in which our donations can readily help street beggars. As Hardin (1990, 101) puts it, “my action makes negligible difference to the hope of changing the general condition of these street people, but it could make a real difference for a while to one of them.” Thus, it is difficult to find a strong reason to justify a moral principle stating that we “never should give money directly to a beggar.” It is not necessary to argue that it is always morally right to give money to beggars, but it suffices to show that it is not always morally wrong to do so (Radford 2001, 293).

A final problem for individual donors is that even when they overcome the first two challenges, they need to evaluate to what extent their direct donations constitute an effective and desirable form of aid. In particular, donors need to rule out the possibility that their donations do not have (unintended or collateral) negative effects on beggars. ⁵ For example, donations that are subsequently expended on alcohol and illegal substances are commonly identified as an important example of misuse of the provided aid. ⁶ Likewise, donors should be concerned with the possibility of creating a structure of incentives that makes street begging even worse (Hardin 1990, 88). This can happen when, for instance, the overall level of donations is sufficiently large that it makes the practice of begging seem attractive to more people (thereby expanding the population of beggars) or seem comparatively more attractive to its current practitioners than wage-based labor (thereby reinforcing the behaviors of those who are already members of the begging population).

There is an additional point that makes direct donations morally troubling: by giving money directly to beggars, we are indirectly damaging their self-respect (Allais 2014; Kant 1997). As Margalit (1996, 231) puts it, “begging for alms is humiliating.” This activity generates an unequal relationship between donors and beggars, and the result of such an asymmetric power dynamic is often humiliation (Margalit 1996, 231; Sypnowich 2006, 186–88). This asymmetrical relationship challenges the value of equal citizenship. If we are committed to build a more egalitarian society, then we should be concerned about participating in this practice. One-on-one beneficence, therefore, can be “a flawed form of egalitarian rectification” (Sypnowich 2006, 193).

These arguments show that the adoption of an institutional solution—such as a DGS—may be a better way to deal with street begging. Given the difficulties associated with potential donors idiosyncratically assessing each street-level begging solicitation on its own merits, the better solution might rather lie in adopting an institutional mechanism that coordinates donors’ altruist efforts, that is, an institutional mechanism that helps donors in perfecting as much as possible the inherent imperfection and indeterminacy of their moral obligations toward beggars. In line with these considerations, the following sections evaluate the case of DGSs.

Justifications of DGSs

DGSs can be defined as the set of programs aimed at diverting donations from street donors to human service agencies, charities, and other groups that serve the homeless and begging populations. ⁷ Street donors are asked to donate to DGSs instead of giving spare change directly to beggars. Examples of these types of policies include the use of collection boxes in the street, ⁸ the use of mechanical parking meters that also serve as collection boxes, ⁹ and programs that raise money via Internet and other standard solicitation methods. ¹⁰ These programs share the common goal of diverting donations to collection boxes (material and virtual) instead of street beggars themselves.

DGS can be implemented and administered by four different actors: (1) public institutions (e.g., local governments), (2) private nonprofit agencies or organizations, (3) business organizations, and (4) some combination of public and private agencies. For example, The City of Lawrence, Kansas, implemented and paid for a donation meter program whose funds are collected by the city itself and provided to local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that support various policies for beggars and the homeless. ¹¹ Other programs such as Change for the Better ¹² implemented in Spokane, Washington, are mainly promoted by local business owners looking for a way to drive beggars out of downtown areas. The third alternative can be found in programs such as Denver’s Road Home ¹³ in Denver or Art of Change ¹⁴ adopted in Chattanooga, Tennessee. These are cases in which both private and public actors assume responsibility for the implementation of the program.

In some cases, the adoption of a DGS is accompanied by legislation that restricts beggars’ activities in various fashions. Some DGSs are adopted together with antibegging ordinances that penalize beggars for soliciting donations from passersby. ¹⁵ For instance, begging is a criminal offence in Exeter, the United Kingdom, where a DGS is used to deal with begging practices. ¹⁶ An important distinction to draw when thinking about this issue is that cities do not necessarily need to implement zero-tolerance policies to strongly regulate begging practices. To give an example, even though the city of Fayetteville in North Carolina does not explicitly prohibit begging, it regulates the areas and the time of the day in which begging can be practiced. By contrast, other DGSs only launch campaigns to persuade donors. That is the case, for example, of the Oxford Begging Initiative adopted by the Oxford City Council in the United Kingdom.

It is possible to identify five main justifications for DGSs. First, DGSs help finance NGOs that have better infrastructures and broader perspectives than do individual donors when it comes to effectively helping beggars. This policy allows specialized agencies to do the work of classifying and distinguishing among various categories of beggars. This gives some certainty to donors that their money is used to truly help beggars in the relief of their immediate needs. DGSs can help distinguish needy beggars from those beggars who misrepresent themselves. Likewise, a DGS can help eliminate the advantage that some beggars may have over other beggars at the time of collecting donations. The location and their ability to get the attention of passersby are important variables that affect the success that a beggar may have for collecting money. For instance, a DGS can avoid the problem of donating to those beggars who are more likely to receive the most from donors. As Moen (2014, 74) argues, “when you give money to a beggar, you are statistically likely to give the most money to the ones with the locations, looks, and tricks that prompt people to give.” The logic of DGS programs is to eliminate the advantage that some beggars may have for collecting money, and to distribute donations more fairly among all the needy beggars. ¹⁷

Second, supporters of DGS present this policy as a good instrument to motivate people to be more charitable and caring than they commonly are. On the one hand, even some altruistic people may prefer not to interact directly with beggars in the street. On the other hand, DGSs may promote the value of unilateral personal giving aimed at the disadvantaged. As a manifestation of personal generosity and kindness, private giving is socially valuable. However, some authors believe that the institutionalization of social welfare policies has displaced and eroded individual private giving (e.g., Obler 1981, 17). With a DGS based on spontaneous and anonymous donations, donors have the possibility to practice and perfect the habit of helping others.

Third, there is a freedom-based justification of DGSs. The argument, in brief, is that DGSs may facilitate individual private giving without compromising donors’ liberty. The voluntariness that defines DGSs allows donors to act beneficently toward beggars in a discretionary and indeterminate way. In contrast to a scheme of compulsory redistribution, a DGS would protect donors’ rights to make gifts to needy people. The key point is that this policy does not focus exclusively on recipients’ rights. Instead, it also takes into consideration the freedom of donors, namely, the voluntary agency to give something to someone or to give nothing (Nozick 1974, 168).

Fourth, by reducing the direct interactions between street beggars and individual donors, DGSs may diminish the dynamic of humiliation and damage to beggars’ self-respect inherent in street begging practices. DGSs give donors the chance to help beggars without participating in this kind of asymmetrical relationship. Since DGSs promote donations that are impersonal in nature, individual donors do not need to engage in undesirable one-to-one interactions.

The last justification is based on the idea that this type of scheme might reduce street begging. The reasoning is that DGSs should create disincentives for people to beg on the street. If most donors exclusively make donations to DGS programs, then street begging will likely become a less profitable activity. The harder the chances of collecting donations on the street, the fewer the people inclined to solicit donations from passersby.

It is worth emphasizing here the importance of studying DGS programs. The first reason is that, although these programs affect the lives of many people, they are understudied in the empirical and normative literature. We know very little about them. Second, DGS programs can be understood as a type of program that is compatible and complementary to other policies used to regulate and control beggars’ behavior—that is, as a program that is an expression of a larger phenomenon. To begin with, DGS policies are often implemented together with regulations to prohibit or seriously limit street begging. DGSs are commonly presented as initiatives capable of eradicating some undesirable behaviors. Thus, DGS programs can be as an expression of the “revanchist city” initially described by Smith (1996) and developed by many others (e.g., Aalbers 2011; Atkinson 2003; Blomley 2010; Mitchell 1997). Roughly speaking, Smith (1996) refers to a revanchist city as a set of revengeful urban policies directed against various populations accused of stealing from the city. To make the city safe for gentrification, different measures are taken to clean the city, make it safe for business, and remove those who are out of the market (Smith 2002, 442). The zero-tolerance policies that I discuss later on in the section “DGSs and Anti-begging Policies” are a clear example of “revanchist” policies (e.g., Ellickson 1996). Likewise, DGS programs can also be seen as a “reaction against the supposed ‘theft’ of the city” (Smith 1996, 207).

Yet, in contrast to other “revanchist” policies, a DGS can also be defended as a program aimed to improve street beggars’ lives. We could depart from the “revanchist” type of justification and rather support DGSs as the right policy to provide better help to beggars and not necessarily to those who benefit from a street free of beggars. Put another way, revanchist policies are typically defended as policies aimed to protect citizens from antisocial behaviors that take place in the city, but DGSs may be conceived not only to prevent antisocial behaviors but mainly also to provide real help to those in need. So this possibility makes DGSs a particular policy within the spectrum of regulatory and punitive programs against street beggars.

Normative Challenges to DGSs

In this section, I discuss the permissibility of DGSs as an institutional response to street begging. I list four conditions that are related to the supposed advantage of DGSs. For the sake of the argument, I assume that the permissibility of a DGS depends on achieving the outcomes suggested by its advocates.

First, according to its advocates, one of the main benefits of DGSs is that through well-organized collective action, these programs can achieve more efficient and normatively permissible outcomes than uncoordinated and idiosyncratic acts of charity on behalf of unorganized individuals. Not surprisingly, one question that arises is to what extent a DGS typically manages to solve the collective action problem so sufficiently that it crosses some threshold of resource acquisition and service provision? To deliver on its promises, of course, a DGS needs to be able to collect enough money to properly fund the operational costs of the organizations in charge of assisting beggars. Therefore, a first condition is that, by using permissible solicitation strategies, a DGS should be able to collect enough money to sufficiently fund the provision of reliable relief to beggars.

Second, DGS advocates argue that this policy can provide more certainty to individual donors through coordination than can be derived through idiosyncratic individual donations. Individual donors may not only struggle to distinguish truly needy beggars from fraudulent ones, but they may also have problems determining whether their donations are truly helping beggars. In most cases, they do not know how beggars make use of the monetary donations they receive. DGSs instead provide donors with more accurate and transparent information about the impact of monetary donations. In consequence, to be permissible, DGSs should be managed transparently and include mechanisms that allow their decision makers to be held accountable for their activities and for the allocation of the money they receive.

Finally, DGS advocates believe that this policy fosters fairer relationships between donors and street beggars. The remaining two conditions account for this point. On the one hand, this may happen by reducing the one-to-one interactions that potentially produce humiliation and harm beggars’ self- respect. However, to fulfill this goal, I argue that DGSs should not be implemented along with antibegging policies. On the other hand, under certain circumstances, some DGSs should meet demands of justice. That is, the principles of justice regulating the main governmental institutions of society should directly regulate the activities of these organizations.

Needless to say, the list of conditions does not pretend to be exhaustive. It only counts crucial conditions that affect the moral case for DGSs advanced by their own advocates. A failure to meet these conditions not only compromises our ability to act on our moral duties toward truly needy beggars but also interferes with the freedom and opportunities of individuals in the begging population. My main objective in this section is to explain why DGSs often encounter serious problems in meeting each of the conditions outlined earlier. I do not claim that all DGSs are equally vulnerable to the same problems. Instead, this exercise is intended to illustrate why these policies are more complex and difficult to justify than many of their advocates seem to recognize.

Discussion

In this paper, I described DGSs and presented four standards to evaluate their use. If my arguments are sound, we should be worried about DGSs. Specifically, we should be aware that DGSs serve as highly limited mechanisms through which we might act on our moral duties toward needy beggars. It is unclear to what extent DGSs can achieve their goals of (1) consolidating an effective form of aid to beggars, (2) helping donors act on their moral obligations, and (3) minimizing the potential social harms created by pervasive street-level begging practices.

One could argue that I have overstated the importance and influence of DGSs. Given the modest scope of some of these schemes, it is inaccurate to demand that all DGSs meet the conditions I developed in the previous section. As a consequence, it could be objected that my argument overstates and misdiagnoses the potential problems associated with DGSs. While some of them involve many actors and restrict donors’ and beggar’ actions, others imply no more than the installment of few charity boxes and modest communication campaigns. In brief, not all DGS are equally vulnerable to my objections. While there is certainly some force in this objection, there are multiple counterarguments that prevent it from becoming decisive. Even in the most innocuous contexts, however, we have reasons to worry. For example, we may think in the case of a DGS that (1) does not have government endorsement, (2) is not backed with an enforcement policy (e.g., zero-tolerance, antibegging ordinances), and (3) distributes the information about its collection procedures and outcomes as well as its implemented policies transparently and publicly. Although in the particular situation described above, we are free to decide whether to give directly to beggars, the real options we might have are highly contingent on the nature of the DGSs in place. Unless there are alternative DGSs that we can trust and agree with, we may still prefer direct giving. This solution is far from being optimal. If a considerable number of donors prefer direct giving to donating to DGSs, then the collective action problems of street charity will remain unaddressed.

This study opens up new avenues of research on both the empirical and normative levels. First, it is important to provide comparative and comprehensive evaluations of DGSs. At present, we know very little about the processes of designing, implementing, and evaluating this policy. As the section “Justifications of DGSs” showed, DGSs are initiatives of a varied nature. We need to better understand and account for this variation to assess the results of this type of redistributive program. This will allow us to evaluate how various DGSs either fail or succeed in meeting the criteria for moral permissibility I have outlined above.

Second, this study shows that more normative work is needed to unravel the ethical implications of both street-level charity and the adoption of programs aimed to deal with the collective action problems inherent to ad hoc beneficence. Thanks to the ongoing normative debate centered around notions of global justice, we now have a better conceptual and theoretical understanding of possible alternative ways to think about the nature of our obligations of justice to the distant needy. Moving forward, this debate can now be extended further to consider the normative considerations surrounding street-level charity.

Street begging is a problem that cannot be addressed through individual actions because it requires collective efforts. This, of course, is not a novel diagnosis. Kant (1997) himself thought begging constituted a public problem that could not be solved through private interactions. This is not only due to the lack of information donors may have, nor is it due to the type of humiliating relationship that this activity involves. Rather, begging reveals a fundamental structural injustice. As Lucy Allais (2014, 18) put it, “if there are genuine beggars, then there is structural injustice of a sort which makes it impossible for you to relate rightfully to these individual encounters.” Genuine beggars have been “wronged by the state’s defense of property and its property distribution: they have been treated unjustly and they are lacking something to which they have a basic entitlement under justice” (Allais 2014, 15). A complete evaluation of alternative institutional arrangements to current DGS schemes, however, requires a broader analysis exceeding the scope of this article.