Saturday, August 08, 2015

Morality: discuss amongst yourselves

When is it moral to have someone else clean your toilet for you?

My first suggestion would be that it never is -- there are some things that we should ALL do for ourselves, at least mostly, at least when we are physically able.

My second suggestion would be that it might be moral when you pay your servant enough for him to have a servant of his own.  Which of course never really happens.

There is, as Amanda Palmer elaborates upon, "exchange-exchange" -- you fix my car, I fix you supper.  Good old Eleutheros would have called those exchanges "like coin" I think.   You do a painting for me, I do an interpretive dance for you.   But few exchanges are like that.  Most involve class disparity.  This can be overcome.  But only, as far as I can tell (and I've been on both sides of this) by the servant class.

It is the whole reason for foot washing, which, well, culturally you probably don't even know about.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whatever happened to old Eleutheros?

CG said...

He probably went to the Heaviside Layer. And you?