Nixie said:
I find it an interesting point but it fails to recognize the intimate nature of a relationship.
Not sure if the intimate part is relevant. I think restaurant owners have choices as to whether they offer good service, and also choices as to which clients they cater to, which seems a strong enough analogy to the relationships stuff.
The first is basically a matter of law -- it's a bad idea to extend the law to do things like shutting down restaurants with bad customer service ratings, as that's over-extension, in the same way it's a bad idea to have laws against free speech, even if the speech said is 100% harmful and 0% helpful, in many cases.
The second is really a matter of respecting some level of personal choice.
Notice the first case is one where we basically agree ethically that the restaurant ought to change, but we won't make it illegal not to, for pragmatic reasons. The second is different, as it is ethically neutral whether you cater to people liking a certain kind of cuisine or another, more or less. It's not just a matter of separation-of-law-and-ethics.
The analogy to relationships: as in the first case, you get some men and women with disgustingly elitist, snobbish, insulting attitudes on who they'll date. It's legal suicide to require them to drop that, the same way it's legal suicide to prosecute people for a lot of the dumb shit they say. However, we can safely ethically look down upon it.
In the second case, the analogy is: even if a man or woman has good ethical attitudes to relationships, he/she still should be allowed personal choice as in the restaurant case. If he/she doesn't feel like satiating another's needs, then no big deal.
In other words, there exists a strong sense in which the two situations are analogous, which seems to demonstrate that the level of intimacy is not required to make the point, only the existence of reasonable personal choice.
What we can say is that a world in which there are people whose tastes don't get satisfied is imperfect/undesireable. Still, forcing person X to cater to person Y is placing distress on person X to cure person Y, so there's no real good in doing that, it is self-defeating. What needs to ideally happen is it becomes possible to meet Y's needs without harming X.
By the way, the correct logic for why we
don't say that
ethically (even if not legally), person X should romantically satiate person Y if not having good reasons not to do so (eg if the reasons are just elitist/snobby ones) is simply that we wouldn't apply that logic to someone who does NOT have elitist/snobby reasons: indeed, the default is even they wouldn't have to romantically satiate person Y. Instead we operate in these cases on the basis that, if there's no reason to, and not to, the default is no need to. There must be positive reason to do so -- its absence is already good enough reason not to.