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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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
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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