IV 

In the parable, the man has been robbed and can't pay for what he needs, and so the Samaritan puts the man in the care of the innkeeper long enough to get him on the way to recovery~ Then the Samaritan says that he'll come back -- not to collect what is owed him by the victim but to be sure that all the innkeeper's bills are paid. And that prompts us to ask: how serious a commitment was his promise to come back? When does an act of charity end? What would happen if the Samaritan didn't return as promise? Who would pay the extra bills that would pile up if the victim's recovery took longer than expected? What if the innkeeper proved not to be trustworthy and had padded his bills? People who are street-smart often fleece those who show themselves compassionate. If the Good Samaritan was willing to put up two denarii to help this man, chances are held pay more when he came back. 

Several other important aspects of philanthropy come to mind. For one thing, the Samaritan trusts the innkeeper to care for the victim until the victim recovers. Philanthropy relies heavily on trust. The marketplace relies on trust, too -- especially in contracts and other formal agreements -- but all those in the marketplace are cautioned to be on their guard. Read the small print. Check references. There is evidence that we are inclined to be more trusting when we engage in philanthropy. False philanthropy is a betrayal of trust. 

The role of the innkeeper (whom we will assume is also a Jew) is important for us because he represents what might be called the business interest. My sense of our common values is that we would expect the innkeeper to be trustworthy in this case, and that we would expect him to share some of the burdens of the Good Samaritan's act. The Good Samaritan, in one sense, can be thought to be acting in behalf of all of us; he is acting by a norm that we all applaud, and that we admire when we see it in ourselves. Because the Samaritan is acting for all of us, we expect others who happen into the situation to act for us, too. The innkeeper is no exception. 

The most plausible reason to expect the innkeeper to take advantage of the situation and derive some righteous malice from it has already been alluded to: in the case of ethnic conflict, philanthropic values are often suppressed.

There are many Biblical stories that are harsh on the self-serving and uncharitable. To further illustrate false philanthropy the story might have related that the innkeeper bargained with the Samaritan to get three denarii rather than two, arguing that there was some doubt whether the Samaritan would return, and that two denarii might not cover his cost. One scholar explains that a denarius would be equal to a day's pay, and that bread for a day would cost one-twelfth of a denarius. We might estimate the current value of the Samaritan's gift at a hundred dollars or so. There would be a certain Dickensian quality to the story told that way -- filled with familiar images of grasping, greedy, small-minded, self-centered people indifferent to the sufferings of others and unmoved by the other people's generosity. We also know stories about those who exploit the grief and suffering of others for profit, often giving nothing in return. Some of those stories are told in a distorted way to make it easier to divide the world into Good Guys and Bad Guys.

If the first ethical question is What is going on? Then one part of the answer is that some people make a living serving people in need. It's what doctors are supposed to do, for example, and it is what some business people do. The philanthropic issue arises when the financial needs of those expected to offer the service cause them to deny it to someone because of an inability to pay.

Assume that the innkeeper does nothing to aid the victim's recovery but that the victim recovers quickly, anyway. The Samaritan returns. The Samaritan doesn't shift part of the burden to the innkeeper; the obligation was taken as the Samaritan's own. The victim expresses his appreciation to the Samaritan and to the innkeeper, not knowing the details of the arrangement, assuming that the innkeeper had also helped in his recovery or had shared the costs. The innkeeper, whose own cost and inconvenience were in fact nothing, and the Samaritan, whose generosity includes both his time and his money, receive equal praise from the victim. What should the Samaritan do? Our image of good people is that they should be consistently good. The Samaritan is a dignified figure, a high-minded person. He set out to help the victim for the victim's sake, not for his own -- he sought neither reward nor praise nor gratitude. That being the case, it would be demeaning for him to try to sort out the misunderstanding, even if only to expose the innkeeper as a hypocrite. 

I was prompted to pursue this digression because of a comment recently from a development officer of a church. He repeated the professional wisdom that everyone gets credit for a gift, and that no single individual should claim credit. Since fund raising takes place in the real world, what happens when someone does claim credit, and unjustifiably so? What happens if that someone is a prominent volunteer or contributor or even trustee?

The world of philanthropy usually involves an inescapable tension between its lofty principles and the sometimes painful reality in which those principles must be advanced. 

The story raises the question of what the victim owes, and to whom. Gratitude to the Good Samaritan, certainly. If the victim had enough resources to be considered worthy of robbery, presumably the victim might be able to repay the Samaritan the two denarii. As far as we know, however, the Samaritan didn't make repayment a condition. Imagine that the Good Samaritan returned in due time and found the victim on the road to recovery, and with his wife at this side. The victim offers to repay the two denarii. The Good Samaritan might decline to accept repayment and reply, consistent with the philanthropic value of the story, "Go and do likewise." 

Does the innkeeper have a right to a reasonable profit for his efforts or would we expect him to be content with breaking even? Is the innkeeper an "interested party," caught in this act of mercy whether he wants to be or not? One might imagine a situation in which the innkeeper searches the clothing of the victim f or a credit card or the address of a wealthy neighbor or a bank reference. Just in case. The victim can also be thought of as a customer -- if there is no free lunch, then there is no free room at the inn. Someone will have to pay, and pay the going rate. It is easy to be generous with other people's money, but it is ethically necessary to consider them as having rights, too. On the road from Jerusalem to Jericho (or from midtown Manhattan to the South Bronx), victims may be frequent, as are those coming to the emergency rooms of inner city hospitals. At some point hospitality can no longer be sustained.

This dimension of the Good Samaritan parable brings in the notion of "corporate social responsibility." To what extent do businesses in our large cities share the responsibility for local victims who may not even be customers? In business, how does one answer the question, Who is my neighbor?

V 

There are three principals in the parable: the thieves, the victim, and the Samaritan. In the background are the two cowardly priests and the innkeeper, surrogates for the rest of us. Should they bear part of the cost? 

This new interpretation of the Good Samaritan story -- new for me, at any rate -- presses the other perspective of philanthropy, that of the person in need. The core of philanthropy is the relationship between those in need and those with resources. It also involves others: agents and passersby. The agents may seek something for themselves; the innkeeper might make a good living off the victims along the road, for example. Another agent might decide that what the community needs is a shelter for travelers who find themselves victimized. Still another agent might argue instead that what is needed is prevention of this continuing carnage on the road, and then organize a campaign to raise taxes to add mobile police units. Another agent might appear whose concern is for the families of the victims: who will tell the family that the victim needs help, where he is, and how he's coming along? 

What about the thieves? Thinking about this case in contemporary terms, it is not hard to imagine the questions that must be answered. If the thieves are apprehended, what should be done with them? What if the processes of justice reveal that they were in fact guilty of assault and robbery (we might learn that there were several witnesses)? The first issue will be that of punishment. Should the thieves be sent to jail? If so, is there room for them in the jail? Perhaps this was first offense. Perhaps the thieves were young hoodlums on drugs. Can they be held responsible for their behavior when they were victims themselves of a drug pusher? In addition to the police and the courts and the penal system, there are "philanthropists" on all sides of this issues. There are those who organize to help the victims and their families; there are those whose goal is to rescue thieves from a life of crime; there are still others whose call is not for compassion or for rehabilitation but for retribution. 

One reason that this retelling of the Good Samaritan story is so useful is that it tests so many of our assumptions and raises so many questions. Fund raisers tell us, for example, that the strongest motivation for someone to help another is the ability to put oneself imaginatively in the place of the other. The usual interpretation is that we will want to help someone else in trouble if we can anticipate that we might need help ourselves someday. It is as if we were all engaged in some variation of a chain letter, piling up reserves of good will that we will be able to call on when the day of crisis comes for us. Another way of thinking about the need of the other is not reciprocal at all, even indirectly. It is the simple and powerful expression of the feeling of shared suffering and sense of vulnerability: "I know how you feel; I've been there." Without some experience of suffering, even of suffering of a different kind, it is difficult to sustain compassion. (The very word "compassion" means to "suffer with" another.) The moral imagination enables us to draw on our experience for analogies that bridge our differences to a common humanity.

VI 

Maimonides said that the highest form of charity is to make someone a loan or take him into your business. The victim and the Good Samaritan presumably don't need such help. The thieves need it. The parable is not about the thieves, but over the centuries we have become concerned with preventing robbery and assault and in finding ways to change the behavior of those who commit such crimes. The moral imagination is always at work, challenging us. How many of us would be prepared to take a former thief into our business? How many of us would trust a business that employed known ex-thieves? 

The concern for criminals and their victims reflects the continuing process of philanthropic development. Things that were not attended to in the past enlist volunteers today. Volunteers work with the families of those in prison. Volunteers work with the prisoners themselves, and help them find jobs once they have been released. organizations are formed to recruit and train volunteers to work with victims and their families. The intervening experience that we take for granted is that the thieves will have paid for their crime, either by serving time in prison or by engaging in community service. Should philanthropic organizations take the lead in offering employment to ex-convicts? We still have hopes for rehabilitation, but it appears that the public need for prisons, for supervision of present and former convicts, and for rehabilitation and training and employment far exceeds the resources we are willing to commit to them. 

The resources used for the thieves cannot also be used for the victims. And so the victims have organized their own advocacy groups, and volunteers work with the families to console them. Volunteers help victims to learn how to regain the use of their muscles and limbs that have been injured in the attack. Volunteers help victims through the recovery from the trauma of the experience, and help them get back to work. 

Much of what we learn about these problems comes from people who are voluntarily engaged in bringing them to our attention. We might prefer to remain comfortably ignorant of the suffering of others whom we don't know: some people are sure to disturb our reverie. 

Where do your own sympathies lie? How do you decide? 

We are all familiar with the need to give advice. For example, a passing Good Samaritan of the scientific philanthropy school might use the occasion to give a gentle lecture while assisting the victim. "Next time," he might say, "take a different road." He might even offer more practical advice: "When you come into a neighborhood like this, don't come alone. If you have to come alone, come armed." If the Good Samaritan were a native New Yorker, advising a recent victim of a mugging, he might give these additional points of advice: Never go into an unlighted area. Always carry at least $40 in cash. Never try to argue or reason with muggers, much less resist them physically. And never, never (my New York friend told me) go back to confront your attackers to point out the error of their ways. 

The modern Samaritan might draw from popular psychology and advise the victim that he would have to pay for the service. One school of philanthropy holds that people should not be encouraged to behave in ways that make them dependent on others. In order to discourage the victim from being a victim a second time, and to heed the advice to stay off the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, the Samaritan might consider the payment to the innkeeper a loan and ask the victim to repay it. "Don't make a habit of it," seems to be gratuitous advice in this case, but we've all been gratuitous at times. We've also voiced the warning that "I'll help you this time, but no more." We expect people to learn from their misfortune, just as children do. It tests our patience and our generosity to respond again and again to people who never seem able to make it on their own. A century ago, liberals and conservatives both believed that most of the people in need were in that condition through their own weakness and failure. That thread persists throughout the modern history of philanthropy. Good Samaritanism is all right in some circumstances, but prevention is the best answer. People have to be taught to be careful. People have to be encouraged or even compelled to take care of themselves.

What if the victim were found to be drunk, and dressed in a way that indicated that he was one of the hard-core vagrants that show up on our streets? What if we discovered that the victim was still wearing his robe, apparently on the way home from a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan? Are there some people who aren't worth helping? Would your list and mine of the undeserving be the same list? In some situations, true philanthropy would teach us, every other human being qualifies as neighbor.

The perspective we customarily bring to the philanthropic relationship is our own. We see ourselves as those who at least have the choice of being the Good Samaritan. Most of us don't come to learn more about philanthropy because we are victims of some sort. Philanthropy is about helping others, not about seeking help for ourselves. At least, that's what true philanthropy is about. Yet being a victim, knowing pain and suffering and despair, is often the experience that causes us to think philanthropically.

In order to help others, we must know the facts: facts about the situation, about the victim, about our own capability and character, about other people's responsibilities, and about the likely consequences of our own action or inaction. Yet in some of the most important situations in our lives we will have neither the time nor the information. We will have to be prepared by our past experience. our rough values rather than our precise calculations will guide us. 

Sometimes we allow for the possibility that we will find ourselves in the place of the victim, dependent on others, perhaps ashamed by our dependence, and yet desperate. It is usually hardest to feel compassion for a victim who is bitterly resentful of being rescued. From the victim's perspective appreciation and gratitude are often bile rather than honey in the mouth. 

Most of our philanthropic lives are not spent at these extremes of need and emotion. But strong cases help us to see in sharper relief the values and practices and attitudes and behaviors that are the substance of philanthropy in action. The victim in the Good Samaritan story might well be the anonymous young man lying in the emergency room of a hospital, brought there by a stranger. We can understand that the medical treatment needed could be very costly, even involving expensive equipment that requires specialists to control. If we knew the person involved, we can readily imagine our reaction. Were we close enough to him we might be ready to accept financial sacrifice to save his life of to reduce the likelihood of permanent injury. We might well feel outrage if we learned that he wasn't treated adequately because of doubts about his ability to pay. 

We move from compassion for a particular individual whom we know to a concern for individuals whom we don't know to concern for a category of individuals whom we don't know. Where does individual responsibility stop and social justice begin?

VII 

The argument thus far has been couched in terms of social need in crisis. My conviction is that the core of our philanthropic tradition began with core values such as those embedded in the parable of the Good Samaritan (and began long before the Christian era, of course). over the centuries we have gradually expanded the tradition to give other values important place. For most individuals, charity remains the heart of philanthropy; that is perhaps reflected in the dominant place of organized religion as the recipient of our gifts and our service. 

For most individuals it is also true that there is more to life than acts of charity. The moral imagination seems to lead us from immediate acts of mercy to acts of rehabilitation to education in its various forms as acts of prevention to efforts to improve things, even to explore new ways to enjoy life that are remote from charity, even remote from ideas of justice. Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes to mind: we rise to higher levels of awareness and understanding but the basic needs never completely go away.

Modern American philanthropy has begun to change those ancient priorities in two ways: philanthropic foundations have played a path breaking role in seeking out the underlying causes of social problems and developing solutions and reforms. Foundations and corporations have also become major influences in supporting the nonreligious part of the agenda: education, the arts, scientific research. At the source, however, where it all begins and where we find the core values that keep it all alive, is individual charity. 

If there is a social crisis, however -- and I think there is a case to be made that there is -- it is a crisis not of our failures to provide adequate financial support to our universities or our research centers or our cultural institutions. It is not even a crisis of money. It is a spiritual crisis, a weakening or loss of core values such as those captured in the parable of the Good Samaritan. It is not our heads or even our pocketbooks that we should be most concerned about, but our hearts. Compassion begets community.