"I'm entitled!"
Commenting on one of my earlier articles, a friend wrote to me about people "with a big sense of entitlement and no sense of consequence." I was struck by the phrase because it so nicely summed up what I often feel when I hear people going on about their "rights." I'll change just one word in the phrase, and substitute "obligation" for "consequences" to make my point.
People are very aware of their entitlements, some real, some imagined. Whenever a dispute of any sort arises, people are quick to insist on their entitlements, but you seldom hear about the obligations that entitlements carry with them.
The most common daily instances of people claiming entitlements while indifferent to obligations are in traffic. How many times have you had someone block an intersection because they tried to get across and wound up at the end of a line of cars they could see were stopped? Or when cars are being forced into one lane from two and somebody tears by you trying to crowd in down the line? Or the guy who dashes through a light just turned red, risking cars on the cross-street will take a moment to get moving? How likely is it these people ever yield the right of way, let someone in line ahead of them, or stop for a pedestrian other than at a red light?
The attitude behind this kind of conduct is worrying. It's worse than just "me first" thinking; it's more like "me only" thinking. There's a technical name for this view: ethical egoism, and essentially it is the view that right conduct is self-serving conduct.
The trouble with ethical egoism is it only works as long as relatively few people in a society hold and exercise it, and as long as they don't let on that they do hold and exercise it. This is because ethical egoism excludes others from anything but prudential consideration: you use others but don't let them know. However, a society can't function if it has too many ethical egoists. It's like a population of hawks and doves that has too many hawks. It's not long before the population dies off.
Every entitlement carries an obligation; even if it is only the obligation to not exercise the entitlement when it harms others. If obligations are ignored, entitlement soon deteriorates to just what you can get away with.
