It's the "at the expense of others" thing that makes it more morally grey, and the chain of cause and effect is short enough that people sometimes get up in arms about it.
For some other actions on some sort of badness scale, we have:
- Murdering people for your spare organs. Parts of China do this (somebody survived and escaped recently, so it's stirred things up a bit). Most people think this is very bad.
- Paying for somebody's organs (similar to prostitution at some level, though banned much more frequently than sex work -- if society is structurally so unequal that sacrificing part of your life for a pittance is actually attractive, that reflects poorly on that society, and we try to ban.the rich and powerful from using that power to create scenarios more like my first point).
- What Jobs did. It's technically legal, but he necessarily got an organ before somebody else for no other reason than that he had money. Did that somebody else survive? Who knows. If you factor in that it was actually many people who were displaced, did all of them survive? Unlikely. Organ donations are already fraught with ethical issues and strongly held convictions, and I'm not at all surprised that a number of people would be upset at this.
What’s the point of making a moral judgment about a bit of human nature that literally everyone in earth shares? It doesn’t make you or me superior to condemn it; we would do the same. So… what does “bad” even mean in this context?
Very many people don’t. We know there are constructs that would enable us to pay less, yet we choose to not pursue them. We are part of a society that enables us to be what we are, why should we strive to give as little as possible in return?
(And yes, we also don’t send extra money. This is not a contradiction.)
> We know there are constructs that would enable us to pay less, yet we choose to not pursue them.
Only because you don't want to put the effort in to pursuing it. If I told you you could reduce your tax bill by 20% by spinning round in your chair one time I doubt you (or anyone else) would decline.
Every entity generally seeks to take as much as they can and give back as little as they can. Individuals are generally a little less extreme, in my experience, with corporations being the worst.
My taxes are not a burden on me. While on the other hand, the local politicians have sought tax cut after tax cut, causing the library to limit services, the schools to cut down on teaching staff, infrastructure maintenance delays, less funding for local social services and city events, and more.
My paying an extra 20% wouldn't fix things, as adding to the general budget would end up simply reducing taxes further, instead of everyone sharing the load.
I hate that I've starting getting involved with local politics. I would rather code.
Or, following your self-centric analysis, I would put the effort into raising my taxes by 20% since the collective benefits give me much more than what I can do individually.
