Charitable Donations and Individual Responsibility

The Christian Century reports:

As Americans set new records for charitable giving in response to Hurricane Katrina, some fund-raisers are seeing a principle confirmed: when the sufferers are perceived as innocent victims, donors respond generously.

But giving patterns suggest that donors are losing interest in chronic problems such as poverty, in which suffering is arguably exacerbated by questionable individual choices. Private donations are shrinking for homeless shelters, AIDS-related services and programs for troubled youth, to cite just a few examples.

Read the full story.  If this trend is true, it seems to me that it reflects a failure to make an important distinction between (1) a program that helps people with problems and suffering that are in part the result of their own individual irresponsibility or bad habits, and (2) a program that helps people with such problems and suffering but doesn't work at changing the irresponsible habits.  I'm quite happy to happy to say that we should be leery of supporting programs in category #2 because they're not likely to produce long-term changes.  The issue there is long-term effectiveness.  But it is a different matter to withhold support even from programs that do try to help change individual habits, simply because the individual needing help got himself/herself into the situation in part irresponsibly.  The reason for withholding support to that category of programs, it seems to me, is not a desire for effectiveness; it's a simple inclination to punish.  (And unless the persons' past acts have been criminal, punishment is not the appropriate, or the Christian, tack to take.)

Tom