Your carpets or your guests?

The article linked in the post below quotes a cliche commonly uttered in the debate about shoes-off. That is that, if you ask your guests to remove their shoes, you must regard your carpet as more important than them.

I would suggest that those who insist on the carpet v guests dilemma are making a zero sum fallacy.

A zero sum fallacy is when one assumes wrongly that if you have more of one thing, you have less of another. Often people of generally Left-wing views make this fallacy about economics. They wrongly assume that the fact that some countries are wealthy and some are poor means that the rich countries must be taking wealth from the poor nations. However, this ignores the economic reality of wealth creation. There is no fixed amount of wealth in the world, but rather wealth is created by economic activity. So if some have more, it does not necessarilly follow that some have less.

Coming back to removing shoes, those who ask 'do you prefer your carpets to your guests' wrongly assume that being concerned about your carpet necessarilly means that you are less concerned about your guests' comfort.

It is not necessarilly the case that the two things are in conflict. That is because not all guests, or necessarilly even the majority of guests, would be unhappy to remove their shoes. Many guests will be indifferent and many will be far more comfortable after removing their shoes. Therefore, to ask guests to take their shoes off to protect your carpet is not necessarilly to disregard the comfort of the guests.

The same may be said about food. Some guests may love brocolli, other guests may absolutely hate brocolli. Does the fact some people hate brocolli that if you serve brocolli at a dinner party mean that means that you care more about brocolli than your guests?