We generally accept that the healthy have some obligation to help the sick, and that the wealthy have some obligation to help those who can’t afford basic necessities 1. I think the same logic extends further than we usually let it: people who happen to have more knowledge, more skill, or more steadiness in a given moment have some obligation to share it with people who, for reasons of circumstance rather than character, have less.
The comfortable rebuttal is that everyone is responsible for educating themselves, building their own resilience, and not depending on anyone else — that the ideal is something like a deer, upright and on its feet within the hour it’s born 2, needing nothing from the herd but its own legs. But I don’t think that’s the shape we actually come in 3. I think we’re closer to three-legged tables: every one of us is missing something, carrying some flaw sturdy enough to tip the whole thing over the moment it’s tested. Nobody is the deer. We just take turns noticing which leg is missing.
That reframes the “pull yourself up” ideal as a story about a species we aren’t. We don’t survive by each of us being self-sufficient and uniform; we survive by everyone bringing whatever they’ve got and someone else quietly covering whatever they don’t. We accept the person who can’t see, not by demanding they see better, but by building the ramp, the cane, the reader, the second pair of eyes — so that what they can bring still reaches the table 4.
That last point matters, because it’s where the idea is easiest to get wrong. It’s tempting to say a little compassion is all it takes to keep us standing, and to leave it there — but compassion by itself is just a feeling, and a feeling doesn’t build a ramp. It’s the necessary starting condition, not the fix. The actual fix is the effort compassion moves you to make: the infrastructure, the patience, the hour spent explaining instead of dismissing. A tiny amount of compassion is what makes someone willing to build the real thing. It isn’t a substitute for it.
None of us built our own starting point — not our health, not our education, not the people who happened to be around to teach us things early enough for them to stick 5. Even with the best intentions, most of us land somewhere we didn’t fully choose, and it’s a little too convenient to then take full credit for landing well, or assign full blame to those who didn’t.
So the obligation isn’t really about being permanently strong helping the permanently weak — nobody keeps their sturdy legs forever, and it isn’t your turn to need propping up on the same day it’s mine. It’s about staying reachable, and pitching in with whatever spare board you happen to be holding today, because the direction reverses constantly and none of us are running quite the same race. We’re not individually self-sufficient, and we were never supposed to be. That’s not a design flaw in us. It’s the only way a three-legged table, or a species full of them, ever manages to stand — and, together, actually hold something up.
References
- Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (Philosophy & Public Affairs 1(3), 1972). Britannica summary.
- Gino D’Angelo, “Fawn’s First Day” (Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, 2015).
- Dunsworth, Warrener, Deacon, Ellison & Pontzer, Metabolic hypothesis for human altriciality (PNAS 109(38), 2012).
- Angela Glover Blackwell, The Curb-Cut Effect (Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2017).
- James J. Heckman, Skill Formation and the Economics of Investing in Disadvantaged Children (Science 312, 2006).
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