The Extent to Which We Should Go to Help Another
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
By: Anisa Chandra
What is the furthest extent we should go to in order to help someone else? If it’s our duty to give up our seat to an elderly person, is it also our duty to help children in third-world countries by giving them opportunities for a better life? Why? As the global situation gets increasingly worse — there’s mass genocides in a variety of countries, we’re facing a global water shortage, and the job market is becoming distorted due to the influence of AI — this question has been plaguing policymakers and citizens alike. According to Oxford Languages, to help is to “make it easier for (someone) to do something by offering one's services or resources.” Therefore, by definition, helping includes sacrifice. The question is, though: at what point do we stop sacrificing?
Like with most modern-day problems, a philosopher born more than 200 years ago has come up with a solution. American philosopher John Rawls argued that it is our duty to help the least advantaged because the existence of inequalities is unjust. When asked why, he stated that because we’re only given the life we’re given through the birth lottery, which is arbitrary, we don’t inherently deserve the situation we’ve been placed into. Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century German philosopher, had a similar belief for an entirely different reason. Deontology states that we should only act on principles that can be accepted as universal laws — essentially, if doing something isn’t reasonable in every situation, we shouldn’t do it at all. Because helping others often assists us in achieving our own goals, Kant believed that it’s better to state that we should always help others, in contrast to never doing it at all.
In the modern era, there are two main reasons why people continue to believe in helping others to this extreme extent: professional and, most recently, legal obligations. According to Professor Sara Goering of the University of Washington, the purpose of medical education is to ensure the health of a community. This is only confirmed by the Hippocratic Oath, which states that medical professionals must exercise their art “solely to the benefit of [their] patients”. It’s because of this, she believes, that nurses and doctors are “professionally obligated to treat those with communicable disease such as Severe Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and anthrax, even at substantial risk to themselves.” Aside from a professional obligation, however, legal reasons to assist others are becoming increasingly more common. According to author Amos Guioria, bystanders to a crime are committing a crime themselves: specifically, one of nonintervention. He derived this theory from stories of his father, who survived the Holocaust’s infamous death march. Guioria believed that all of the German men who watched his hungry, frail father walk past them without assisting him should be considered just as guilty as the Nazis considered his father. Even though the act of those men handing his injured father food would’ve likely led to their death, Guioria still considered their lack of action a crime — proving that Guioria was perhaps the largest supporter of helping others to a self-sacrificial extent discussed so far. The idea of not helping others potentially being considered a legal crime is especially relevant today, as ICE deports, wounds, and kills American citizens. How far must we go to stop this injustice?
But while Rawls, Kant, and Guioria all believe in helping others to a self-sacrificial extent, Effective Altruism pushes charity only when it doesn’t cause mass harm to the giver. It was promoted by philosophers Peter Singer and William MacAskill, and relies on donating money (within a defined budget, according to MacAskill) to prioritize doing the greatest good. For example, if a certain amount of money has the potential to provide one hundred meals for starving children or save one thousand children from malaria, it should be donated to save the greater population of children. Again, though, what separates Effective Altruism from the beliefs of Rawls and Kant isn’t its focus on doing the greatest good — it’s the fact that it draws a line with the amount of money that can be donated. This line is important, especially when viewed in a professional context. The Hippocratic Oath states that nurses and doctors must treat the sick regardless of their ability to pay; therefore, is it the duty of a Californian physician to fly halfway across the world to treat a patient who can’t afford care in their home country? Paying such a large amount of money to provide care that a local physician could give, given that they’re kind enough to do so, places an extremely heavy burden on medical professionals across the world. From a legal perspective, the line between sacrificing food versus your life to help another is also important. While most of us donate canned food to local food banks on Thanksgiving, is it also our responsibility to lose our own lives to give an individual at a shelter a place at our dinner table? Most would say no.
The purpose of philosophy is to guide our decisions in a moral manner. So, for this article’s final paragraph, I think it’s appropriate to consider how far we should go to help others in the context of America’s current political situation. All that’s been written so far boils down to the importance of a line: specifically, a line that determines how far is “too far” when it comes to charitable giving. And although this line is important, and it’s obviously important to not lose yourself or your life in the process of helping others, we’re spending too much time thinking about this damn line. Thinking too much about who we can help and who we can’t is putting Americans in a state of paralysis, and this paralyzing state is preventing us from actually helping. We as a society are convincing ourselves that through a temporary state of inaction, we’ll complete more moral, beneficial actions in the future. However, these states of inaction are never-ending, and that is the real problem. Currently, we’re watching silently as Americans are dragged off our streets in unmarked vehicles by ICE agents to be put in detention camps. We’re observing from the sidelines as systems of aid are defunded, as we isolate ourselves from a myriad of global organizations, and as prices rise at unprecedented rates. Therefore, we must help — and to an extent, it doesn’t really matter how much. When we choose to do nothing, we support our oppressors, deny Americans their constitutional freedoms, and watch silently as democracy falls. Therefore, it’s crucial that you do something: whether you’re educating yourself through an informational YouTube video or leading a protest, you’re supporting a good cause in a way that you’re able to; at the end of the day, that’s what matters. The line is unimportant when lives are at stake.
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3.21.2026
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