The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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"Gentlemen" of the motte. What do you expect in return for... being a gentleman.
I was reading a post in my cities subreddit asking "Do you give up your metroseat for women?".
Most responses were along the lines of "no unless they are pregnant". But some were really making an attempt to claim the moral highground. "My mom raised me to be a gentlemen" from the males to "there are no more gentlemen!" From the females.
I was left thinking thats well and good. But no man is actually taking a purely raw deal just because right? He must expect something in return, not from the individual woman, but the social structure as a whole. I dont know.
What is that something?
A healthy soul. It's not a transaction, it's axiomatic. You don't do it because it delivers good results, you do it because it's good to do.
I would argue that it only appears axiomatic because it was useful for the millennia humans lived in tribes where a small action to a neighbor or stranger benefitted the group’s sum total good (including expansion of lands and progeny down the line). If the well-being of my descendants is inherently tied to the well-being of the person down the street, which it is in pre-modernity, then the rule of always helping neighbors or strangers is optimal for the group’s good. Today, spending even an iota of thought on a stranger is worse for your own group’s interest, unless you are picking and choosing who to help.
Perhaps an equivalent example would be how there’s a difference between doing extra help in a group project, and then secretly helping a competing project.
what you've just described is an axiom of "humans are animals and human behavior is nothing more or less than the expression of evolutionary drives." Having applied that axiom, you then find that the question answers itself. The thing is, the axiom is itself a choice, or more accurately a composite of a large number of smaller choices made over time. Different choices result in different axioms, which result in different self-evident answers.
You could claim that it's really biology at the base, not axioms. You can even argue that there's no such thing as free will, that choice is impossible, that we're all deterministic or pseudo-deterministic machines winding slowly down. The thing, though, is that none of these statements actually generate meaningful predictions; if I act in a way evolutionary theory wouldn't predict, you'll either claim that my evolutionary drives are misfiring ala the beetle that tries to mate with beer bottles, or else claim that there's some indirect benefit. Meanwhile, some groups really do act as though they believe that we're just animals, and others act as though they believe we are not, and the predominance of those beliefs correlate with changes in population-level behavior.
...You understand that your appeal to scientific rationalism here isn't actually grounded in science, fact, or objective truth, right? Like, at all? What do you think the rate is for people getting stabbed in fights over bus seats, versus the rate of people getting stabbed for offering someone their seat? How close do the rates of those two need to be for the increased risk of not giving a seat to be offset by the "resource advantage to the community" of keeping it?
Maybe evolution selects for the sort of person who just adopts a simple, hard-and-fast rule, and it's the obsessive search for loopholes that's the misfire? Alternatively, maybe my community is better off with the sort of person who is aware of and cares about others, rather than focusing all their attention on seeking selfish advantage?
It’s not at all clear to me that “selflessness” is actually the operative virtue here. The OP wasn’t about giving up one’s seat to a person who is infirm, elderly, or pregnant; in those scenarios, it is credible to claim that the “selfless” act would be to give up one’s seat, since the other person would very obviously benefit more from sitting down than you would, and would be harmed more by being made to stand than you would be.
But, you’re not suggesting that every person is obligated to give up a seat to every other person; this would lead to wacky and madcap scenes of people endlessly rotating seats, each one eagerly vacating the seat as soon as it is occupied. The OP was about whether it’s gentlemanly for any man to give up his seat to any woman; since the average healthy young women is only negligibly more harmed by standing than the average healthy young man is, it’s unclear why a man giving up his seat to a woman is an obligatory act, let alone a “selfless” one. I’m not even disagreeing with you that axioms in general are useful, nor even that this particular axiom is maladaptive; I’m merely questioning the justification you’ve provided to support the continued existence of said axiom.
"Selfless" might be the wrong term, but I was aiming for an antipode to the sort of merciless winner-take-all competition implied by: "Today, spending even an iota of thought on a stranger is worse for your own group’s interest, unless you are picking and choosing who to help."
The idea is that men should inculcate self-sacrifice toward the worthy, and while individual women might not be worthy, women collectively are. Women are, indeed, wonderful, or to put it a bit more precisely, good women are of incalculable value. Cementing this attitude is well worth the minimal deadweight loss from minor sacrifices granted to the unworthy; given the triviality of the sacrifice, attempting more than the most minimal gatekeeping is probably a net-negative.
The counterargument, implied by the OP, is that a substantial percentage of the woman one is likely to encounter in an urban American environment today is not a good woman, and is therefore unworthy of the sacrifice. And that furthermore, by continuing to reward women despite their doing nothing whatsoever to merit that reward - and in fact, in many cases, actively doing harmful things and displaying harmful attitudes that are the opposite of the things that ought to earn the reward - we are allowing women to become utility monsters and auto-defectors.
Now, again, I’m not saying I fully buy this line of reasoning. I don’t bear anywhere near the level of ill will and distrust toward random women that some commenters here do. Also, if other respondents are correct that average women seem to react poorly to being offered seats, perhaps it is because those women are cognizant of precisely the web of reciprocal interpersonal obligations and standards of behavior which your preferred social regime would enforce, and they have decided to opt out, precisely because they are unwilling to take on the expectation of living up to the standards necessary to merit the reward in the first place.
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