Are you morally obligated to defend a stranger from a violent crime?

[Ferguson97]

^

[Big Abraham]

Depends on the crime in question and my own level of preparedness and ability to defend myself. If I saw some guy getting mugged at gunpoint, and I'm unarmed, I'm not going anywhere near there. I also don't have a lot of upper body strength so I don't see myself being able to win a fistfight in most instances.

[LBJer]

I voted no.  I don't think you're morally obligated to put yourself in danger for the sake of a stranger.

[HisGrace]

This is always a prickly issue for me because I am very much opposed to vigilantism but there are some cases severe enough where you should intervene if you have the ability.

[dead0man]

obviously there are many variables that can come into play, but generally speaking, if you can do something to assist someone in need, you should.

[Del Tachi]

As has been said, it really depends on the specifics of the situation.  At a bare minimum, you're under a moral obligation to report a violent crime if you come across one in progress but anything beyond that is context-dependent.

[Vosem]

In the general case, no. If you have the ability to do so while placing others and yourself at little danger, then you are strongly morally encouraged, but I think not absolutely obligated. You owe nothing to those you have made no commitments to.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It depends on likelihood of success and on whether the intervention escalates the situation or deescalates it. I'd say I'm morally obligated to, say, tell the foul-smelling pindick haranguing a scantily-dressed girl on the bus to knock it off, but the only person I'm going to help by walking up and decking the heavily armed gang leader who's doing the same thing is the eventual prosecutor.

You owe nothing to those you have made no commitments to.

This idea is self-evidently fatuous, nihilistic nonsense to anybody who doesn't already subscribe to it. It's a shame that those of us who don't are such a diverse group that we can't agree on any alternative organizing principle for society that wouldn't be even worse.

[Meclazine for Israel]

Yes and No.

In the middle of the outback, I have had an aboriginal guy start hitting his wife in the head in front of 7 other aboriginals when I stopped to help them when their car was broken down.

She wanted me to take her husband into town and "put him in jail" and she suggested I step in and beat him up, and then he got angry because I was a white guy and he felt any argument should be kept 'in house' so to speak.

Then once the bloodshed subsided, she got up, went around the back of the car, and came back swinging a small two sided pick axe at him and he ran off.

She looked like he beat her every weekend for the last 15 years.

It was just not my fight. The risk of injury when you stop to help the mob fix their car on the side of the road is great in Western Australia. They don't mind belting the piss out of each other in public.

https://www.facebook.com/7newssydney/videos/south-hedland-shopping-centre-brawl/1442772232413572/

[John Dule]

You owe nothing to those you have made no commitments to.

This idea is self-evidently fatuous, nihilistic nonsense to anybody who doesn't already subscribe to it.

It is also the foundation of all tort and contract law for the past 300 years.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

You owe nothing to those you have made no commitments to.

This idea is self-evidently fatuous, nihilistic nonsense to anybody who doesn't already subscribe to it.

It is also the foundation of all tort and contract law for the past 300 years.

Yes. As I said...

[President Johnson]

It depends, especially how much you put yourself in a situation of danger. If the offender is armed, it would certainly be better to call the police.

Fortunately I was never in such kind of a situation. However, if I was witnessing something like that, especially violence towards children or women, I'd almost certainly intervene. Heck, when I see something like this on TV, I really can get upset. It's possible I'd beat the hell out of such an offender.

[John Dule]

You owe nothing to those you have made no commitments to.

This idea is self-evidently fatuous, nihilistic nonsense to anybody who doesn't already subscribe to it.

It is also the foundation of all tort and contract law for the past 300 years.

Yes. As I said...

There is no other way to structure society.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

You owe nothing to those you have made no commitments to.

This idea is self-evidently fatuous, nihilistic nonsense to anybody who doesn't already subscribe to it.

It is also the foundation of all tort and contract law for the past 300 years.

Yes. As I said...

There is no other way to structure society.

No, there is currently no other viable way to structure society that wouldn't be even worse. Or, in the immortal words of Harry Potter, "Capitalism is an improvement over the previous system, but it's still F**KING CAPITALISM!"

Regardless, whether or not something is the foundation of all tort and contract law has no bearing one way or another on whether or not it ought to be the foundation of the way people interact with one another in interpersonal situations or make moral decisions.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There is also considerably more to society than Tort and Contract Law and always was. Arguing otherwise makes you sound like a wind-up caricature of a crass Utilitarian written by Dickens.

[John Dule]

There is also considerably more to society than Tort and Contract Law and always was. Arguing otherwise makes you sound like a wind-up caricature of a crass Utilitarian written by Dickens.

But he argued that there should be an "alternative organizing principle for society," by which I assume he means the law. What would the law look like if failure to help others was a tort? This sounds like the Seinfeld finale.

[Vosem]

You owe nothing to those you have made no commitments to.

This idea is self-evidently fatuous, nihilistic nonsense to anybody who doesn't already subscribe to it.

It is also the foundation of all tort and contract law for the past 300 years.

Yes. As I said...

There is no other way to structure society.

No, there is currently no other viable way to structure society that wouldn't be even worse. Or, in the immortal words of Harry Potter, "Capitalism is an improvement over the previous system, but it's still F**KING CAPITALISM!"

Regardless, whether or not something is the foundation of all tort and contract law has no bearing one way or another on whether or not it ought to be the foundation of the way people interact with one another in interpersonal situations or make moral decisions.

I would argue that the establishment of a capitalist society is morally obligatory...

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

There is also considerably more to society than Tort and Contract Law and always was. Arguing otherwise makes you sound like a wind-up caricature of a crass Utilitarian written by Dickens.

But he argued that there should be an "alternative organizing principle for society," by which I assume he means the law. What would the law look like if failure to help others was a tort? This sounds like the Seinfeld finale.

A few points:

1. There are other areas of the law where it is presupposed that people have unchosen obligations to others; the existence and legitimacy of taxation, for example, is predicated on the idea that it's permissible, at least to a limited extent, for the state to coerce people into paying for other people's needs (or at least for the state's own needs, which inevitably involve the interests of people one doesn't personally know or choose to care about). Indeed, the idea that citizenship involves any individual duties at all, as opposed to all individual rights all the time, is predicated on the idea that the state, which is neither a natural community nor a chosen interpersonal circle, has some right to people's assistance in its own upkeep.
2. I don't really mean the law when I say "organizing principle for society", no, or at least not only the law. The vast majority of interpersonal relationships that people maintain and moral decisions that people make have very little bearing on the law at all, even in a modern and bureaucratic age in which the state's role in directing people's lives is both more visible and more, let's say, stylized than in the bad old days. As Hobbes (not that one) said, "if your friends are contractual, you don't have any". Surely that's even truer of, say, family, townspeople, coreligionists, and other people with whom one has relationships and to whom one has obligations that one doesn't personally choose the way one chooses one's friends?
3. I've conceded a few times in succession now that my desire for an alternative to a Maximum Individual Choice account of interpersonal obligations doesn't mean that such an alternative is currently available. You (and I guess also Vosem) stressing the nonexistence of such an alternative over and over again seems superfluous to me, unless you're trying to convince me that what I currently believe is an unfortunate feature of the current historical era is in fact a universal part of how the world works. And universalizing that sort of thing is just not an idea that appeals to me as much as it appeals to the average Talk Secular US Forum Atlas Elections blogger.

[John Dule]

1. There are other areas of the law where it is presupposed that people have unchosen obligations to others; the existence and legitimacy of taxation, for example, is predicated on the idea that it's permissible, at least to a limited extent, for the state to coerce people into paying for other people's needs (or at least for the state's own needs, which inevitably involve the interests of people one doesn't personally know or choose to care about). Indeed, the idea that citizenship involves any individual duties at all, as opposed to all individual rights all the time, is predicated on the idea that the state, which is neither a natural community nor a chosen interpersonal circle, has some right to people's assistance in its own upkeep.

As anyone who's ever received cash for their birthday can tell you, money has high utility but requires little personal thought. Taxation works because it reduces society's needs to a single common denominator (money) that can then be used to fund innumerable programs determined by the government. This is fundamentally different from a stranger being compelled to directly help someone else in a specific way, whether in the case of a violent crime or otherwise.

2. I don't really mean the law when I say "organizing principle for society", no, or at least not only the law. The vast majority of interpersonal relationships that people maintain and moral decisions that people make have very little bearing on the law at all, even in a modern and bureaucratic age in which the state's role in directing people's lives is both more visible and more, let's say, stylized than in the bad old days. As Hobbes (not that one) said, "if your friends are contractual, you don't have any". Surely that's even truer of, say, family, townspeople, coreligionists, and other people with whom one has relationships and to whom one has obligations that one doesn't personally choose the way one chooses one's friends?

3. I've conceded a few times in succession now that my desire for an alternative to a Maximum Individual Choice account of interpersonal obligations doesn't mean that such an alternative is currently available. You (and I guess also Vosem) stressing the nonexistence of such an alternative over and over again seems superfluous to me, unless you're trying to convince me that what I currently believe is an unfortunate feature of the current historical era is in fact a universal part of how the world works. And universalizing that sort of thing is just not an idea that appeals to me as much as it appeals to the average Talk Secular US Forum Atlas Elections blogger.

If you're talking about extralegal activities like charity, then what exactly is lacking in our society? Charitable acts aren't exactly frowned upon by any political or social group. I would contend that charity is an organizing principle of our society when it comes to social relations; it just wouldn't work as an organizing principle in a legal sense. How much of an obligation do you want to see, exactly? And how would you see it enforced?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

1. There are other areas of the law where it is presupposed that people have unchosen obligations to others; the existence and legitimacy of taxation, for example, is predicated on the idea that it's permissible, at least to a limited extent, for the state to coerce people into paying for other people's needs (or at least for the state's own needs, which inevitably involve the interests of people one doesn't personally know or choose to care about). Indeed, the idea that citizenship involves any individual duties at all, as opposed to all individual rights all the time, is predicated on the idea that the state, which is neither a natural community nor a chosen interpersonal circle, has some right to people's assistance in its own upkeep.

As anyone who's ever received cash for their birthday can tell you, money has high utility but requires little personal thought. Taxation works because it reduces society's needs to a single common denominator (money) that can then be used to fund innumerable programs determined by the government. This is fundamentally different from a stranger being compelled to directly help someone else in a specific way, whether in the case of a violent crime or otherwise.

This is a fair point; however, I don't think it inherently makes a huge moral or ethical difference what kind of denominator an obligation is being reduced to as long as the obligation itself, or perception of obligation, still exists. (Obviously invasive cases like, I don't know, corvee labor aside.) I could just not be thinking this specific point through particularly clearly, though; many such cases given that it's a Monday morning!

2. I don't really mean the law when I say "organizing principle for society", no, or at least not only the law. The vast majority of interpersonal relationships that people maintain and moral decisions that people make have very little bearing on the law at all, even in a modern and bureaucratic age in which the state's role in directing people's lives is both more visible and more, let's say, stylized than in the bad old days. As Hobbes (not that one) said, "if your friends are contractual, you don't have any". Surely that's even truer of, say, family, townspeople, coreligionists, and other people with whom one has relationships and to whom one has obligations that one doesn't personally choose the way one chooses one's friends?

3. I've conceded a few times in succession now that my desire for an alternative to a Maximum Individual Choice account of interpersonal obligations doesn't mean that such an alternative is currently available. You (and I guess also Vosem) stressing the nonexistence of such an alternative over and over again seems superfluous to me, unless you're trying to convince me that what I currently believe is an unfortunate feature of the current historical era is in fact a universal part of how the world works. And universalizing that sort of thing is just not an idea that appeals to me as much as it appeals to the average Talk Secular US Forum Atlas Elections blogger.

If you're talking about extralegal activities like charity, then what exactly is lacking in our society? Charitable acts aren't exactly frowned upon by any political or social group. I would contend that charity is an organizing principle of our society when it comes to social relations; it just wouldn't work as an organizing principle in a legal sense. How much of an obligation do you want to see, exactly? And how would you see it enforced?

The thing is, Vosem doesn't appear to be of this opinion, since this thread is specifically about moral rather than legal obligation, and I think there's an ongoing secular trend (in the sense of long-term and difficult to reverse, not in the sense of SECULAR) towards more and more people in developed societies agreeing with him. That's what I was getting at.

[progressive85]

Yes... it's important we have each other's back.  If It was you, you'd want a stranger to defend you.

[LBJer]

If It was you, you'd want a stranger to defend you.

But "wanting" someone to do something doesn't necessarily mean that the other person is morally obligated to conform to that wish.  If I don't want my girlfriend to dump me for another guy, that doesn't mean she has a moral obligation to avoid doing so.  She can say: "You know what?  Tough.  I have a right to be with who I want, as long as they're willing to be with me.  You'll just have to deal with it."  And she'd be absolutely right.  

If someone says: "I don't think I'm morally obligated to risk my life for a stranger,"  it's hard to see how that's clearly wrong, even if one disagrees with it.  It's certainly not like, say, a restaurant owner saying: "I don't think I'm morally obligated to serve African Americans--I can only serve whites if I want."  That's obviously false, because African Americans have a clear moral right to be treated equally.  Therefore, the owner is obligated to either serve both races or neither.  There is nothing comparable which shows that someone is obligated to defend a stranger.  Yes, the stranger's life is important, but so is one's own, and whether someone must value the stranger's as much as their own is very much a subjective call.