Topics Ethics

Question Suppose Bob is wearing a pink shirt and John tells him, in an aggressive tone, to lose the shirt. Bob replies "You can't just tell people me to do like that," and John replies "But in saying so, you're trying to tell ME what to do!" Similar logic seems to apply with regards to all sorts of things - tolerance is another common example ("You need to tolerate my intolerance, Bob!"). A similar case might be John screaming at Bob, and Bob screaming back (presumably just to be heard) that John should stop screaming at him. My question is twofold: first, on a more formal level, this kind of problem seems common, yet I'm not sure what to call it, nor am I sure what exactly the problem is. Can you give me a brief formal analysis of these situations, and perhaps tell me whether this is a frequently-discussed topic? Second, how can Bob effectively respond in such situations? Should he even try, or is he in the wrong?

Accepted:
May 24, 2012

Comments

If Bob had said "You should never tell anyone what to do" then there would be logical trouble in the neighborhood. But that doesn't seem to be the best way to understand what he's is saying. More plausibly his point is that John is trying to impose his own tastes, and that (in the normal course of things) he's not entitled to do that. When Bob points this out, it isn't a matter of trying to impose his mere personal preferences on John, and Bob's complaint needn't be the bare fact that John is trying to tell him what to do. It's that John is trying to tell him what to do in a case where he has no business doing so.

Bob's obvious reply is something like this: "I'm not saying it would never be okay for you to tell me what to do. I'm saying that this isn't one of those times. And it is okay for me or anyone else to remind you when you're stepping over the line, just as it would be okay for you to remind me if that's what I were doing."