Cultural relativism and consequentialism in Italian tardiness

Over break I was having a conversation with Nancy, a violinist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as well as a friend of my family. She has a house in my hometown in Italy, Spoleto, where my family and her met a couple of years ago. Nancy and her husband Terry have fallen in love with the diverse architecture of the town, presenting styles that vary from Ancient Roman times to our days. They have also fallen in love with the Italian way of life, characterized by a relaxed pace, shopping for food at local markets and stores, a pervasion in art in everyday life, and, of course, good wine. There are certain aspects about the Italian way of life, however, that she finds are frustrating. The main one is the inevitable tendency of Italians in being late.

She told me about an episode in which Terry and she were involved. They hopped on a public bus to go from the train station to their house. The bus driver had to wait one minute in order for the bus to run exactly on schedule, but a tourist couple approached the bus driver asking him where to buy tickets. The bus driver pointed at the newspaper kiosk where they could buy them, not mentioning the fact that he would have left the following minute. But, in fact, the bus driver wanted to do the couple a favor and decided that waiting for them would have been the right thing to do, the nice thing to do. As a result, the bus left five minutes late. Just a few stops later, one of the main bus stops of the town, there were six people waiting for the bus.

This is just a simple example of a common tendency in Italian culture, where being 20 minutes late for an appointment is perfectly acceptable, where classes at universities have developed the concept of the “academic 15 minutes” (i.e. a class scheduled at 9am is expected to start at 9.15am), where the average delay of trains is 7 minutes (this statistic also takes into account trains that are on time). There is actually an unofficial website that, by entering the number of the train, it will tell you its current, average, and expected delay.

I found this story interesting because it brings forward two ethical issues that we have discussed in class this semester: cultural relativism and consequentialism. The first one is concerned because I can tell you that, as a person that grew up in Italy, being late is not perceived as being late; it is perceived as a normal feature of everyday life. If my friends and I want to go out for a drink on a Friday night and wish to meet at 10.30pm, we will schedule to meet at 10pm. Being raised in a bicultural family (my mother is American), I sometimes point out to my friends how this doesn’t make any sense and, although they kind of acknowledge it, they don’t perceive as a big deal at all and continue to follow this model. Cultural relativism is involved in this issue because the conception of punctuality is perceived differently throughout different cultures.

The issue of consequentialism concerns the bus driver’s choice of waiting for the tourist couple to the detriment of the six people waiting at the next bus stop (and of all the people at the next bus stops). The bus driver thought that he did a good deed by accommodating the needs of the tourist couple, but he neglected the needs of all the people, perhaps dozens of people, that suffered from the bus delay (maybe one of these people was a train driver who consequently made the train depart late). Consequentialism looks for the best outcome for the greatest number of people. Therefore, a consequentialist bus driver would have ignored the needs of the tourist couple to favor the needs of dozens of people.