How to do Samba: Nicely

Posted Oct 25, 2018 14:45 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: How to do Samba: Nicely by excors
Parent article: How to do Samba: Nicely

> So the rule does still restrict your behaviour if you're an autosadist; it just becomes useless and permits you to hurt others if you're a regular masochist. Presumably the medieval monks weren't heavily into BDSM else they'd have realised that people have different (sometimes complementary) tastes, and the rightness of an asymmetric action depends on all the participants being okay with it, and none can judge its rightness solely by considering their own desires. Surely someone has come up with a more robust rule in the past 2500 years that can be used instead of this.

Well, it doesn't work well for half the population, and is extremely sexist, anyway.

OF COURSE I want to be treated like a male. But half of my friends and acquaintances would hate it! And then they treat me like a female and I hate that!

It's very hard to come up with a decent rule along those lines, but something along the lines of "encourage and build others up". But all this requires some basic knowledge of human psychology, and far too many people take the attitude "I don't WANT to know ..." :-(

Cheers,
Wol

How to do Samba: Nicely

Posted Oct 25, 2018 23:23 UTC (Thu) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

> OF COURSE I want to be treated like a male. But half of my friends and acquaintances would hate it!

You are taking a very literal interpretation. I'm not suggesting it is wrong to be literal, but it is not the only reasonable interpretation.

How you want to be treated is a function of various aspects of who you are, in general (male, British, etc) in context (poor, rich, homeless) and at present (tired, grumpy, hungry).

There are multiple levels at which you can interpret the maxim, depending on how deeply you look into both yourself and the other person, and what level of abstraction you consider when you try to form an identity between the two.

You get to choose how abstract you go, but the maxim applies recursively: How abstractly would you like someone else to analyse your condition when determining the best way to compare their desires with yours - then use a similar level of abstraction yourself.