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Notes -
Thanks to everyone who answered my hypothetical about the startup.
General opinion seems to come down to ‘you don’t owe them anything but a decent sum of money would be a gentlemanly / ladylike show of gratitude. Which seems about right to me.
One of the reasons I’m interested in the question is that much social conflict comes from the discrepancy between the market value of labour (determined primarily by the number and type of people able to do the work) and what you might call the utility value (determined by how important it is that the work gets done. For example, @PutAHelmetOn’s code saves hundreds of thousands in processing costs, farmers stop everyone dying of famine, longshoremen make it possible to have international trade (modulo automation).
I would say the primary economic conflict of the last two hundred years is that the employees think in terms of the utility of their work while customers and employers think in terms of the market value.
Trade unions and guilds have historically been used as a method of arbitrage between these two values, limiting competition to drive market value closer to utility value. And the communist states show pretty clearly to my that trying to base your society on something other than the market value causes problems. I suppose the welfare state is basically ‘we don’t owe you this money but we’re going to give some of it to you anyway’.
Would like to write an effort post but this is what I have for now.
(Meta: is it obnoxious to do multi-top-posts like this? I didn’t want to talk about these ideas right away because I felt it would bias the replies, but at the same time it seems like a waste to write this as a second level reply in an old thread just before the new CW thread opens up).
In Aristotle's Politics, he observes that families hold property "in common" while cities hold property privately (but for public benefit). He thinks this is natural, because if cities treated property as communal, no one would have stewardship and freeloaders would be a problem--but with our true intimates, it's actually normal and natural to live communally.
What you are saying sounds to me like kind of a modern take on the same phenomena, or maybe even just a more granular take. The reason we have the law of contract is to facilitate agreement between non-intimates. But the line between family and stranger can be more of a spectrum, and in many circumstances we find ourselves treating strangers as near kin, at least temporarily.
I don't think I have anything substantive to add, really, I just think it's always interesting to observe that these questions have been the subject of philosophical inquiry for all of recorded history.
You might be interested in https://www.amazon.com/Order-without-Law-Neighbors-Disputes/dp/0674641698
It is a similar point in that law is useful when the game is functionally not iterative (either because of the size of the market or the size of the transaction) but when iterative law is basically irrelevant.
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