On Bum's

Late one night, my friends and I started talking about bums. This wasn't the first time I had thought about bums, I had put some thought to it before. I felt the need to record our ramblings, thus producing this essay.

It all began last summer. I had a dillema. In my possesion were few bottles of cheap wine that had been sitting out in the sun for a while. I also had some very old hard liqueur. I assume all bums are alchoholics, (my friend say "my hidden republican side was showing"), so what better way to make a bum's day then deliver a boat load of booze to him? You might say that not all bums are alcoholics. Fine, but some are. All I need to do is ask around until a bum is willing to take my low quality loot. My brothers said I should just pour it down the drain. I know I could possibly be contributing to their alcoholism. But, how big a smile will you see on thier face when you drop a box of booze in front of them? My brother said that they bum could get really drunk and hurt themselves of someone else, so they said I wasn't allowed to give the alcohol away.

Then I started really thinking, is it wrong? Giving money to a bum is considered charity, even though we all some of it gets spent on alcohol. Is it wrong to give icecream to a child. It might make him sick in the long run, but boy will he happy in the short term. Is it wrong for a restaurant to serve decandent desserts to diabetic diners? Interesting stuff, but philisophy has its limits. I wanted to get emperical.

So I wanted to address my prejudiced that all bums are alcoholics, see if it was an unfounded view. If my prejudiced is wrong, presumably some bums don't want alcohol. This is testable. All I need to do is make a bunch of sandwiches, buy some beers, and go around and offer bums a choice between a sandwich or a beer. Perhaps one day I will do this. After I started thinking about actually doing this, I realized that if a sociologist wanted to do a similar test, he's need approval from some ethics commitee. So I could possibly force a commitee to judge whether my experiment was ethical or not, and see if my phisosphical ramblings agreed the views of supposed "experts" in such things. I realized that my friend Ed has done vision studies on people requiring him to deal with the Human Subjects Institutional Review Board, giving him some insight on the issue. He gave me a good idea, that made me feel like I could do my study without being so mean to the bums. He that that an ethics board would probably tell me to ask the bum to make a choice, and then just give him $20 instead of the beer or food. But I thought thats boring, so Ed suggested that after the bum chooses between a beer or a sandwich, I give the bum both. I think thats a swell idea, thanks Ed. And thanks to Phil for asking me "Which one would you choose if I offered you a sandwich or a beer!"

Phil's criticism was that a bum might have just eaten, or that a bum might not be hungry. Then the bum would choose the beer, but not because he's an alcoholic. The hidden assumption in my experiment was that bums are starving. That might not be true, so I need to redesign.

Food is subject to transitory cravings, I needed something more steady. What if I offered him a good pair of walking shoes vs. a handle of fine liqueur. What if I offered him or her a nice fleece or a six-pack? With enough data, one could convert between items, and thier equivalent value as measured in number of beers to a bum. Phil then suggested I should start a websites listing many such items. A leather jacket might be worth 20 or 30 beers. A baseball cap of beanie might be worth 4 or 5 beers.

Bum fights. Imagine this. Offer two bums $50 each to fight each other. The idea make my stomach churn. I saw a video of it once and it was very hard to watch. Luckily the people making the video got arrested. How could anyone be so malicious, I thought? What a horrible thing to do. But we pay boxers to do it? Whats the difference. Well, boxers make a lot more money. But is that a good moral reason? At precisely what dollar amount does it go from immoral to moral? Personally, I feel like making bums fight is exploiting thier situation. The poor bums are desperate for money. But a boxer is desperate for fame and glory (and money). Isn't the boxer being exploited as well? I think the real issue stems from medical care. A bum is pretty much just screwed if he breaks his leg or looses some teeth. A boxer has all the medical care that a person need.