>"...The strong sense of holding people responsible is >getting more and more difficult," said Joan McGregor, With sentences like this, we should hold Joan responsible for SOMETHING. Did she really say those words in that order? > a philosopher at Arizona State University. "We still hold people > responsible all the time in a >legal sense. But in a moral sense, it's as though no one is responsible >any more." I've been thinking about the changing 'morality' of people in the past 10 or 15 years. I think it goes hand-in-hand with the mentality of even small businesses: i.e. get paid as much as you can for doing as little as possible. EVERYONE is out to screw you before you screw them. It's getting increasingly difficult to do honest business. By "honest", I mean, you give someone [the expected] value for their money. It's becoming increasingly 'acceptable' to rip people off. I mean, for 'good folk' to do it. Three examples: 1) A former employee of mine [and for all appearances, a very decent person] told me that she bought some furniture from a large furniture company and they delivered a very similar but much more expensive living room set. She didn't tell them, but a couple of weeks later, they phoned her to tell her that they were delivering the correct stuff and picking up the wrong stuff. She actually thought that she was perfectly entitled to keep the (twice as costly) furniture that she had NOT paid for. 2) at a recent church meeting in our town, there was a discussion about rising natural gas costs and the fact that the church's gas contract was due to run out in a few months. One _deacon_ suggested [seriously] 'maybe we should just hope that they don't remember and keep charging us the present price." Another deacon posed the question "well that wouldn't be very honest would it?" to which he was fairly groaned at by the other 6. AND THIS WAS AT A CHURCH!!! 3) I had a furnace problem last September and had to call an HVAC dude (are you listening MIKE?) to come and do some work. After futzing around for 3 hours, he had the problem licked. Just as he was writing up the bill, his cell-phone rang and he sat on the steps of MY house talking about someone else's job for 12 minutes. After he hung up, he looked at his watch and filled in his hours. At 80 dollars an hour, he over-charged me a full 15 minutes which is 20 dollars of MY money. Now, I complained and got him to reduce his bill, but it's the principle of the thing. This is today's contemporary business practice. I shouldn't HAVE to write 3 letters a week to businesses complaining about their service, they should give me good service in the first place. But they don't. And it's becoming increasingly acceptable and even worse, expected. My theory is that our actual culture is changing so that the vast majority of people actually think that it's absolutely okay to rip people off if you can get away with it. "Buyer Beware" has transformed into "human beware". Perhaps it's just the revenge of the little people. not holding out hope about the goodness of humanity, Paul ########## Paul Stone pas@xxxxxxxx Kingsville, ON, Canada ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html