Offering jobs at less than the minimum wage is also exactly this too - people accepting those jobs are in a better position than if the jobs weren't available, yet many modern free societies have minimum wages.
Selling drugs to addicts falls under this category too, since if they didn't have the drugs easily available, they might do something worse to get them, and clearly they're chosing to buy them so they must be better off having them.
The same applies to your other examples. You and I are currently paying billions of low skill workers exactly $0/hour. Why are we morally blameless, but the person offering $3/hour is a villain?
As for addicts, in a society that didn't outlaw drugs, they wouldn't have much more trouble living a normal life than people who need coffee to function.
Should this be banned, too?
It should obviously be.
In fact the army has a long-ass history of setting up recruiting offices and exploting the most poor and desperate with false promises and BS to go do the fighting.
From Alabama and Mississipi down to Los Angeles, those recruiting offices are choke full of blacks, latinos and "white trash" sent to die (and kill) while privileged white folks enjoy their "patriotism".
By definition slavery isn't voluntary. Not that this changes your argument; servitude is banned internationally for approximately the same reasons as slavery.
> people accepting [less than minimum wage] jobs are in a better position than if the jobs weren't available
This is yet another example of the problem of using "profit" as the primary (or only) metric for human progress.
Are the people given non-livable wages in a more profitable position than if those jobs weren't available? Does the job improve their situation in general? Is the job using using low wages Wallmart-style to offload a portion of their personnel costs on taxpayers by paying such a small amount all employees are expected to always use government services?[1]
It is of vital importance to ask a wide variety of these questions. Using a single metric is p almost always going to give you an incomplete view of the situation.
[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-w...
Or surge pricing: the net effect is pricing out people with a lower income, while there are other, more fair solutions to the problem.
> In all cases the people involved could simply choose not to take the offer, and be no worse of.
That's the same kind of logic which gets you social advances like zero-hour contracts.
Helping a little (even if you benefit) is better than not helping at all.
However, if this spreads and becomes the "new normal" (eg, zero-hour contracts), this can result in a net diminution of social good compared to alternative outcomes where employers would have offered better terms to their employees. I think that's the issue people have with this kind of "improvement".
If you agree that certain actions can be moral in limited circumstances, you also agree to support the moral logic they're based on, on principle - even if that moral logic does huge harm elsewhere.
It's a superficially clever rhetorical argument, but it's not a very moral one.
If you're a poor person, you don't want to be in situation where PETA are offering to interfere in your life to make a political point - you want to be in a situation where you're not poor in the first place.
There's no point saying that bandaids can stop people bleeding and people who don't want to use them are bad, if you don't address why there are flesh wounds everywhere you look.
Are bandaids better than nothing? They are. But there are still people trying to fix the flesh wounds. Does the author support them, or not?
Yet poverty is improving globally ( http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/17/aid-trade-red... ). Given that, no one should be faulted for doing what they can to help locally.
> Are bandaids better than nothing? They are. But there are still people trying to fix the flesh wounds. Does the author support them, or not?
It doesn't matter. The author presented an idea that is important in its own right. I don't think there's any moral authority anyone can draw upon to say that he or she needs to do more. Anyone who thinks there is is proving the author's point.
If your house is burning and the fire brigade is too busy to help, and your neighbour Bob comes with a fire extinguisher and a smile on his face, and proposes to give you the fire extinguisher in exchange for your new car, I sure hope there won't be any hard feelings next time Bob drives past your house.
People like Bob are not out there to help others. They're out there to win.
He invented the fire brigade.
He also invented a fire brigade protection racket: if your house was burning he'd offer to buy it at a knock-down once-in-a-lifetime price before putting the fire out.
It was a solution of sorts. But maybe not the best of all possible solutions.
A popular misconception is this is unlikely in America, because nobody is suffering that badly. The people that believe this obviously haven't worked in the fast-food or similar low-pay industries recently[1].
[1] https://medium.com/@sarahkendzior/the-minimum-wage-worker-st...
I don't find this argument convincing.
1. I don't believe anyone in this thread has actually raised this objection.
2. If others have raised this objection, I would not believe this is their actual motivation. The (acerbic) discussion in this thread is not traceable to a future possibility of worse terms for employees - it is outrage over moral turpitude.
3. The possibility of a worse future requires strong proof to not choose real benefits now.
With 25 thousand facing water shutoffs, PETA offered help for up to ten people - technically an improvement on the status quo. But they also inserted their own agenda, diverting attention from Detroit's poverty and unemployment issues to the ethics of using animal products. This is definitely a worse outcome for the remaining 25k - 10 Detroit residents. It's fair to consider PETA's hijacking of the issue as a cost imposed on those affected by it.
No, and only an incredibly uncharitable reading of my comment could suggest otherwise.
What is it about this topic that makes people go crazy? The examples in the article involved: donating to the homeless, paying people's water bills, and taxi pricing. The comments here have brought up slavery, selling drugs to addicts, and avoiding criticism of brutal dictatorships. Please, try to retain a sense of proportion.
It could be argued that outrage over PETA brought more attention to the problems of Detroit. I didn't know about the water shutoff until my Facebook feed was full of PETA hate. But it doesn't matter. People didn't get angry at PETA for "diverting attention." They got angry at PETA because PETA only helped a little bit.
The "more fair" solutions to the problem of surge pricing involve either Uber themselves paying out of pocket, drivers not receiving fair compensation, or neglecting to tackle the problem at all.
Where does it stop? How is that morally different from a $denomination religious charity offering aid conditioned on your family joining the faith? I find that disgusting and manipulative.
And that's not the worst. To take another example, it's like an insurance company offering to lower your costs in exchange for having your driving and dietary habits tracked. It's all voluntary, sure. Except that ten years later, the rest of the market has taken note and it has become mandatory.
> The "more fair" solutions to the problem of surge pricing involve either Uber themselves paying out of pocket, drivers not receiving fair compensation, or neglecting to tackle the problem at all.
Random assignment would be a fair outcome, where everybody gets paid, and people get a chance of getting a ride.
People don't want a chance at a ride, they want a ride. And that desire is the fuel that drives us.
Why do you make the issue into a bizarre dilemma between freedom and fairness?
> People don't want a chance at a ride, they want a ride. And that desire is the fuel that drives us.
What does this have to with anything? Not everybody can have a ride in this situation. The question is only about the system you use to attribute rides.
This sounds like a very naive position ignoring dynamics of power. Indentured labour was also the result of a "voluntary agreement between individuals". See also the working conditions of migrant workers in the Gulf states - again the result of "voluntary agreement between individuals".
> raising prices is the utility-maximizing choice (across riders, drivers, and Uber)
Only across riders who can afford the surge price. It's the utility-minimizing choice for the rest.
It's really not. Without surge pricing, the people who can't afford surge pricing experience significantly worse outcomes as well. Specifically, they end up with very high wait times and cancellation rates, which ends up being a lot worse than the counterfactual world in which they saw the surge pricing and decided to take the subway instead. We have solid evidence for this: http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/chris.nosko/research/effects...
There is nothing unavoidable about that.
The only problem I have with such things is when someone agrees to one thing, but winds up with something else. That probably happened at least some of the time with indentured labor.
> It's the utility-minimizing choice for the rest.
You usually can't maximize utility for every single person. Maximizing total utility is the standard, and you haven't explained why we shouldn't do that here. "Won't somebody think of the ~~children~~ poor riders?"
[1]:http://www.nickkolenda.com/psychological-pricing-strategies/