"The food was awesome. Oh, the service was great, too! Well, you were busy and I guess, well, in my opinion, just a little distracted..."
Sound familiar? What's really meant is "The service sucked, and if I had the guts I wouldn't leave a tip." But that doesn't get said; now no one dares to be critical of poor service received in restaurants, stores, banks, etc.
The reason is our contemporary obsession with not denting others' self-esteem, which makes us see complaints about service as personal affronts to the people waiting on us.
So we swallow our resentment of careless, surly, and even rude behavior by those waiting on us in stores, restaurants, and offices. But surely not complaining about poor service isn't a moral or ethical issue, is it?
It is. As with so many of the cases I explore, we have here mundane activity that results in cumulative effects with significant moral or ethical import.
How this works can best be shown in utilitarian terms: If we fail to provide productive criticism when we are poorly served as customers or clients, we promote unhappiness instead of the greatest happiness of the greatest number because poor service gets worse when the unacceptable is regularly accepted. To borrow from Foucault, acceptance of poor service "normalizes" it.
Both utilitarian and deontological principles apply here. As good utilitarians, we're obliged to promote the greatest happiness when we act in ways that affect others, and maintaining service standards promotes the greatest happiness. As good deontologists, we have to act as we are prepared to have everyone act at will, so if we accept poor service, we are endorsing everyone doing so, and if everyone does it, the lower expectations go and the worse it gets.
The point is that acceptance of poor service is, in effect, training people to provide poor service. In this way acceptance of poor service is making things worse for ourselves and everyone else.
