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randogogogo | 6 years ago

I think the author of the story aptly addressed this as an all to common justification. The tricky ethical bit isn't whether or not cases like your own do exist, but rather really how many of them are there on the whole?

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DoreenMichele|6 years ago

The more you chip away at the human rights of poor people, the more you succeed in making sure "cases like my own" cannot possibly exist.

And that's exactly my point. Your assumption that I'm some weird statistical outlier is exactly the problem.

It comes across to me roughly like this:

"Oh, Doreen is actually smart or something. But that's the rare exception among the poor. So fuck the rest of 'em!"

fzeroracer|6 years ago

The fact of the matter is that things like payday loans exist to exploit the poor and homeless in a way that ensures that they live perpetually in debt.

To take your argument to its rational extreme, it would be a bad idea to disallow poor people literally selling themselves to a corporation because that's taking away their basic rights.

And this is literally something that happens when you don't put regulations to stop it [1]. The fact that the poor predominately are people who take payday loans which often end up exploitative of their situation should tell you that payday loans might be a bad thing! The norm is that people are not escaping payday loans. Payday loans need to go and we need an actual safety net in place.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/09/us-payday-lo...