I recently faced a dilemma.
A real-estate agent called me to notify me that a property I was inquiring about was sold before auction. I was an interested party and the fact that they did not try to solicit a price from me before accepting a signed contract to another party means they did not do their best to secure the best deal for the owner. I happen to actually know the owner as well, (I have no great worries about losing the deal) I wonder if I should report the events to the owner who effectively lost out on an unknown number of dollars (AUD~$10,000-$50,000), from myself or possibly a number of other interested parties who might have taken the opportunity to bid - had the property either gone to auction or been offered to other parties before the auction.
Extra info: The owner is currently unwell and does not need any kind of further stress in their life; also I don't think anything can be done to change the situation as contracts have been signed (also this was a week ago); also property prices in this local marketplace have gone wild recently, causing stupid things like this to happen - probably frequently. I wonder if regulation of the bidding marketplace would make this less likely to happen.
There are probably cases where it's rational for a real-estage agent to sell a property before an auction. An auction could well return less money than the other party offered.
I wonder if regulation of the bidding marketplace would make this less likely to happen.
You can write regulations to fix single problems. That comes with a cost. It increases bureaucracy. More forms have to be filled. It's more complex to sell property.
In general I would expect the free market to solve this issue better than a government produced system.
[CW: This post talks about personal experience of moral dilemmas. I can see how some people might be distressed by thinking about this.]
Have you ever had to decide between pushing a fat person onto some train tracks or letting five other people get hit by a train? Maybe you have a more exciting commute than I do, but for me it's just never come up.
In spite of this, I'm unusually prepared for a trolley problem, in a way I'm not prepared for, say, being offered a high-paying job at an unquantifiably-evil company. Similarly, if a friend asked me to lie to another friend about something important to them, I probably wouldn't carry out a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. It seems that I'm happy to adopt consequentialist policy, but when it comes to personal quandaries where I have to decide for myself, I start asking myself about what sort of person this decision makes me. What's more, I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad heuristic in a social context.
It's also noteworthy (to me, at least) that I rarely experience moral dilemmas. They just don't happen all that often. I like to think I have a reasonably coherent moral framework, but do I really need one? Do I just lead a very morally-inert life? Or have abstruse thought experiments in moral philosophy equipped me with broader principles under which would-be moral dilemmas are resolved before they reach my conscious deliberation?
To make sure I'm not giving too much weight to my own experiences, I thought I'd put a few questions to a wider audience:
- What kind of moral dilemmas do you actually encounter?
- Do you have any thoughts on how much moral judgement you have to exercise in your daily life? Do you think this is a typical amount?
- Do you have any examples of pedestrian moral dilemmas to which you've applied abstract moral reasoning? How did that work out?
- Do you have any examples of personal moral dilemmas on a Trolley Problem scale that nonetheless happened?
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