An event-space was hosting a Christmas party in London. I arrived late, maybe 10pm. They had oversupplied food, and a large cake, topped with strawberries, had been abandoned in the corner. Rather than cutting a slice of cake, I simply took a strawberry from the top. I turned to my friend and said “This is unethical”[1] and ate the strawberry.
Clopus45 initially tells me that taking the strawberry was fine, but after some back-and-forth we’ve agreed on this assessment: Strawberries are the scarce, desirable resource; cake is the abundant substrate. The intended allocation bundles them together. By taking a strawberry without cake, you claim more than your proportional share of the good stuff while leaving strawberry-depleted cake for others. You might argue you weren’t going to eat cake regardless—but someone else might have wanted a properly-topped slice. The strawberry you took was theirs. This is mitigated by the likelihood that the cake would go uneaten anyway, but not eliminated by it.
I think that, if you’re about to do something that you know is wrong, it’s better to loudly declare to yourself and others that it’s wrong.
c.f. active inference, inoculation prompting, signalling, social memetics, etc, etc.
@Eli Tyre asked for an example:
An event-space was hosting a Christmas party in London. I arrived late, maybe 10pm. They had oversupplied food, and a large cake, topped with strawberries, had been abandoned in the corner. Rather than cutting a slice of cake, I simply took a strawberry from the top. I turned to my friend and said “This is unethical”[1] and ate the strawberry.
Clopus45 initially tells me that taking the strawberry was fine, but after some back-and-forth we’ve agreed on this assessment: Strawberries are the scarce, desirable resource; cake is the abundant substrate. The intended allocation bundles them together. By taking a strawberry without cake, you claim more than your proportional share of the good stuff while leaving strawberry-depleted cake for others. You might argue you weren’t going to eat cake regardless—but someone else might have wanted a properly-topped slice. The strawberry you took was theirs. This is mitigated by the likelihood that the cake would go uneaten anyway, but not eliminated by it.