Date of Award

9-25-2024

Publication Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Philosophy

Keywords

Argumentation;Hospitality;Philosophy

Supervisor

S. Pender

Abstract

This dissertation is an exercise in applied philosophy, an attempt to meditate on the hospitality industry while in its midst. Throughout this project, I explore the ‘stakes’ of waiting—a term that I employ in three distinct senses: the attendant risks and rewards of waiting on others; the thresholds or boundaries that commercial hospitality establishes and engenders; and the underlying hostilities that variously frame and condition host-guest interactions in the service industry. In the spirit of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, I divide the dissertation into three courses, each consisting of three or four bite-sized sections. I begin by bringing Jacques Derrida’s later reflections on hospitality into productive tension with recent work in business management theory. In this opening course, I consider various risks and rewards of inviting guests into a restaurant, boundary lines between commercial hospitality and other forms of welcoming, and common sources of hostility in host-guest, host-host, and guest-guest relationships. Next, I examine Elizabeth Telfer’s conception of hospitableness as an ‘optional’ moral virtue, noting a few problems with her attempt to moor hospitality studies to virtue ethics. I then identify the origins of our current tipping system and survey several economic rationales for gratuities. To conclude this second course, I discuss the ethical implications of servers’ illicit tip-chasing behaviour. In the final course, I consider how acts of arguing and acts of welcoming intersect in restaurants. By acknowledging the difficulties associated with responding hospitably to guests, exposing tensions between the etiquette and exigencies of wine service, and offering an argument concerning the proper methods of making an Old Fashioned, I seek to illuminate the stakes of ‘arguing over drinks.’

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