While testing the civilization-nature of things is a complex and fraught matter, I am reminded of one by seeing this Trolley Problem variant on Mastodon:
As I said at the time:
Somewhere I still have a copy of the several thousand words of libertarian theory I once wrote to reconcile “there is no such thing as a social contract and involuntary duties are no duties at all” with “returning the shopping cart in accordance with the implied bargain is the primary differentiator between civilized people and reptiles and lawn furniture”.
And in general, I feel it’s a pretty good test to include in the set. Somewhere before the Inplacement Officer in the starport are the people whose job is to look for those who casually abandon luggage trolleys they’re finished with wherever and flag them as officially Not Wanted In Imperial Space.
The flip side of “there is no [explicit] social contract” is “just because the benefits of a social-contract action are not easily quantified, does not imply that the benefits don’t exist.”
Because there’s never just one “social contract”, not even in the Empire where they’re far more explicitly reified than anything Terrans have ever managed. There’s thousands of little ones, each one mostly deduced by context alone.
The contract for returning a trolley is “contribute to the ethos of ‘return your cart’, and reap benefits like “carts not blocking parking,” “carts easier to find,” and “fewer cart return employees getting in your way.” Which seems a reasonable micropayment for a few seconds’ labor.
Quantification is nice and exceedingly useful, but the map is still not the territory.
It’s even simpler: it’s the age-old, hallowed, and not-even-implicit contract of lending:
“You can use this for [while you shop], and then you must return it.”
That doesn’t enumerate the various positive externalities produced by so doing in this specific case, of course, but it doesn’t need to, because the fundamental principle is almost as old as property itself.
I think we’re not talking in the same mental model here. A cart left in a parking space, or on the sidewalk near the door, could be said to be “returned.” After all, you didn’t remove it from the property! It’s still in their space and under their control; you relinquished all power and claims on it. It’s just not convenient: for the owner(s), contractor(s), or customer(s).
That’s the component that’s a contextual, implied ‘social’ contract - the specific courtesy of not leaving a mess behind oneself.
I would say the specific context is also important.
Lets posit the existence of a Hypothetical Store, a ‘low effort grocery store’, where you pay some amount more for the minor luxury of being explicitly allowed to do various inconvenient things. Leave food lying where-ever instead of putting it back, when you drop something don’t help clean up, leave the carts lying around, etc. Such a store could exist, either because the people paying for it value their time that much, or just because nothing says the market can’t cater to inconsiderate people.
And in this Hypothetical Store, the employees would of course be paid more to compensate for them having to deal with this, and so it’s all fine and daisies.
But this is in the Hypothetical Store. In real life, grocery stores exploitatively employ minimum-wage workers who can’t even afford a roof without working multiple jobs. You are most certainly not paying for any such luxury, and refusing to do these minor time-saving actions is perhaps analogous to walking by a homeless person and kicking their jar of coins.
Now, there’s plenty of room for debate about whether it’d be better for individuals to never desire the services that such a Hypothetical Store offers, or whether real grocery stores should aspire to be the fair-paying Hypothetical Store. But that grocery stores should actually pay a living wage, or just use damn machine robots instead of asking for people robots, is pretty much a given.
(I suppose Amazon is the logical conclusion of the real Hypothetical Store, though they certainly have their own problems.)
You know, I was going to say “That’s such a human thing to say,” except on reflection, what it really is a such an American, or maybe modern English thing to say. I have a rather harder time picturing that argument being made in good faith in, say, Germany, and I honestly think if someone were to make it in Japan they’d probably be compelled to commit seppuku on the spot by the sheer force of social disapproval.
But, in short, we’re definitely not because that’s not what return means.
(intr.) to pass back to an earlier possessor
(tr.) to bring, send, or put back to a former or proper place
And even if you can convince someone due to the distinctly sloppy nature of English and the permissive tendencies of humanity that “abandon in the rough vicinity of” is a legitimate meaning of “return”, it is quite definitely not what misenlétár means. That first particle means “initial place, origin”: if it came from my hand, you put it back in my hand; if it came from a facility, you take it back to that facility, etc., etc., unless otherwise specified, and this is so for all grammatical, legal, and social purposes.
Also, even if the above were not the case and you could twist the meaning of return around in that sort of way, they have heard all about using the letter of an agreement to defeat the spirit of an agreement over there, and this is the first step down a dark path that ends up with you being only able to shop at Honest Uncle Eneri’s Overpriced Goods Emporium for the Incorrigible Solecist, where everything costs maybe 300% of normal due to the putting-up-with-your-bullshit margin.
(Assuming such a Hypothetical Store exists. It is entirely possible that no-one’s willing to put up with this sort of person at any price, that no-one’s willing to live next to anyone willing to serve this sort of person, or that they by and large get the point before hitting rock bottom on the Ephemeral Contract rep-net and depart post-haste for a polity willing to tolerate this sort of degradation of the public environment.)
That’s the component that’s a contextual, implied ‘social’ contract - the specific courtesy of not leaving a mess behind oneself.
Quite explicit, actually. That’s the Fundamental Contract, first clause, Right of Domain. Whether you go with the most traditional “All others owe thee respect while within it, and it the same respect as thyself.” or the more modern “A person’s property and domicile may not be moved, destroyed, occupied, damaged, altered, or made use of without his informed consent,” it should be very clear that leaving a mess behind oneself is prohibited. That’s the legal basis behind meddlement, sabotage, and crimes against nature.
(Technically, I suspect, there you could prosecute cart-abandonment as misdemeanor theft on the grounds that lacking the intention to return it vitiates the consent of the owner to lend it to you.)
I think it’s important to make a distinction between Here Stores and There Stores. Here stores are blatantly manipulative, exploitative bastards. Dealing with them should probably be treated more like dealing with Evil Badperson McGee, who commits technically legal crimes and exact words every other breath, but unfortunately has roped a lot of innocent people into his employ.
So you put the cart back because you don’t want to make things any harder for those poor bastards in his employ, not because of any obligation to a entity that clearly will not reciprocate.
There Stores, however, are different. In that they’re going to be not evil, and they will have courtesy for you, and so you should reflect that back, and if you don’t reflect it back then that is a failing on your part.
(Also, it largely misses the point of the hypothetical, but I would expect the Hypothetical Store to exist There except that it alleviates the need for the obligations instead of explicitly permitting violation of them. A helpful concierge helps you load your car and takes the cart back, you can flag down a employee to help you reshelve something, etc. Or the logical conclusion, Amazon Except We Don’t Exploit Our Employees.)
They lent you the cart. You’re the one in a position to reciprocate something.
(As a side note: believing that virtue [and worse, obligation] is only owed to the virtuous is probably something else that qualifies one as Not Wanted In Imperial Space.
Even if your neighbor is Hitler, give him back his lawnmower and be gracious in your thanks for the loan.
Then kill him.)
[And while it is off-topic for General, I also take a moment to note that no-one there would share your definition of “exploitation”, for reasons which I should not need to reexplain.]
I’m not sure what you mean by this, is it stating that there’s a unspoken assumption that we’re always comparing Here and There? Or is it stating that we only talk about There, and so I should act as such and not bring up Here?
And that’s fair. I wouldn’t want to go to Imperial space either; it’s a nice place, and I certainly don’t want to track any muck into there.
It’s a reminder that General is for talking about there, and Random is for talking about everything else. This is not to say that here can never be relevant in discussions of there, but at the time of posting, it quite escaped me how your digression on how you believe the entire retail industry to be super-evil was relevant in any there-touching way to the discussion.
On the latter:
Hey, if you can’t take a strong ethical stance against sufficiently general exceptions that would permit whoever you personally consider The Worst follow your ethical system perfectly, what the hell can you take a strong ethical stance against?
(I mean. Seriously. Everyone short of Dark Kantians believes you should be good to people you like and approve of. Everyone. If those are the only people you’re required to behave virtuously towards, you might as well just skip to declaring everyone a bodhisattva now and have done with it.)
To generalize (this is General after all), this is a mass-korasan thing to say. That is to say, the (disordered) philosophy that holds that the proper response to korasan behavior in a few is to extend diluted versions of korasan-like behavior to as many persons as possible, on the implied theory that “every sophont’s home is his castle* should read “every sophont is a korasan”.
An eldrae would instantly see the absurdity of the premise: you can’t have korasan of any sort without theft from somesoph, somewhere; if one extends and diffuses privilege without the counterbalancing responsibility, one might bolster the illusion of freedom — but at the cost of making the total theft measurably greater.
The English are beginning to feel the consequences of this absurdity. (I refer specifically to the largest of the four constituent countries. AFAICT from across the pond, the Welsh and Scots already knew this.) Americans are, for the most part, still oblivious that such a bargain was made in their name.
And even within the Union, the distinction between the states is often one of how much this mass-korasan notion has taken hold — or, to reverse the perspective, how much the notion of social responsibility has been expurgated.
It’s not “rough”, and I point to the cart-retention systems in some places as evidence. The bounds are those of the property line. It’s precise; it’s just sloppy. And as you point out with the Eldraic term, one thing eldrae are not is sloppy: they quite literally had it edited out of them.
Likewise, the distinction here of English vs. Eldraic is not the capability of precise speech; it’s the accessibility. To speak precisely in English is inefficient and difficult to access, so much so that multiple ‘dialects’ exist for just that purpose. Eldraic makes precision easy.
I lol’d so hard at this that my spouse became worried!
Of course the eldrae wrote it out explicitly. How shortsighted of me.
Makes me contemplate a micro-tort system analogous to a micro-payment system, to deal with such matters efficiently without wasting judicial resources…
