Grandpa Kim on the topic of duty

[AS of SA]

I ask to speak with a supervisor and I get thier office number and have them send me written confirmation of removal. I also get their names.

The only companies I found that have their own telemarketers is places like Sears, Macy, Wall Street Journal, and the US Energy Dept.

When I signed up for a do not promote list by my state I found a lot of people sign themselves up for it. Like those little vacation info things at the mall or the car give-aways, and such. Some buy the information from creditors which really peeve me.

I actually met once person who said he liked his job. He also said he had a bubbly personality and was extremely rude to me. Then he started asking if my name was greek (but I said it was a wrong number and never said my name)....

btw, the Highway patrol one is a scam.

[tbontob]

What I have found to be extremely effective is to interrupt their chatter and ask "Are you selling something?"

Almost invariably, there is a pause and an affirmative answer. I then say, it is my policy never to buy anything over the phone and hang up.

I have never had a telemarketer lie to me that he was not selling something. If they did, I would probably just tell them it is my policy to never buy anything from liars and cheats.

Occasionally a telemarketer will be evasive and not answer the question. That is a tip off to me that s/he is selling something and I take the evasiveness as an affirmation that they are in fact selling something and then go into my speel about my policy to never buy anything over the phone and hang up.

I do have some difficulty when charitable organizations call. I have my favourites to support but can't support them all and some of them are a bit off the wall.

How do you guys handle charitable request?

[capnq]

I deal with telemarketers by screening all my calls through my answering machine. 9 out of 10 won't even leave a message, and the ones that do are usually computerized recordings anyway.

[Ragnarok]

I like toying with the people that call. There was this one company that kept calling us. But I forget what the name was. But anyways, they would go on their spew and I would basically repeat it and act all excited and stuff and be like "Wow! That is a great deal!" or something like that and they would continue on. Then I would find a flaw in their promotion and exploit it and do different stuff.
It is rather fun and they stutter around trying to reply to some of the stuff you come up with.

[tbontob]

E. Albright

The quote was not mine but Grandpa Kim's although he got it from somewhere else.

However, like him, I do endorse it.

And you do bring up a good point.

The issue is who has the right to decide our actions.

Grandpa Kim and I believe we should not have a knee-jerk reaction to someone claiming a person has a duty to do something.

That opens the door to a manipulative, conniving person to control the actions of a person.

I believe we have the right to examine whether or not there is a overriding or overwhelming duty.

I believe that even if there is a duty, there may be overriding considerations which may make the duty less compelling or commanding.

An example is the Viet Nam war. Conscripted kids had a duty to report to the military and participate in the war. Some of them questioned it, fought it and ultimately won in the long run.

The hard-liners of duty would have us believe we should do our duty without question.

But duty changes with the times. And to demand we be hard-wired to it, is IMHO neither healthy or advantages to the person or to the nation.

[E. Albright]

Originally posted by tbontob:

===========================================
Do not confuse "duty" with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.
But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with leech who wants "just a few minutes of your time, please-- this won't take long." Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time-- and squawk for more!
So learn to say No-- and to be rude about it when necessary.
Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you.
(This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don't do it because it is "expected" of you.)

=============================================

The fundamental issue here is "Who has the right to decide your actions".

One thing really troubles me about GK's quote. If one takes it seriously, it eliminates the possibility of the existence of ethical standards, or at least prescriptive ones. If one mustn't do what others want you to do, one cannot accept their behavioral rules (i.e., morale codes). And if you claim that the statement has nothing to do with ethics and/or ethics are a special case, you've essentialy subverted your argument, as any request can be turned into one based on morality. Or should you argue that one can accept such things, but one must freely choose to do so, well... Like I said, this kills prescriptive morality; one no longer has any basis for demanding any sort of behavior from anyone else...

Admittedly, if one refuses to accept the concept of objective ethics, the preceeding is less than meaningless.

E. Albright

[dogscoff]

E_A: If I inderstand your comment correctly...

If you are doing something becasue it is morally/ ethically right, then it makes no difference whether someone has asked you to do it or not, and a different set of rules apply.

[ January 14, 2003, 12:49: Message edited by: dogscoff ]

[Grandpa Kim]

Admittedly, if one refuses to accept the concept of objective ethics, the preceeding is less than meaningless.

E. Albright

And I do so refuse.

I refuse to give anyone or any group the right to force their concept of ethics on me. Most likely they won't come up to my standards anyway.

(BTW, this quote is from "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" by Robert A. Heinlein.)

Kim

[Kamog]

There have been some chain e-mail Messages going around on the topic of stopping drunk driving. They try to manipulate you into forwarding the message to everybody by saying that it's an important cause and that if you don't do this simple thing, you're being incredibly selfish. I received multiple copies of the same thing from different people within a few days so obviously people are following the instructions. I find chain letters annoying and I never forward them to anybody.

[E. Albright]

Originally posted by dogscoff:
E_A: If I inderstand your comment correctly...

If you are doing something becasue it is morally/ ethically right, then it makes no difference whether someone has asked you to do it or not, and a different set of rules apply.

Problem: morality doesn't evolve in a void. Most (though admittedly not all) people recieve their concept of what is "right" directly from others, and thus to do what is "right" can generally be viewed as doing what you're told, though by whom changes from one instance to another.

Originally posted by tbontob:
The quote was not mine but Grandpa Kim's although he got it from somewhere else.
[...]

The hard-liners of duty would have us believe we should do our duty without question.

But duty changes with the times. And to demand we be hard-wired to it, is IMHO neither healthy or advantages to the person or to the nation.

Yes, I was aware it wasn't your statement. See thread subject and the phrase "GK's quote" in my prior reply.

And yes, blind obedience is IMO a "bad" thing. "Bad" rather than bad because...

Originally posted by Grandpa Kim:
I refuse to give anyone or any group the right to force their concept of ethics on me. Most likely they won't come up to my standards anyway.

I too reject the concept of objective ethical standards, albeit for longwinded metaethical reasons. My view of right and wrong is purely my own, and admittedly purely arbitrary. As is, IMO, everyone else's (excepting perhaps the admittedly part).

So I don't expect people to agree with me about what is right, and full well expect that people can, will and must radically disagree with my personal standards of ethics. So what's the rub of this? Well, I can't really judge other people in any kind of compelling way. When I say "I think that what you're doing is bad", it's like I've said "'Boo!' for what you're doing", and if I say it's good, I'm saying "'Rah!' for what you're doing" (this outlook is called emotivism, BTW).

IMO, the rejection of objective ethics reduces my ability to judge the actions of others to a capacity to state purely personal opinions as to the value of their acts, comparable to statements regarding my preference for vanilla ice cream over chocolate, or vice versa. I can't in good faith say "You ought to do that"; I must instead say "I think you ought to do that", or better still, "I would like you to do that", whether "that" is not punching people like me in the face, avoiding cheating on your spelling test or restraining from deep-fat-frying your neighbor. Anything else smacks to me of hardcore hypocrisy...

E. Albright

[ January 15, 2003, 10:39: Message edited by: E. Albright ]