being right while being the asshole
The other end of changing norms from Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son because God said so is me when I'm in a nice restaurant and the waiter takes my plate before everyone at the table is done eating. Here are the relevant norms of nice restaurants, as I understood them during the years when I could eat at nice restaurants before this norm changed:
While you were eating, with your fork in your left hand and your knife in your right, if you wanted to pause from eating, you set them both on your plate in the way that matched how you'd been holding them while you were eating, so that they crossed at most only a little at the top of the plate. The fact that your silverware were crossed like that (in the "pause" or "rest position") showed, at a glance, that you weren't done eating. Maybe you had more food still. Or maybe you were going to eat more bread or some of someone else's food. Maybe you just needed to take a breath before deciding what to do next. Whatever the reason, the rest position showed to anyone who looked that you weren't done with the plate and utensils.
When you were done eating, you slid the fork and knife parallel at the 4 o'clock position on the plate, more or less. Occasionally, people would put them parallel in the middle of the plate or in a slightly different spot. But the parallel signaled, also at a glance, that it's all over. If there was food left on your plate, you weren't going to eat it. If there was nothing left, you weren't waiting for more. You had finished. (I don't know how widely this was shared, but there were always older people who would tell me that the food itself was "done" and diners had "finished" their meals, but I think that distinction was fuzzy even before the norm about where to put one's silverware.)
I was a waiter for one summer, at a pizza place where the diners, if they used knives and forks at all, didn't consistently use this norm. I'm not sure what norms they used: it was good for little league baseball teams and families with kids who threw food on the floor. It wasn't a great job, and I worked there for three months until my supervisor was upset that I spent too long talking to a high school teacher and his wife at the end of my shift, so he took me off the schedule for a week as punishment, and I got a different job instead.
A couple of summers later, I was a bartender at a place that sold food during lunch, which didn't make me a waiter exactly, since people would order at the bar, but I would take them their food and sometimes clear their places. This bar was casual, but it was in a location in central London where many of the people who came in for lunch were themselves used to eating in places that had fewer little league teams and strongly discouraged kids' throwing food on the floor. So, while the environment of the pub wasn't fancy, the norms of the diners were.
That's where I learned, first from staff and then from friends who confirmed that this knowledge had been around me my whole life without my knowing it, that people were quietly signaling with their cutlery when they were done eating.
This is the kind of etiquette that many people find objectionable because it distinguishes those in the know from those who are not. It might make a certain kind of sense to have some way to signal a rest position and a finished position, but why should parallel and at a certain location be the signal, and how could you guess that? That feels like a test to see how someone was raised.
Instead of signals, we can also ask each other. Because these signals aren't universal now, and maybe never were, I have to answer the question almost every time I eat at a nice restaurant whether I've finished, sometimes several times. (Chatty waiters who are "just checking in" several times during a meal are another norm that varies; I prefer the person who takes my order then be seen only in my peripheral vision unless I get their attention, but I know what I think of as good service (attentive and not too present) is often interpreted as bad service (inattentive and absent).) So there's a value to having a way to send this signal, but any particular way of sending the signal can be exclusionary.
None of that is what I want to consider.
The example I want to consider is that wait staff will clear a person's plate before others at the table are done eating. The waiter will say, "can I get this out of your way?" and then take any plate that isn't being actively guarded with fork and knife. This is connected because the exchange starts when the waiter has to ask, "Still working on this?" (Eating is not work, which is another part of this that I'm not going to discuss.) Once they've interrupted the meal and/or conversation, if my answer is some version of "I'm done" (or "I've finished" if there are old people present), then they have to do something about it.
But this is where the norm seems to have changed in a real way. What used to be polite was, I assume, not to clear any plates until everyone had finished, so you could wait more or less until the people were ready to pay before you cleared anything away--and at that point, there's little question about whether they've finished.
The logic behind not clearing until everyone is done is clear enough. People feel pressured to finish eating when others have finished, but they really feel pressured when others' plates have been cleared. Who wants to be the last person eating when the rest of the table has nothing on it but the glasses? Maybe the waitstaff can sweep up nearby and put up all the chairs upside down on top of them as well, just to make sure the message is very clear that we're all waiting on you to finish, slowpoke. If you really wanted to avoid pressuring people to finish eating, you wouldn't clear too early. There was nothing to ask, but diners could also let you know subtly if they were done in case you needed to know. Maybe once everyone had finished, you could drop by to ask if they wanted coffee or dessert. I don't know.
I do know that the norm has changed definitively, at least in places in the US, even in very nice restaurants. The norm now is that we don't want anything on the table to indicate that we'd been eating, so plates should be removed as quickly as possible. If anyone catches sight of two people sitting at a table in a restaurant, they should politely assume only that they're having a glass of wine. A plate with remnants of food on it might as well be a piece of toilet paper stuck to one's shoe: we all know that we have to engage in certain bodily processes to stay alive, but we clean up the direct evidence as quickly as we can.
I liked the older norm, the norm of not clearing plates until everyone is finished. It's probably more compatible with a slower meal and more lingering after eating, and the norm of clearing plates quickly probably has a lot to do with the restaurant's trying to get as many people in as possible, so pressuring people to finish is exactly their point. That's not what I want when I'm dining, but I'm also not the one trying to make a restaurant profitable, which I realize is tough.
But imagine a situation, like Abraham's, but for me, now, at the end of the old norm's life. The norm is all but dead: recognizable if you're old enough, but not even something a younger person would know about. I would have been right to insist on this 30 years ago and even to ask the waiter not to take my plate until everyone is done, but times have changed, and, even if the dead norm was better, my insisting on it now makes me the asshole.
Seen from the other temporal side, this is very similar to Abraham's case of imagining a future norm in one's current action. For Abraham, that was a future norm of doing what God says even when it would count as murder; in this case, it's imagining a past norm to explain or justify one's current actions. When the waiter says, "Are you still working on that murder?" and Abraham responds, "No, this is a sacrifice, but the position of my knife clearly indicates that I'm pausing, so don't clear anyone's plates," then Abraham is the asshole because the norms might be better but they're not the current norms. Norms aren't norms anthropologically; they have to be norms that a person can actively use to justify their current actions to others in that same community, and when the community changes, what is justified will change, too.
