I don’t find that view hard to understand or hard to agree with. I wonder whether we’re interpreting that passage differently from one another. Here’s what I take it to mean:
“To value 15 seconds of _your_ time more than $5 of _the local pizza place’s_ money is to be excessively selfish. If you cost them $5 to save yourself 15s, then you are making the world a substantially worse place on net for a trifling benefit to yourself. Decent people do not do that, and if you do it you should feel bad about it.”
I can totally understand how someone might disagree with that (way 1: “yes, I really do care that much more about myself than about random other people, and I don’t see any reason why I should be ashamed of that”; way 2: “in this situation the local restaurant has clearly decided that they don’t mind getting $5 less in order to save their customer a phone call and hence make it more likely that they get that customer at all, and if they’re OK with that decision I don’t see why I shouldn’t be”) but it seems clearly reasonable to me.
The view you articulate is perfectly intelligible. I’m just not sure it corresponds to the view expressed in the OP. Why invoke notions like defection, if all you want to say is that you should not impose a great cost on others when you can do so at a small cost to yourself?
Why invoke notions like defection, if all you want to say is that you should not impose a great cost on others when you can do so at a small cost to yourself?
I do observe that this is actually what defection is in the canonical game theory sense.
(No comment on whether or how that should apply to the current discussion)
In game theory, the costs and benefits in terms of which defection is defined occur in a well-defined context of strategic interaction. My objection was to the use of defection in a way that implied that the situation described in the post had a particular game-theoretic structure, when in fact no clear account was given of what that structure was supposed to be.
I don’t find that view hard to understand or hard to agree with. I wonder whether we’re interpreting that passage differently from one another. Here’s what I take it to mean:
“To value 15 seconds of _your_ time more than $5 of _the local pizza place’s_ money is to be excessively selfish. If you cost them $5 to save yourself 15s, then you are making the world a substantially worse place on net for a trifling benefit to yourself. Decent people do not do that, and if you do it you should feel bad about it.”
I can totally understand how someone might disagree with that (way 1: “yes, I really do care that much more about myself than about random other people, and I don’t see any reason why I should be ashamed of that”; way 2: “in this situation the local restaurant has clearly decided that they don’t mind getting $5 less in order to save their customer a phone call and hence make it more likely that they get that customer at all, and if they’re OK with that decision I don’t see why I shouldn’t be”) but it seems clearly reasonable to me.
The view you articulate is perfectly intelligible. I’m just not sure it corresponds to the view expressed in the OP. Why invoke notions like defection, if all you want to say is that you should not impose a great cost on others when you can do so at a small cost to yourself?
I do observe that this is actually what defection is in the canonical game theory sense.
(No comment on whether or how that should apply to the current discussion)
In game theory, the costs and benefits in terms of which defection is defined occur in a well-defined context of strategic interaction. My objection was to the use of defection in a way that implied that the situation described in the post had a particular game-theoretic structure, when in fact no clear account was given of what that structure was supposed to be.