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| Re: With the higher minimum wage, we should try again to eliminate the penny... (1190645) | |||
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Re: With the higher minimum wage, we should try again to eliminate the penny... |
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Posted by Nilet on Tue Jun 3 09:43:28 2014, in response to Re: With the higher minimum wage, we should try again to eliminate the penny..., posted by LuchAAA on Mon Jun 2 22:37:17 2014. All people are inherently self-interested. Altruism and morality only exist because those are in our self-interest (no matter what Ayn Rand has to say). If all of us agree to be moral and altruistic, then we're all better off for it. Said agreement can be enforced through social pressure, reciprocity, and the creation and enforcement of laws.Rich people are sufficiently shielded from social pressure, are sufficiently well-off that they don't need to rely on reciprocated altruism, and sufficiently able to control, subvert, or escape the influence of the law. Since they don't gain personally from being altruistic or moral, they revert to strictly selfish behaviour. Basically, in a one-off situation, morality and altruism is a prisoner's dilemma, where every rational person chooses the greedy or immoral option, hoping everyone else decides to be altruistic and moral but figuring greed is the better option either way. However, society is a decidedly ongoing affair, making altruism and morality into more of an iterated prisoner's dilemma, where cooperation is better over the long term as immoral behaviour forfeits future rewards; be the asshole who takes without giving and people stop giving. However, that assumes everyone starts on a roughly equal playing field and must obey the same rules. At best, a rich person has no need for the reward from mutual cooperation, and at worst the rich person can compel the other "player" to act against his own self-interest. So basically, rich people are no more likely to be assholes than anybody else— they're just free of the social pressures that keep everyone else's innate assholery (relatively) in check. |
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