Sufficent for what? I contend that just because someone else’s need is not my obligation, and certainly should not be law.
Look, there are many people who need food, shelter, and other such things. This does not obligate us to fufill others’s needs.
sufficient to ensure that all members of our society have equal access to it.
sufficient to ensure that what should be common sense is truly “common” to all.
sufficient to ensure that what we deem “polite” is shared by all; so that my grandma doesn’t have to engage in a fist fight with MrT for a seat on the bus (mind you, she’s pretty tough)
would you agree that all people should be treated fairly?
(if no, then it’s just a difference in ideology)
if yes, then it’s about “what is fair?”
fairness involves everyone getting what they need, not everyone getting the same thing
consider this: a student in a classroom is choking, the teacher says to the student “i’d like to give you the heimlich maneuver, but i cant give it to everyone, so, i’m sorry, it just wouldn’t be fair to the other students that you get something and they don’t”
maybe people aren’t morally obliged to help those who cannot help themselves, or could really benefit from some help (I happen to disagree, I think we all have a moral obligation to do what we can to help anyone in need, especially because we have the resources to do so), but the fact that there is a law that states we must give up the seat to someone in greater need of it. Our laws are an expression of our collective morality. Your personal take on the matter does not negate your participation in society and your obligations therein.
Well, the logical question then becomes, are you equally cheezed off by having to give up those right-next-to-the-door parking places to the folks with “handicapped” plates?
Are you equally cheezed off at the way that all of our state and national parks have been spending money to make themselves wheelchair-accessible? They didn’t spend thousands of dollars on you, building a ramp to make it easier for you to get down in the valley and view Cascade Falls at Mathiessen State Park. They didn’t put in special wheelchair-accessible privies for you. How you feel about that, Robert? Are you cheezed off, wondering where your thousands of dollars are?
It’s a “fairness” issue. It’s not fair that folks in wheelchairs can’t get down there to see Cascade Falls, so We the People of the United States of America, through the medium of the ADA, authorized Mathiessen State Park to build them a ramp, and a whole flock of privies they could get their wheelchairs into, while they were at it.
Criminy. You must be cheezed off pretty easily then – especially in light of the great hardship that these people go through on a daily basis.
Does this remind anyone else of the thread where the guy wanted people to explain to him why he should wash his hands after he goes to the bathroom? Sorry, it just made me think of that.
—Look, an unwritten, unenforced policy such as tipping at restaraunts that even chronically rude people like me do out of social inertia I would have no problem with.—
This is itself a fascinating issue.
In the aggregate, tipping (at the standard expected rate) as a social strategy arguably does more of a harm to waiters and busboys than it does to help them, and at the very least doesn’t really help them. Contrary to popular wisdom, it doesn’t necessarily make them any better off as a class of workers: it just makes their particular incomes more uncertain and subject to the whims of diners. That’s because the more you tip waiters, the more attractive the profession becomes, the more people enter it, and the lower resturant owners can bid down the pre-tip wages. Most waiters and busboys I know have salaries well below the minimum wage: their incomes, instead of being entirely steady salaries depend partly on whether diners like them or not: often for ridiculous and irrational reasons. Only unusually likeable waiters having good days can make out better in this situation than they would if there was no tipping. Only unusually generous diners (those that tip in excess of what everyone tips) are really being generous (and even their effects might later be washed away if the market adjusts).
It’s a catch-22 though. GIVEN that tipping is now ingrained in society, not tipping your waiter is a lot like not paying for your dinner. That’s because the menu prices are determined in part by what the owners DON’T have to pay their staff: if no one tipped, they’d have to pay them a lot more, and menu prices would be higher. What’s essentially happening here is that the excess value of tips over what waiters would naturally get paid is being returned to diners in the form of lower menu prices.
But that means by living in a waiter-tipping society, and not tipping, you’re having it both ways: paying the lower menu prices, but not paying for the REASON that those prices are so low. Having a general social policy of tipping allows nasty people to cheat the system (though perhaps that will be made up for by slightly higher wages and menu prices). So not tipping really is, per conventional wisdom, pretty nasty and selfish of you, despite tipping as an institution not being very helpful to anyone at all!
Now, it’s not clear if, on the aggregate, this actually makes waiters worse off, because maybe being slave to the fickle whims of diners makes the job less attractive, which means wages compensate… etc., but it’s unlikely that it makes them (or anyone) better off. And in fact tipping more and more seems to be becoming mandatory: included in bills with strong sanctions if you don’t pay it.
What this means is that tipping as a social strategy seems to have a lot more to do with benefiting customers (giving them more direct power over waiters and their “appropriate” degree of friendly servileness to given diner: as well as allowing diners to not pay as much for dinner if they please) than it does any sort of generosity.
What’s interesting is that some “lower-class” jobs have tipping, ostensibly to “help” them, and almost no “higher-class” jobs don’t. You might write that off to generosity to the poor. And again, on an individual level you might be right. But, given what happens when society in general starts tipping a certain profession, that generosity seems to cancel out: leaving only a consumer led strategy to gain more direct control over the employees who service them (otherwise, diners would have to bicker with managers over the bill, which is uncomfortable).
Now, think of what would happen if we started tipping our doctors. Would their wages drop to compensate? Maybe… but there’s a good reason why they wouldn’t. Doctors essentially control a guild (via medical school admissions) that has a monopoly control over how many people can become doctors at any given time. That means they can control salaries (and do!). If we tipped doctors, they’d likely just be even richer. So the same strategy (to gain more direct control over how well they serve you) wouldn’t work as well with them.
Look, would a law stating that you must wash your hands after visiting a bathroom cheeze any of you off? If the owner of the bus wanted handicapped seating available, thassa good. He does own the bus. Look, I would get up, provided all the other seats were taken up by handicapped people and one more needed a seat. But I don’t think that it’s the government’s business to tell me to do so.
greck: “would you agree that all people should be treated fairly?”
Indeed, and that is EXACTLY what I find problematic with your unwillingness to actually consider fairness.
—fairness involves everyone getting what they need, not everyone getting the same thing—
Not exactly: Fairness is about everyone being treated the same in regard to their obligations and rights. You’re quite right to chastise those who take this in a gross sense (everyone gets a seat, regardless of need!). It’s supposed to be asbtract: a characteristic of equal provision of empathy for everyone, not a material lottery.
But you’re being fundamentally dishonest with your child choking example. No one here, even the OP (with whom I’m not in agreement) is putting forth such a concept of fairness. And I DO think there are serious problems with what some people seem to consider “fairness”: foremost that it’s done in a very sloppy, material way.
First of all, public resources are very different from private ones. Bus trasport is a public resource: everyone has a right to be able to use them regardless of what reasonable changes have to be made to the service to allow it. The infirm could not ride buses or trains if they couldn’t sit down for the ride. The wheelchair bound could not ride buses if not given special accomodations. All of this is quite right and fair (though it’s not clear whether the provision of money required to pay for these extra services is or is not obtained in a fair way, and outside your glib conclusion, it’s an that philosophers of justice are still very seriously trying to consider).
However, your reference to the law is also in bad faith. The law, and the collective ideas behind it are EXACTLY what are under scrutiny. Your attempt to blow off the issue on essentially “that’s what people think is best” is beside the point. If something is right, it’s because it can be justified as so, not simply because someone passed a law saying it was right.
My point is that fairness is NOT being served precisely because gross categories are standing in for need. That’s sloppy, and I think society can do better than that. I wouldn’t have any problem with a law that said “the resources on this bus must go first to those that need them most” and let people on the bus figure out who that is. If you object to this position, then I demand you tell me WHY, as opposed to throwing silly or irrelevant examples my way. I demand that you explain how this policy would have worse outcomes for all involved.
The main line of arguement I can see against this is that people are too stupid, or too combative, to decide “need” on the spot. But if this is true, then it puts the lie to your “collective morality” objection, because it cannot possibly be any sort of collective morality if the collective is too dumb to figure it out in the first place. It must instead be elites trying to make simple rules that they hope won’t confuse the common man, who happens to be a moron. If that’s the case, then I might agree that the policy of “old people take precedence” makes the most pragmatic sense. But I still wont buy the lame arguement that it is a rule based on pure “fairness.”