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Why, specifically, a neighbor? Out of sheer statistical likelihood, this is extremely improbable. He would almost certainly be one of the billions of people in the world you never met and never will.
I have a hard time believing any of this interaction you are describing actually happened, because this reads like fiction. How do you know what they hoped for and what went through your minds? You didn't, you're simply writing a morality play with yourself as the altruistic moral savior of humanity.
I certainly understand the impulse to want to make the world a marginally nicer place, but I do it by doing things for friends and family and actual neighbors. I do it for people I know personally who are more blameless than not for their own misfortune. Because I know in my bones that no matter how good the world is, yes, even in literal Star Trek Utopia, there will inevitably be some shitty people in it, utility monsters who intuitively victimize themselves of their own free will, and if I spend my time enabling their shittiness, all I've probably done is make the world a marginally worse place. The beautiful thing is my vision of ethical behavior also universalizes, because if everyone tends to their own garden as well as that of the people they personally know, it's only the antisocial who are excluded from the benefits of society, which is just.
IME, beggars hereabouts are either professional panhandlers, or conspicuously poor people who will ask for money to buy food but refuse offers of food. (My dad watched one immediately take the gifted money and rush into the liquer store, socks and no shoes). Even if the pros are bums rather than downtrodden, they at least know that gifted food means more of their alms go to something else. There's two axes, I guess—functionality and malice—and the problem is that the tails of each dominate, and the malicious above a certain level of functionality are better at pretending to be more benign.
Certain levels of disfunctional warrant institutional care. Above a certain level of malice, policing is required. The window of homelessness that is not covered by these has widened dramatically with the closing of asylums and the defanging of police, meaning that the tails kind of ruin it for the rest of the homeless, who already have it bad enough!
There are public long-term care facilities for sufficiently disfunctional adults in some areas in the US. Since I work at one, I am contractually obligated not to opine on whether or not people should use their services. I will say the state should just buy some Roombas, FFS.
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Obviously I can only guess. Though for what it's worth I didn't necessarily mean to imply that the target of such small acts of kindness are thinking of the situation in the same terms I am, so the only real guess about the recipient's unknowable mind-state is that they didn't expect that they'd meet someone willing to spend double-digit sums on them out of the blue rather than chickenfeed, and I don't think this is an unreasonable or overly romanticized assumption.
In terms of emotionless fact, the interaction I am describing (and it's an abstracted summary of many, not a direct account of a single one) is "homeless guy approaches me/addresses me as I'm walking around town, asking for a bit of cash; I reply in more than one-word sentences and ask them what, in fact, they need, possibly telling them I was on my way to a nearby store if relevant; over a few sentences they actually come up with something that they'd need that is easy for me to purchase, I purchase it and hand it to them". I don't see what's so hard to believe about that. If you just think that the person I give stuff to must be thinking something more like "har, har, what a sucker" than "yay fundamental human brotherhood, I'd do the same for you if our positions were revesed", well, sure, some of them at least, but I don't really care. The fact that they got the stuff still means I made their day better, which is what I wanted to achieve. If you believe that beggars wouldn't make such reasonable requests in response to the open-ended offer… again, sure, some of them shoot for the moon, but I don't blame them. And by and large, beggars can't be choosers is an expression for a reason; I've never met one who when I replied that "an iPhone" is maybe out of my price range here, failed to back down to a more achievable idea.
Oh, I do that too, which is in fact the answer to "why, specifically, a neighbor" - because the level to which I care about and help my neighbors is something that is already an established pattern of behavior I can default to.
I do not feel the same. I believe very heartily that a world in which everyone has everything they want is superior to one in which only the virtuous do (although I'm comfortable with prioritizing the virtuous if it's necessary to prioritize someone, a la this SSC post).
Have you ever consider that what the unvirtuous want could be zero sum with what the virtuous want? Say, for example, to murder me, bath in my blood and rape my wife. Or maybe break into random homes and stab children to death cause YOLO why not?
Evil exists and requires planning around. Not enabling because you want everyone to get what they want and be happy.
Certainly I've considered it. I would, on the whole, be surprised if there were very many whose preferences along those lines were innate to such a precise degree that nothing else - not violent sports, not hardcore BDSM - could sate their desires. Especially, in terms of the Glorious Transhumanist Future, once we bring VR into it. Now of course, again as per Scott's "short end of a trade-off" concept, I'm not saying that fulfilling those specific preferences for that tiny fringe of humanity should be a priority. But in terms of envisioning the utopia at the end of the rainbow, then yes, I do think a world in which we contrive some way for them to live out their violent fantasies, or something close to them, without actually hurting anyone is preferable to a world in which we simply keep them denied because we deem their desires Wrong.
Anyway, I don't think we were especially talking about the fulfillment of unvirtuous desires, necessarily. I think pusher_robot was saying that the unvirtuous shouldn't get common-sense nice things even if they want them, while I think the unvirtuous should indeed get nice houses and good food and safety and so on (at least once everybody else has got them).
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