[philh]

To pick a contrived example, I suspect that if you offered unlimited free heroin for personal use! that would make the world a worse place.

More subtly, charity could make one person better off and others worse off. You could go around to every doctor in the world and ask them if I gave you a million dollars, what would you do?. Then you could give a million dollars only to the ones who say they would retire and spend it on bribing law enforcement officers to overlook the murder spree that they can now afford to finance.

Those are both pretty actively evil, but it's at least plausible that well-intentioned but poorly-thought-out charities could have negative effects.

[JamesBarney]

You could also accidentally save Hitlers life. I'm sorry if I misspoke, I didn't mean to imply it's theoretically impossible to do harm by giving people money.

You're right that it's plausible that their have existed in the world at some time charities that have accidentally done harm. I don't think that it's plausible that it's a significant problem facing charities, specifically large charities advocated by 'Effective Altruists'.