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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

> Pay toilets are nasty, and ought to be illegal. Those of us who are not poor can afford the price, if we accept the practice; poor people can't.

Can't this be applied to basically anything? Food, water, electricity, pubic transport. Let's refuse to pay for all of these otherwise the poor can't afford it. Is this a parody webpage?

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You don't think society has a duty to feed people who would otherwise starve to death? Who do you think should pay to clean up the rotting corpse they leave behind?

Why would you pay for other people's food? Are you kidding? Cleaning up a corpse is much cheaper than feeding a poor person her whole life.

Because I'd rather live in a world where a few pennies out of my pocket results in everyone living a decent life, sans street corpses. Seriously, even if you're an extreme individualist, is there NO price you would pay to not have dead bodies strewn about the streets?

So you moved the goalposts. You were talking about the economic thing to do. I responded accordingly. Now you want to talk about ethics and morality.

It comes down to values. Our values have been shaped by stories that on average yield a high reward for a lot of people and they are based on aesthetics, empathy, social stability, food, peace, absence of pain and chaos and so on.

But it also has more direct causal motivation: If you don't fight for basic human rights, taxes, plurality etc., you will likely erode the stability of your own life unless you are completely emotionally, economically and technologically independent (which I doubt you are). There is always the possibility of an unexpected economic decline which a rational agent should take into account for maximizing their reward signals.

Food and water are already largely covered as a basic need in modern countries. Electricity and pubic transport have nothing directly humiliating or existential about them, but people are also negotiating to introduce a basic right for these commodities. Payed toilets in some sense do occupy a special spot in this space because they are such a basic and often very immediate and unpredictable need. This is different from e.g. the need for water, because you can typically suppress it for several hours or even days in an emergency situation.

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