That's a huge jump from "no smartphone" to "off the grid."
I prefer using laptops and I prefer doing my banking on my laptop. I'm online a lot. I do have a smartphone, usually an older one, for calls, messaging, playing music and taking photos. I even have an old Samsung tablet, for reading ebooks.
It should be possible to do your banking from a laptop.
I just don't want apps on my phone, because they will track me, I don't like using apps on the phone in general, and banking apps in particular because the bank wants to control what I can and can't do with my own phone. Want a rooted phone? No banking for you.
"Look at it this way: should the rest of us with smartphones pay for that bank office?"
To answer that question with any degree of rigor one has to go back to the beginning and study the works of Bentham, Mill and others—and the many issues that surround utility and utilitarian principles. This involves such issues as the greatest good for the greatest number, greed overpowering well established moral norms and the fact that the majority of modern states and cities were founded on utilitarian models where a lot of give-and-take was involved before workable consensuses were achieved.
Think twice, the obvious solution doesn't always turn out to be the most optimal one.
So are many other political and philosophical ideas—essentially any field involving ethics is fraught with perils and consensus is never fully reached.
Just because unanimity is never achieved in respect of some philosophical idea doesn't mean it's not worthy of consideration and or it's never put into practice. Utilitarianism has been the subject of much study and debate and it's been widely practiced over several hundred years.
I'm well aware of the debates over utilitarianism and its ethics, any why those for and against it take the (usually) entrenched stance that they do. That ought to have been obvious by my use of the word 'consensuses'.
BTW, I could have made the same argument from a different philosophical perspective but the previous commentator specifically invited a utilitarian-type response by the words he used. That said, no matter what philosophical argument I'd have used someone would have found fault with it.
My main point still stands, which is that obvious solutions aren't necessarily the optimal ones. Note, I've deliberately not used the word 'best' for the above reasons.
You could just as easily have cited Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas or any other philosopher who wrote an ethics. The previous commentator didn't invite a utilitarian-type response. He implicitly posed a question about the justification for the ordering of goods in society. Nothing about that statement is definitively answered (or even satisfyingly questioned) by big-U Utilitarianism.
Since you appear to enjoy a little bit of philosophical discussion, let's break down what you ackshually said:
> To answer that question with any degree of rigor one has to go back to the beginning and study the works of Bentham, Mill and others—and the many issues that surround utility and utilitarian principles.
The "beginning" of ethics hardly begins with Bentham or Mill or even the Enlightenment. Utility is quite a modern concept in ethics. The question of what is "the good" is presupposed in any system of value. "The greatest good for the greatest number" is perhaps one of the more perverse interpretations of human good on record.
> This involves such issues as the greatest good for the greatest number, greed overpowering well established moral norms and the fact that the majority of modern states and cities were founded on utilitarian models where a lot of give-and-take was involved before workable consensuses were achieved.
The majority of modern states and cities were most emphatically NOT "founded" on utilitarian models. Most states predate any notion of such post-hoc rationalizations. Cities were largely founded as commercial centers along trade routes or ports, or sometimes intentionally as colonies. States were largely the results of conquest by militarized groups that were certainly NOT utilitarian. Quite the contrary. In the bronze age, they would have simply been warrior bands centered around family/tribal bonds and vassal/suzerainty relationships founded on violence. By the time of the great early empires around the Mediterranean, formal structures of militarism and class privileges won through violence were the organizing forms of society, not "give-and-take" consensus gathering (unless you mean one group giving up the fight and the other either enslaving them or killing them outright).
Maybe you could have argued they are founded on something like Hobbesian social contract theory (certainly not Rousseau's version) but that, too, would suffer from being simply "not true in fact."
The main point that "obvious solutions aren't necessarily the optimal ones" suffers from being trivial, condescending, and a non sequitur. The commenter didn't offer a solution as such, but raised the obvious question of why they should have to pay for someone else's choices. Utilitarianism is the worst of all philosophical answers because it entails the most absurdities.
Point proven, your comment just confirms what I said earlier:
…an(d) why those for and against it take the (usually) entrenched stance that they do.
I'm aware of those issues and omissions for brevity's sake. Also, I would point out that what I said was a passing comment on HN and not meant for a paper in a learned philosophical journal.
BTW, in case you didn't notice, I never mentioned whether I was for or against utilitarianism specifically because discussion about it inevitability ends in arguments that usually remain unresolved. That it was just an example ought to have been obvious.
It would be informative to compare the syllabus content at your philosophy school versus that of mine.
My philosophy school was a library card. Am I presuming too much by your handle that you are a lover of the higher mathematics? Although I think it would be hard to derive a workable ethics from number theory, I believe it has been tried. Descartes and Spinoza metaphysics come to mind, but Plato's number magic is probably a more entertaining place to start.
As you say, not relevant to you, but do you think mathematicians generally have some kind of affinity for Utilitarian ethics?
I have a smartphone. However I choose to use a mobile OS that is neither Android nor iOS, why should I get penalized that banks don't invest in applications for my OS too?
It’s business. Should a steakhouse be required to have vegan offerings? If that’s not what their customers want, then why would they invest hundreds of thousands on building and maintaining an app that maybe five people would use?
They do not have to build an app. They could build a mobile website that is accessible from almost any computing platform.
For something so core and critical to society (banking), I don’t think it’s reasonable to leave it up to the private sector and say “well, if some people get left behind—ho hum, thems the breaks”
If we’re talking about a florist, then sure. The market wants what it wants and if you’re not in the majority it kinda sucks. Not great, but probably not a place for government intervention. Banking, though? There should be accessibility guidelines and standards, absolutely.
When businesses provide essential services (like banking) I feel like they should be held to the same standards as government services. Not that some governments don't treat users without Android or iOS as third class citizens.
So, to clarify, there are banks that have their full business value accessible only through mobile, and as a person needing banking but doesn't have access to mobile, I can make an informed decision and not be their customer. But when I create a bank account in a physical office, and then the office gets closed in favour of an alegedly much more accessible mobile application, I feel like there should be some measure protecting me from that. Do you find that unreasonable?
> "should the rest of us with smartphones pay for that bank office?”
Yes! There are many things you cannot do without a physical bank location. It is worth paying[1] something to have them. I used to use an online-only bank, but I realized I wanted to be able to walk into a branch at times, so I switched to a new bank.
[1] “Paying” can mean a variety of things, including lower interest rates on savings accounts, for example.
What are those mythical actions that can't be done outside of a physical location? How many of them are things you do ~once in a lifetime, like getting a mortgage?
The PIN thing can be done online at both of my banks.
As for the cash stuff, those are things you may need to do if you’re a shopkeeper, but I can’t imagine a reason why I would do that myself. Banks over here will sometimes charge fees for changing cash.
in the US $2 bills are an icebreaker. There's still a lot of people that don't believe they're real. I also used them as incentives for my kids to go above and beyond with their communal chores. The quarters thing i haven't done personally but i was adjacent to for a club, it was for a game in a booth at an event.
banks here don't charge, as one of their expected roles is to change money in the US.
At least for me, the problem is not the closing of the brick-and-mortar branches, though that has happened near me, because for the last 25 years I have used those only seldom, preferring on-line banking.
What annoys me now is the closing of the on-line banking Web sites, which could be used easily and without any problem from any computer or smartphone, and their replacement with apps, which may force you not only to have a smartphone but also to be a customer of Apple or Google, because some banks refuse to provide their Android apps otherwise than through the Google app store.
How is this different though. Infrastructure costs money. Apps are the new hotness. The same "well, I don't use it so whatever" you bring is what it seems like the online banking folks are saying to the brick and mortar people.
Has anyone looked at the world lately and thought "hey maybe all these apps aren't the greatest idea"? Amazon, Shein, Temu, AliExpress have all but made history just visiting a mall and browsing.
I know Walmart loved the pandemic, too, because all the mom and pop stores that survived the first 20 years of amazon couldn't survive the local and state and federal government interfering with their commerce.
JoAnns is closing hundreds of stores. This whole subject is on my mind a lot lately.
What I'm stating below is my general understanding of this subject, If I'm wrong and if you i.e the reader have investigated sufficiently on the subject let me know.
>Society doesn't penalize anyone if they decide to go off the grid
While they don't penalize you, they do make it extremely difficult, if not impossible to go completely off grid. Try putting up your own 'grid', which in IMO should include your own monetary system, and not having to pay taxes.
At least in germany, there are both traditional banks with offices and online-only banks and one of the reasons given for the fact that traditional banks have worse conditions (less interest, sometimes monthly charges for even having an account etc.) is that they hvae to pay the offices somehow.
I prefer using laptops and I prefer doing my banking on my laptop. I'm online a lot. I do have a smartphone, usually an older one, for calls, messaging, playing music and taking photos. I even have an old Samsung tablet, for reading ebooks.
It should be possible to do your banking from a laptop.
I just don't want apps on my phone, because they will track me, I don't like using apps on the phone in general, and banking apps in particular because the bank wants to control what I can and can't do with my own phone. Want a rooted phone? No banking for you.