@Khethil,
BlueChicken wrote:The overweight individual is reponsable for their weight,
Already I have to stop you. This is only partially true. Some people eat too much and have unhealthy lifestyles, others suffer from medical conditions
BlueChicken wrote: The company is under no obligation to serve everyone, but they do offer it to all who meet the criteria they set.
So companies should be able to discriminate on race, or gender, or anything else they please? If a company has no obligation to serve everyone, this is the result - a justification for segregation based on race or any other factor.
BlueChicken wrote: The individual is under no obligation to be dehumanized by the company, they choose to partake in the services provided and in doing so accept the conditions by which they are offered. They are not forced to purchase a ticket for a seat on the plane, nor are they forced to use it: in choosing to do so they come under the requirements airlines set, which the airlines set based on their own reasoning.
All fine and well, but far short of justifying the dehumanization of certain individuals.
BlueChicken wrote:The company IS penalized in some fashion, otherwise there would be no necessary debate. The extra weight uses extra fuel, a cost they recover by charging more who do not meet a certain weight restriction. Further, those who require two seats (which in Canada they receive for the cost of one) penalize the airline in a fairly obvious fashion: the airline loses an entire seat because an individual who uses two seats but pays for one.
So a few extra dollars is more important than humanity. Brilliant idea :rolleyes:
BlueChicken wrote:The company's interests are not to remain humane, and if they are that exists alongside their bottom line rather than exceeding it.
The company's financial interests are opposed to being humane, that's true, but isn't that just a moral indictment of the company in question? Doesn't seem like a justification to say 'oh, but the company shouldn't be moral'.
If the company does have a responsibility to be humane, but also should be allowed to discriminate based on weight, then the bottom line has trumped humanity. That's a shame.
Quote:Yea, I'm not sure this is a question of morality here. It's fee-for-service; plain and simple. Space and weight make up "what is being sold" when one flies. If they take up two spaces, they should pay for two spaces. If they weigh more, they should pay more. It all comes down to paying for what you get.
And the problem here is that the bottom line is taken to be more important than humanity. If it all comes down to money, then compassion is out the window. Personally, I think compassion is more valuable than 'one dollar more'. Maybe I'm crazy.
Quote:If I crash my car 10 times this month, why should I be discriminated against with having to pay more?
Depends - did you cause the wreck? If so, then this is your fault. Discriminating against someone based on weight, and "discriminating" someone based on their actions are two very different situations.
Quote:If I decide I need four pizzas instead of one, why should I be made to pay for more?
Because you can choose not to eat those extra pizzas.
Quote:My wife's hair is long. So when she got a perm the other day, they used 2 bottles of treatment; thus, we were discriminated against by being made to pay more.
If she has a problem with this, she should cut her hair. But cutting some hair is vastly different than losing weight, especially when we consider the morbidly obese, people who are obese due to some medical condition over which they have little or no control.
Sheesh, Khetil, I know you are a deeper thinker than this.
Quote:If I weigh twice as much as anyone else (or your average person) flying on a plane and they charge me more because of this to compensate for fuel, it's simply paying more because more is being carried. Unless there's something else to the equation I'm missing here...
Yeah, human emotion. Happiness, compassion - morality.
I know in today's world we tend to think that economics has no use for morality, and considering the way economics is usually studied, there isn't much use for morality. But this seems to be a problem. Morality should not be tossed out the window just because profit margins are at stake - if we do toss out morality in favor of profit margins, we've made morality useless, obsolete.