When you sit down at a table with service, you are entering a contractual relationship with the waitress (and also with the restaurant). If you are not going to tip the waitress, a person concerned with honoring contracts would say so, and if they’re not going to order food, they would again request permission from the waitress. This is just to demonstrate that there is a contract. In practice this wouldn’t work, because the waitress is bound by social norms and the demands of the restaurant to serve you anyway. Thus, not tipping is a form of stealing.
The reason why there is this confusion about whether tipping is required is because the contract is between just the pair of people (the person paying for the meal and the waitress) and it can be a subjective matter whether the waitress has upheld her part of the contract. If you don’t believe she has upheld her service component of the contract, you can tip less or not at all.
But not tipping a waitress who has given good service is not completely unlike secretly pocketing one dollar of her tip from another table, especially if she is busy and she has paid the opportunity cost of not serving another table. Sitting down and explaining you only have 80 cents for coffee is OK (socially acceptable) but you should realize you are requesting her service and time for free.
There are lots of societal rules that expected to be followed even if they aren’t enforced. Is it OK to take a banana from a fruit vendor and start eating it? It’s very unlikely they will call the cops—they will probably just complain loudly in an effort to shame you. But if you don’t feel shame, can you then take bananas freely?
Harder question: If someone tells you they lost their wedding ring and you find it in the stairwell, can you sell it if you plan to give the money to save lives of starving children? I guess this idea was explored in Robin Hood. What if you happen to know they’re cheating on their spouse?
I simultaneously feel applause lights for ‘being rational means being free of constraints that are only perceived’ and applause lights the moral feeling that ‘the ends can’t justify the means’; if you want to save starving children, you should find a good path to doing so. But then I don’t use my disposable income to save starving children, so I don’t know that my morality is on the up-and-up anyway. I will relate that when I was in my early 20s I went through a stealing phase (in ethically light-gray cases). I just didn’t see what the consequences were and I didn’t care about social norms. Now that I’m an adult with something to lose (I have a job and am a parent), I’m grateful for society and I think that getting along with society is pretty important. I wouldn’t steal, not even from a big anonymous corporation. (Just the other day, our chain saw broke while we were using it and my husband and I debated about whether we could ethically exchange it.) But too many times society has given me the benefit of the doubt and given me a break, so I am motivated to act in good faith even when it’s not ‘required’.
When you sit down at a table with service, you are entering a contractual relationship with the waitress (and also with the restaurant). If you are not going to tip the waitress, a person concerned with honoring contracts would say so, and if they’re not going to order food, they would again request permission from the waitress. This is just to demonstrate that there is a contract. In practice this wouldn’t work, because the waitress is bound by social norms and the demands of the restaurant to serve you anyway. Thus, not tipping is a form of stealing.
The reason why there is this confusion about whether tipping is required is because the contract is between just the pair of people (the person paying for the meal and the waitress) and it can be a subjective matter whether the waitress has upheld her part of the contract. If you don’t believe she has upheld her service component of the contract, you can tip less or not at all.
But not tipping a waitress who has given good service is not completely unlike secretly pocketing one dollar of her tip from another table, especially if she is busy and she has paid the opportunity cost of not serving another table. Sitting down and explaining you only have 80 cents for coffee is OK (socially acceptable) but you should realize you are requesting her service and time for free.
There are lots of societal rules that expected to be followed even if they aren’t enforced. Is it OK to take a banana from a fruit vendor and start eating it? It’s very unlikely they will call the cops—they will probably just complain loudly in an effort to shame you. But if you don’t feel shame, can you then take bananas freely?
Harder question: If someone tells you they lost their wedding ring and you find it in the stairwell, can you sell it if you plan to give the money to save lives of starving children? I guess this idea was explored in Robin Hood. What if you happen to know they’re cheating on their spouse?
I simultaneously feel applause lights for ‘being rational means being free of constraints that are only perceived’ and applause lights the moral feeling that ‘the ends can’t justify the means’; if you want to save starving children, you should find a good path to doing so. But then I don’t use my disposable income to save starving children, so I don’t know that my morality is on the up-and-up anyway. I will relate that when I was in my early 20s I went through a stealing phase (in ethically light-gray cases). I just didn’t see what the consequences were and I didn’t care about social norms. Now that I’m an adult with something to lose (I have a job and am a parent), I’m grateful for society and I think that getting along with society is pretty important. I wouldn’t steal, not even from a big anonymous corporation. (Just the other day, our chain saw broke while we were using it and my husband and I debated about whether we could ethically exchange it.) But too many times society has given me the benefit of the doubt and given me a break, so I am motivated to act in good faith even when it’s not ‘required’.