The Moral Problems of Dining and Dashing

Briefly, I want to bring a question to everyone who reads this (yes, all nine of you).

I argued last night with Luisa that it was acceptable to not pay for a meal that was of God-awful quality. Basically, I argued that if you got horrible food with horrible service, it would be ok to not pay your tab and just leave the restaurant. (With the obvious intention of never coming back again). Luisa argued that what I proposed, the "Dine and Dash," was stealing and thus morally repugnant. I didn't find the idea repugnant because it's one of the checks that the consumer has on the whole restaurant experience. By waiting until the end to give me the bill, the restaurant owner has to make sure that all of his staff perform adequately enough so that I'll actually pay the bill. (Then the staff has an even greater incentive to serve me well so that I'll tip them.)

So I posit the question to everyone who reads this: Is the concept of not paying for sub-standard quality of restaurant food the equivalent of stealing?

Also, keep in mind that I'm not saying you go in there with the forgone knowledge of not paying for your meal regardless of price or quality. I'm saying you walk in there, you sit down, and the service is craptacular and the food is horrible. Do you pay? Do you talk to the manager first or not even bother?

I'd personally not talk to the manager because IF he's going to repay you for your grievences, then it'll either be something like getting more food, or a voucher for a future visit. Which then generates more business for the restaurant that you wouldn't want to come back to in the first place.

And just to extend this to life in general, can this be applied elsewhere. Like taxes? Or other industries? Government (especially unelected government) has little incentive to provide the best quality of services because you have to pay for it either way. Like the DMV or the EPA. They can screw you over and you have to take it because you have no other choice. Because you end up in jail for not paying your taxes if you take the route of not paying taxes or you end up screwed over and not able to do anything because the government is intrusive on everyday life.

See, these are the types of questions that I want to ponder when talking about the philosophy of government. Unfortunately, you never do this in college, because most political philosophy classes are run by the philosophy departments, which emphasize the philosophy over the political. At least, that's what I learned during my experience at Georgetown. But then again, philosophy departments exist only to provide jobs for philosophy majors, which is probably in the Top 5 of useless majors. But that's liberal arts higher education for you.

So anyway, I was just pondering that since it got both myself and my girlfriend all bothered because of it. And it's an interesting topic to discuss.