There’s certainly a concern, very pressing in the case of the rape example, that if the risk is too high then there’s a responsibility upon society to mitigate it. In the case of the jumping off the roof example, building codes could mandate that the building be made impossible to jump off of or the surroundings be cushioned, but in this case most people would probably agree that the costs on society are too high to be justified in light of the minimal and easily avoidable risk. The case of the minimum wage worker falls somewhere in the middle ground between these, where the consequences are highly predictable, and the actions that would cause them avoidable, but with a significant cost of avoidance, like being unable to trust one’s acquaintances, and unlike being unable to jump off a roof. And of course, as in both the other examples, limiting that risk comes with an associated cost.
Whether society should be structured to allow people to raise families while working on minimum wage is a question of cost/benefit analysis, which in this case is likely to be quite difficult, so it doesn’t help to declare the question structurally similar to other, easier questions of cost/benefit analysis.
I don’t disagree with you on any particular point there. However, the quote I was responding to wasn’t, as I see it, attempting to explore the cost/benefit of raising minimum wage or subsidising the future of children. It was stating that they just shouldn’t have kids—and in that much represented an effective blank cheque. That seems the opposite of your, much more nuanced, approach; bound by implications of fact and reason that are going to be specific to particular issues and cases and thus can’t be generalised in the same way.
There’s certainly a concern, very pressing in the case of the rape example, that if the risk is too high then there’s a responsibility upon society to mitigate it. In the case of the jumping off the roof example, building codes could mandate that the building be made impossible to jump off of or the surroundings be cushioned, but in this case most people would probably agree that the costs on society are too high to be justified in light of the minimal and easily avoidable risk. The case of the minimum wage worker falls somewhere in the middle ground between these, where the consequences are highly predictable, and the actions that would cause them avoidable, but with a significant cost of avoidance, like being unable to trust one’s acquaintances, and unlike being unable to jump off a roof. And of course, as in both the other examples, limiting that risk comes with an associated cost.
Whether society should be structured to allow people to raise families while working on minimum wage is a question of cost/benefit analysis, which in this case is likely to be quite difficult, so it doesn’t help to declare the question structurally similar to other, easier questions of cost/benefit analysis.
I don’t disagree with you on any particular point there. However, the quote I was responding to wasn’t, as I see it, attempting to explore the cost/benefit of raising minimum wage or subsidising the future of children. It was stating that they just shouldn’t have kids—and in that much represented an effective blank cheque. That seems the opposite of your, much more nuanced, approach; bound by implications of fact and reason that are going to be specific to particular issues and cases and thus can’t be generalised in the same way.
Well, I’m not particularly in agreement with the original quote either, I just don’t endorse treating it as a Boo Light, against which any sort of argument is praiseworthy.