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One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens... The way I see it is that there is no such thing as "commercial activity". There is voluntary activity of a
by murbard2 11y ago
One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens...
The way I see it is that there is no such thing as "commercial activity". There is voluntary activity of all sorts, and all kind of transactions happen, whether it be through payments, barter or goodwill. If I'm exempt from the ADA when inviting friends over, so should you be when you rent your room on AirBnB, and so should the motel across the street. All exist on a continuum, and the "sharing economy" is now making that continuum more explicit than ever before.
Decreeting that some activity is commercial and subjecting it to government rules merely because it involves money is arbitrary and unfair. Laissez faire, laissez passer.
- Dylan16807 11y agoHow can there be no such attribute if there is a continuum of that attribute? Picking thresholds is not unfair. It's the fundamental way that life interacts with the world around it. You physically cannot examine everything that could affect you with infinite precision. The job of regulation is not to pick a mythical "perfect" result for every possible case, it's to force a good guideline into place. This is partially arbitrary, and that is okay. It doesn't matter if that fine is $200 or $220, the regulation just needs to work.
- murbard2 11y agoWhat I mean to say is that the attribute isn't categorical, even though it is treated as such in the discussion. I'm also not saying the regulation cannot "work" by picking a threshold, I am appealing to our moral intuition that regulating private behavior is wrong to explain why regulating "commercial" behavior is also wrong.
- Dylan16807 11y agoBut how does it explain that? The situations are clearly very different on either end of the spectrum, so you can't directly use the intuition from one end on the other. The only thing you've really shown is that the categorization will be mildly imperfect.
- murbard2 11y agoOur moral intuitions tend to rely on categorical differences.
- Dylan16807 11y agoThere's rarely such a thing as a perfect category in real life. Arbitrary categories are still categories, and still work with moral intuition, they just take slightly more care around corner cases. Extrapolating from one case is a bad idea when categories are fuzzy. You find such things as the sorites paradox.