Glad you can enjoy homeless people's "duty" not to lay on a bench. Do you have a duty to give them food? I'm sure you're able to justify why you don't have a categorical imperative to help them.
Society would be better off without the homeless on average, objectively.
Why does society have an obligation to assist and protect people who don't contribute to society? If you feel some moral imperative to assist some druggie slobbering in his own shit then by all means you do do, but don't rope me into it. The only people with any obligation to assist are their families or those whose religions command them to do so. Neither involve me.
People neglect their duty all the time. That doesn't make it okay, and it doesn't mean we should find it acceptable.
Again, this is about creating a better society for everyone. If we operate a transportation system that is inefficient because many of the patrons do not want to use it because of quality of life issue, then all those gains from transportation efficiencies lost... they are lost and replaced with expenses instead.
This isn't a zero-sum game. When efficiencies are lost and instead become costs everyone becomes worse off, including the person sleeping on the bench. Efficiencies compound upon themselves. High-trust societies make people better of in almost every interaction, including folks who need assistance.
Man at the end of the day we're animals. When you deprive people in certain ways for long periods of time they act certain ways with high reliability. You can't blame them for that; it's like blaming the water for running down a stream. If you want to create a better society you need to give the water somewhere else to go. Duty and ethics are, frankly, useless ways to look at this problem, and all you'll achieve with this methodology is the brutalization of the already deprived. That's why I felt angry reading your comments. I figured that's what you really wanted.
>That's why I felt angry reading your comments. I figured that's what you really wanted.
I'm sitting here arguing for improving outcomes for everyone and you think I'm trying to make people angry??? What?
Yes, I think analysis like the authors and yours is naive... but that is because I actually give a shit. For every one of me, there are probably a dozen folks who don't care at all, and would happily literally criminalize homelessness. I'm merely proposing that we prioritize efficient functional systems while also providing other places for folks in need to rest their heads.
That a bench in a subway system should be for people using the subway does not mean that we can't also have a bench in another place that could be used to sleep on. In a place that does not do more harm than good.
Yes, it seems like you're only focused on the disruption they cause. To paraphrase you said something like
>They'll sleep on the benches and this will cause disruption, so the benches will be removed
Why? What if we just didn't remove the benches, or we installed more? The solution you immediately reached for was to kick the homeless person off the bench while saying it was their duty not to block the bench and that if they were allowed to sleep on the bench it would, to be a little hyperbolic, cripple the transit system. I don't hear any solutions being suggested other than "kicking them off the bench" and the logic you're advocating where you blame them for their situation immediately justifies basically throwing them in jail. They failed their fellow citizens, after all.
And to be clear I know you're saying we should install more benches, but it seems secondary to you man. With how you're thinking I don't see why you think we ought to do that.
Why does society have an obligation to assist and protect people who don't contribute to society? If you feel some moral imperative to assist some druggie slobbering in his own shit then by all means you do do, but don't rope me into it. The only people with any obligation to assist are their families or those whose religions command them to do so. Neither involve me.