One customer has no responsibility to ensure another customer’s experience is satisfactory. One could also point out that a customer (traditionally) has no responsibility to ensure that the staff are satisfied.
But I would say that one human being should consider how their actions might impact on other human beings—even if they happen to the customer. If I am in a restaurant it is possible for me to notice that my loud speaking is annoying to another person and tone it down. By all means recline your seat, I don’t care. But please don’t adopt the general policy that when you are the customer you can suddenly stop thinking about how your actions might effect others.
This is all very well as a general heuristic, and certainly being considerate of other people is a good thing.
But when we find ourselves in a situation where we have paid for some good or service, but then, having done so, are informed that if we actually gain possession of the good / enjoy the service—which we have already paid for!—then we’re bad people… then we should immediately be very suspicious. Because what this indicates, quite reliably, is that this is a situation which has either been deliberately engineered, or deliberately prevented from being resolved, by parties that benefit from this outcome—most obviously, of course, that would be the provider of the good/service, which certainly very much prefers to receive money, but provide nothing.
And so it is in this case. The airline benefits from this situation, as I have noted above. This entire problem could be fixed! It doesn’t have to exist at all. But it does, and the reason why it continues to exist is, in large part, the public perception of it as a moral problem, rather than an economic problem.
And so the bottom line is this: when we are told that reclining our seat on an airplane possibly makes us bad people, we are being cheated out of something that we paid for. The beneficiaries of this fraud are the airlines. And the people who make the moral claim are the airlines’ accomplices.
I, for one, do not care to comply with a moral demand, made by accomplices to a fraud of which I am the victim, that calls for me to participate in my own defrauding. Such a demand calls not for acquiescence, but for spite. Reclining one’s seat and thereby inconveniencing someone who believes that reclining makes you a bad person, is not only not morally blameworthy—on the contrary, it is a positive good. You are thereby doing your part to punish defectors (a prosocial act, without question), and helping to move society toward a state where everyone agrees that reclining a reclinable airplane seat is your right. That is, it seems clear to me, a good thing.
If it is common knowledge that you will be socially punished for reclining, you are no longer being deceived when you buy the seat. The deception only takes place if you buy the seat thinking there will be no social punishment but actually there is.
I am not buying “freedom from social punishment”, I am buying “the airline provides me the benefit they advertise”. If they allow this “social punishment” to deprive me of that benefit, then now it’s not “social punishment” anymore, but action by the airline.
And if the “social punishment” does not in fact prevent me from reclining, then what you wrote is just irrelevant.
One customer has no responsibility to ensure another customer’s experience is satisfactory. One could also point out that a customer (traditionally) has no responsibility to ensure that the staff are satisfied.
But I would say that one human being should consider how their actions might impact on other human beings—even if they happen to the customer. If I am in a restaurant it is possible for me to notice that my loud speaking is annoying to another person and tone it down. By all means recline your seat, I don’t care. But please don’t adopt the general policy that when you are the customer you can suddenly stop thinking about how your actions might effect others.
This is all very well as a general heuristic, and certainly being considerate of other people is a good thing.
But when we find ourselves in a situation where we have paid for some good or service, but then, having done so, are informed that if we actually gain possession of the good / enjoy the service—which we have already paid for!—then we’re bad people… then we should immediately be very suspicious. Because what this indicates, quite reliably, is that this is a situation which has either been deliberately engineered, or deliberately prevented from being resolved, by parties that benefit from this outcome—most obviously, of course, that would be the provider of the good/service, which certainly very much prefers to receive money, but provide nothing.
And so it is in this case. The airline benefits from this situation, as I have noted above. This entire problem could be fixed! It doesn’t have to exist at all. But it does, and the reason why it continues to exist is, in large part, the public perception of it as a moral problem, rather than an economic problem.
And so the bottom line is this: when we are told that reclining our seat on an airplane possibly makes us bad people, we are being cheated out of something that we paid for. The beneficiaries of this fraud are the airlines. And the people who make the moral claim are the airlines’ accomplices.
I, for one, do not care to comply with a moral demand, made by accomplices to a fraud of which I am the victim, that calls for me to participate in my own defrauding. Such a demand calls not for acquiescence, but for spite. Reclining one’s seat and thereby inconveniencing someone who believes that reclining makes you a bad person, is not only not morally blameworthy—on the contrary, it is a positive good. You are thereby doing your part to punish defectors (a prosocial act, without question), and helping to move society toward a state where everyone agrees that reclining a reclinable airplane seat is your right. That is, it seems clear to me, a good thing.
I am not buying “freedom from social punishment”, I am buying “the airline provides me the benefit they advertise”. If they allow this “social punishment” to deprive me of that benefit, then now it’s not “social punishment” anymore, but action by the airline.
And if the “social punishment” does not in fact prevent me from reclining, then what you wrote is just irrelevant.