A would-be good samaritan wants to help the homeless, who truly need assistance. He was not interested in providing money for booze and cigarettes. A woman on the street was shrieking “HELP ME! I’M HUNGRY!” Our would-be good samaritan offered to take her right then and there and buy her a sandwich. She declined and asked for money instead. He said, “no” and repeated his offer. This went back and forth for a couple rounds, but he stuck to his offer and refused to give her money. Suddenly she just “blew up” at him, swearing at him and telling him where to go (in so many words). Who was wrong here? Both of them perhaps?

It is usually an imprecise term to apply to human behavior because that term "being in the wrong" stems from the judgment of another. We would prefer a term that is more descriptive of the energetic consequences that are automatic from the Law of Karma reacting to events as they unfold dispassionately but assigning responsibility as to whether a person’s actions are creating something positive or something negative in consequences to themselves or others. In the case of a panhandler, a passerby will never be sure of the motive of the person and what might happen to them with or without that passerby making a gift. People have differing kinds of needs. Someone struggling mightily with an addiction may not have the most attractive need to a potential donor being approached by a panhandler, but keeping them going a little longer might defer a choice to become a criminal through an act of breaking and entering, robbery, or even killing someone to take their money out of desperation. So keeping a panhandler going through donations can be preventing a greater evil than perhaps the panhandler falsely representing themselves as hungry when they have other things in mind for donated funds. As you do not truly know the disposition, it is karmically more beneficial to give what you can anyway to the person. In a sense even if they are keeping their lives on hold and living off the generous public, and some would say "gullible," it is still keeping a human being going who is perhaps stuck in a false view of their potential and need for that to play out. It may be only having done it for a good long while that will bring a needed internal questioning and then this leading to a new perspective when they will seek something better. All the donated funds along the way have kept them going until they could reach a place of calm and greater security where they could risk taking a chance, as they see it, to have greater demands on themselves and risk failure which might be what they are avoiding all along, a repeat fall from grace, so to speak. Without that stream of income, they might go into a severe downward spiral ending in suicide or criminal activity that will drag them down severely, or a decline in health that closes off a possible better future. So we would say it is better to not act through judgment but to be generous when one can because you will much more often be helping than hurting someone or yourself through an act of kindness. You will always get a karmic benefit even if a person wanting something from you is perpetrating a total scam as they are not truly in need. It is nonetheless a test of your character and you will either pass or fail by what you do.