Should individuals be held responsible for their inaction?

If you see someone about to be struck by a car or otherwise step into harms way but choose not to call out a warning or act in some way to prevent disaster, are you responsible for any harm caused?

What defence, if any, can be offered for choosing inaction?

 

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A legal defense (not needed) would be no requirement to act in the first place. A moral argument might be personal safety, if that was the case. Otherwise, I can't think of one, can you?

 

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LoL
that is such an over simplified view which assumes to know the outcome of all actions that it renders the reasoned logic of your question to be a parlor trick word game.
if you wish to request people to post their opinions about social responsibility, you will need to remove the need to be a mind reader & fortune teller.

 

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Whenever I have stepped in to help someone avoid harm, no conscious decision making/choosing was involved---it was just action/reaction.

 

It becomes a matter of one's own conscience, and would be hard to prove in a court of law. Only the individual who didn't act to prevent harm to a fellow human, would know with complete certainty, what motivated such inaction. For example, refusal to help, and simply not knowing how to help, are two different motivators. Same end result, but the motivating factors leading up to cause that result, would be different.

 

its a harsh world
be in wifi hifi middle class feckless narcissistic drama procreation
or
4th world kill or be killed survival of the most ruthless

the hapless deliberate ignorance to either mentality usurps moral ideology on to the other as a process of selfish intellectual minimalism

 

but are we capable of making it less harsh? therein lies the rub?

 

excellent question
less harsh for us to look at or less harsh for others to exist in, live, grow, thrive etc etc...
there are soo many potential sides to the core of that idea.

the finer side of the more civil state is as much an art as a science
where as the less civil side is about preventing terror & treachery(collapsing governments & entire civil society's etc)

an example

i saw a drunk person walking along the side of the road(there is no footpath for them to use and only occasional dim street lights) at night.
should i stop and offer them a lift its starting to rain and they risk getting hit by a drunk/careless driver ?

it is such a small act for me to simply pull over and give them a lift. it costs me nothing and takes almost no effort

 

but, he could be a psychopathic ax murderer. maybe that line of thinking keeps me from saving the world. :/

 

there is a lot of the world that dont want saving
only until after they have learned some things they realise how they could have been saved afterward.

example, if i knew what i do today when i was at high school, i would be a different person today.
the whole moral-religious debate about what is good/bad or indifferent is a distraction from the aspect of the nature of overt power & control Vs ability to make your own mistakes(be those fatal etc)

?

drunk or not drunk if they make a grab for the wheel while your passing another vehicle at a combined speed of around 100 miles per hour.
everything else doesn't matter anymore.

 

or she

either way, at what point does our own personal safety come before helping another? do we risk helping another, at the risk of our own peril?

 

excellent question

i am currently wrestling with whether i should attempt to get a friend of a friend to see a professional psychologist.
i can see most of the issue
i could potentially lose the friend over it by looking like im meddling in something i should not.
yet i can see the need and the damage that is ongoing.

by simply raising the subject i cause emotional harm.
doing nothing i knowingly allow the persons issues to continue to drag them down & impact their ability to socialise and continue to damage their physical health and psychological health.

i am well aware many self acclaimed "normal" people are incapable of dealing with the reality of such a reality.
being able to choose to not care about something that you report to care about when others ask you if your a caring person..
hypocrisy's of the emotional being etc etc...
sometimes doing your best is choosing to not do anything as a total gamble/guess
because of the unknown variables etc

 

It generally wouldn't be needed in a court of law. You generally speaking aren't going to be in a court of law over something like the scenario in the OP. There is generally no legal obligation for you to help someone else as long as you were causing the dangerous situation in the first place.

Morally is completely different.

 

Why then, if someone were to tell you that he/she murdered someone, and you chose to not go to the police with that info, would that be considered a crime? I'm not disagreeing with your premise, but there seems to be some legal contradictions out there.

 

In certain narrow cases, yes. If your child is in harm's way and you do not assist you can be prosecuted for child neglect. Minnesota and Vermont have duty-to-assist laws that say that if you see someone in peril (i.e. a victim of a car crash) you have a duty to provide reasonable assistance. That could include extricating them from the wreck and doing CPR, but it could also be as simple as calling 911. There are efforts to pass those laws in other states.

In most places you don't need a defense because you have no duty to assist. But the usual defenses are "I didn't know what to do" or "I was scared." The defense "I was afraid I would get sued" is now largely void due to Good Samaritan laws in most states.

 

In most cases you aren't under any legal obligations to report a crime. Their may be some exceptions (depending on the local laws). If you are a medical worker and you see evidence of child abuse as you are examining a child there may be a law that requires reporting that.

You can't "aide and abet" a crime (help a criminal commit a crime or help him get away from the police).

There has to be a legal obligation though or there is no crime and, in general, there is no legal obligation.

 

True, but are you willing to die for it?

It's a tough example; the risk factors for some people doing that are statistically greater than for others.

 

Unfortunately, in the U.S. at least, people are more inclined to be like this:


I can see him coming
He's walking down the highway
With his big boots on
And his big thumb out
He wants to get me
He wants to hurt me
He wants bring me down
But Sometime later when I'm feel a little straighter
I will come across a stranger
Who'll remind me of the danger
And then I'll run him over
Pretty smart on my part
Find my way home in the dark

 

Unless, of course, they're cops--then they tend to be like this:

 

There is a legal category of inaction that is criminal, in most States: https://definitions.uslegal.com/d/depraved-indifference/