(wow, I've never experienced "that comment was too long" from Hacker News before... :/)
(part 2/2 <- make certain to read part 1/2 first)
> He knows it, which is why he was very careful to trick Avis's system and limit the amount he extracted to a level where Avis was unlikely to bother to stop him. Many manipulative people are excellent at telling carefully measured amounts of truth.
This would be a great argument, and again, is one I would entirely agree with... but the only evidence I see of this is "I figured two days would be enough, or the reps might become fed up with me", which is not because he is concerned he is extracting too much value from AVIS but instead seems to be due to not wanting to make the on-the-ground employees unhappy that they are having to do a bunch of repetitive labor. I make the same tradeoffs when I order things at restaurants that I feel quite confident the restaurant will make money and where they would want me to get what I want, because I feel for the people at the bottom who are being paid some fixed wage. He mentions the workload again later, seemingly because he actually cares.
I think you need to be very careful in this situation (as in all situations) to not try to generalize it to other situations you have dealt with and turn it into "just another instance": once we lose the specific situation, it becomes tempting for us to think we see evidence or facts that help us fit a specific situation into an overall narrative we have seen in the world--I will happily admit that I have made this mistake at many times--but it is important to always look back at the specifics of the situation we have chosen to discuss.
To recap, what seems to have happened here is you have two reasons for why we should be unhappy with this person. The first, is that we should simply dislike anyone participating in a transaction that is "a net negative for the society as a whole" (which is an exact quote of yours, and is similar to the "the idea of doing something wasteful, perhaps even net negative for society, for a very minor personal surplus" definition given by forgetsusername that you said "has [you] exactly right" in the comment I first replied to, and seems exactly to be what you mean given your usage of the phrase "the whole system" when you first posted). This metric is nice, because it is sounds like it would be reasonably objective and measurable, but it is very difficult to correctly evaluate:
- it requires an analysis of numerous third-party actors who are involved in the extended transaction (as it could be that AVIS and this person are accidentally colluding against EuroBonus, as in the realistic contract scenario I previously discussed),
- it leaves factors outside the control of the actor whose morals are in question to sway the balance (as maybe for this one time doing this it is a big win for AVIS's marketing department, making our moral judgements incapable of being repeated),
- it causes confusion with regards to who actually is causing the problem (as with the housing crisis or with network neutrality: we suddenly have to blame people who are obtaining short-term benefits by, for example, buying houses with inflated credit),
- it puts us into the horrible situation of realizing that most of us might constantly be immoral (as we spend money on useless junk that fails to make us any happier and ends up in a trash bin somewhere, instead of feeding someone else),
- it absolutely requires us to take into account the morality of all actors and how their decisions affect future outcomes (so we have to judge if AVIS's program should exist in the first place to see if undermining it is a "net negative to society").
As this argument path becomes more complex, rather than attempting to delve into any of the intricacies (which I personally find quite interesting! hence again, why I spend so much time talking to people about the careful interplay between "unlimited" bandwidth and network neutrality, and why I have carefully laid out so many fun examples), you have instead ended up moving to a new definition: that none of this actually matters, as we should be judging how the person we are accusing of exploitation treats the exploited. This metric is also nice in a different way, as it is conveniently local, but it then requires us to actually lay down what the person is doing that we don't like and "stick to it". The thing we classically don't like about "scam artists", "pickpockets", and "parasites" is that they do things to other people without informed consent.
This new definition has nothing at all to do with negative sum transactions and should not be modeled at the level of society. We often judge pickpockets even when they take something from someone who has enough money that their marginal utility of their possessions is much lower, and you have expressly rejected (which I don't disagree with) the notion that someone isn't a scam artist just because they scam someone we dislike (which I will again point out is an analysis we are absolutely required to do if we insist on a definition of morality that looks at the impact of transactions on the state of "society" or "the whole system").
Now, it isn't clear to me that this person actually acted in this way. It seems to me more likely that AVIS as a system is simply OK with this happening, at least today (due to PR), if not often... as in all seriousness, I have no clue where EuroBonus miles come from: there seems to be a treaty signed by the actual countries involved that defines some of how it works; one can trivially imagine situations like the one I described earlier: hell, the entire banner ad industry is set up like this, leading to the "collusion" problem of people who run popular web properties often encouraging and colluding with people who perform casual click fraud :/. Again: this entire space is fascinating, and it is really difficult to throw stones at people as flippantly as you have seemed to here.
But yeah: I feel like you either now need to actually take some deep dives into the complexity of your original position (and be prepared to judge AVIS, EuroBonus, and your own buying behavior as we attempt to analyze "the whole system" and apply that brutally objective metric to everyone, including those people you have attempted to protect in the past), or be willing to entirely discard it for the new definition which is both less controversial of a morale to possess (and so many people who are in this conversation, including myself, would likely not have bothered responding), but no less contentious as to whether it actually is safe to apply in this particular situation (and I truly feel like the case from the provided material is just not there).