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But a rich person wouldn't sleep under the bridge, which is the whole point of that saying. Namely, that what counts as a universal ban can often just be a targeted ban at a select group of people, even if that was never the intent.
There's nothing wrong with a targeted ban. All bans are targeted bans. Murder bans target murderers. Theft bans target thieves. Not all people would engage in all banned activities were they not banned. This has no bearing at all on whether such activities should be banned.
The point of the saying is that targeted bans are not seen for what they are, and that what may be an ostensibly universal ban is only focused on one particular group more than others.
It is, as you say, those with murderous inclinations who are most affected by bans on murder. But the existence of good targeted bans shouldn't be a shield for any particular one.
Framing it as a targeted ban at all, or as "focused on one particular group", is dangerously misleading, because it strongly implies intent.
The way I see it, the saying is a classic motte and bailey. The motte is that we should be careful that our universal bans are actually universal. The bailey is that any disparate impact is intentional, and any actually universal ban would not have disparate impact.
Yes, and if this was a more casual conversation, you would rightfully call me out on it. But I am not lying when I say that I only believe in the motte.
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I think both you and @BurdensomeCount demonstrate the different perspectives one can approach this from. For one, it's about the relatively minor suffering diffused among all the rest of people of society, for the other, it's about the acute suffering of a much smaller and distinct subset of society. I feel like so much of the culture war is around who prioritizes which higher in what context. Personally, in this, I'm sympathetic to the point of the original quote, but unfortunately the point can't really be made convincingly to people who see it from the other angle.
Really? I wouldn't have expected this for someone who accepts:
If you accept that framing you must accept that what is happening here is no different to the tragedy of the commons. By choosing to shit on the commons you are causing a minor suffering diffused to everyone in society while by choosing to behave properly and pay for the disposal of your waste you are taking a much bigger hit upon yourself and keeping the commons nice and feces free.
Pretty much everyone I know consider the tragedy of the commons to be an actual tragedy, they think that causing the minor suffering diffused upon the rest of society (in our example sleeping under bridges/shitting on the commons) in return for reducing the suffering upon yourself is a net bad and should be strongly discouraged, even if it leads to people having to pay more for their personal costs. Here that position translates to forbidding sleeping under bridges; it's directly isomorphic to the original tragedy of the commons and yet a large amount of people have the opposite views here than they do with the TotC.
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