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Prismattic comments on Public Service Announcement Collection - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (328)
The opportunity cost to a tall person of being asked to reach something for a short person is generally quite small. This remains true even if there are many short people who require such assistance.
The cost to a woman of having sex with every man who asks, in terms of pregnancy risk, disease risk, and status loss from being perceived as promiscuous is rather more significant.
I can see why an objectivist would try to include them in the same reference class; a utilitarian, on the other hand, doesn't have to reach far to find reasons not to.
OrphanWilde also made an example about writing Web pages, whose opportunity cost is much higher than for reaching stuff but much lower than for having sex, so there might be more of a continuum than you realize.
I can point to a conversation on these forums where a woman stated she had pity sex with guys, for pretty much the reasons I laid out - that's what pity sex -is-, it's having sex with someone out of that sense of obligation arising from a perceived social advantage. It's not like I took an entirely fictitious example and presented it as an analogue of real-world things, they're all real-world things, and they're not the only ones.
You're stating that they're different, but that's from an objective outside perspective; from the inside obligation feels like obligation, regardless of its reasonableness.
It depends on who exactly the person feeling the obligation is. For example, I definitely don't feel obligated to write Web pages for free for anyone who asks regardless of how busy I am.