Yesterday I wrote about a hypothetical moral situation and ended up questioning whether or not I am meeting my moral obligations (if they do exist).

Essentially, the hypothetical situation poses the question of whether causing harm is just as morally wrong as not preventing the same harm from occurring. I’d like to believe that, yes, action and inaction that produces the same result (in a simple scenario) can be morally equivalent. The bigger problem then was that if I am morally obligated to prevent harm from occurring, then am I not morally obligated to spend as much of my time and money as possible to help others? (That is, without doing harm to my own life, obviously. For example, it may not be moral to donate all of my money such that I can no longer pay for my own food, shelter, etc.)

How and whether you can answer this question first depends on what beliefs your general morality system is based on. Some people have no moral system, and therefore, these questions are irrelevant to them. But it seems as if most people do have some morality system, and in general, I would say that most people believe in the morality system that it is “moral to not cause harm and moral to prevent harm if possible”. You may not agree with this, but assume this is true for the sake of my argument.

Let’s return to the question “am I not morally obligated to spend as much of my time and money as possible to help others?”. Given the above morality system, if you say “no, I am not morally obligated to spend all my time/money helping others”, then it must follow that inaction to prevent harm is not immoral, and therefore, you cannot say committing a crime is immoral either. If you do, then your entire morality system breaks down. The reason I say this is that if you agree that not preventing harm from occurring is immoral, then you are morally obligated to always prevent harm from occurring – and well, harm to individuals is occurring every second right now.

Again, this is true only if you believe that given the same result, action or inaction are morally equivalent – if you don’t agree with this, then we can’t go any further. But if you don’t agree, then you have no moral system or a different one – but aren’t most people’s moral systems pretty close to what I suggested?

This is the Idea I was Struggling With

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Today I read about a hypothetical scenario that I’m struggling with, and not exactly sure yet how I feel about it.

Hypothetical scenario 1: A person is tied to a train track and a train is going to run the person over. There is a switch that controls the train. If you flip the switch, the train will stop. If you don’t, the person will die.

Hypothetical Scenario 2: Same situation as above, but in this case, the switch is off and the train isn’t moving. If you flip the switch on, the train will start to move and kill the person on the track.

Is not flipping the switch in #1 just as morally wrong as flipping the switch in #2?

I would say that you are morally obligated to not harm / let the person be harmed in both scenarios. Yet I initially struggled with the idea of moral equivalency for this situation. Could action to hurt ever be equally bad as inaction against harm?

In case #2, if we flip the switch, then we essentially desire the person to die. In case #1, if we choose to not stop flip the switch and stop the train, this does not necessitate that we desired the person to die – it could also mean that we did not feel a moral obligation to save the person’s life (but in that case, we don’t share the same moral values), or that even if we did, we chose not to act on it. So initially, it felt as if flipping the switch in #2 was worse if we took complete intentions into account.

However, if we are just looking at just morality, I guess one could argue that it is morally correct to act on your moral obligations. Therefore, in #2, we are morally obligated not to kill, and in #1, we are morally obligated to prevent death – in that respect, you could argue both action (#2) and inaction (#1) are morally equivalent and equally wrong.

Yet legally, there is a clear distinction between how we would treat an individual in those circumstances – in general, you can’t really be charged with a crime for inaction for such situations (but if you have any interesting spots where you can, let me know). For instance, if this exact situation was presented in court, I would think you could only jail the person who flipped the switch in #2.

A bigger question, however, emerges if we extrapolate inaction into a larger sense. Right now some people in third world countries are dying of hunger, disease, etc. Am I committing an immoral act by sitting here and typing this at my computer instead of directly contributing to improving their lives?

Now that might sound ridiculous at first, but that’s probably because humans tend to feel stronger about immediate events and results – such as actually being at the train tracks with the switch and a person about to die. Besides not being able to visualize it in real time, how is my inaction right now any different from not acting to help?

However, the idea that anytime I am watching a movie is immoral seems pretty ridiculous to me. The question we must then ask is: Are we actually morally obligated to do anything? If so, how can we act on our moral obligations in some cases but not others?

I am definitely not an expert or anything on moral theory – these are ideas I struggle with, and I’d be interested in hearing different opinions, insights, and perspectives on these issues.

What do you think?

Modern day education systems constantly stress the importance of developing leadership skills. Students who have “demonstrated leadership and “initiative” are the ones desired by higher education programs, as obvious through a glance at university admissions booklets and scholarship applications. Yet one of the things I find really weird and rather misleading is how young people are brought up viewing what it means to be a leader.

At least in my experience, while growing up, a strong leader was portrayed as someone who always took initiative in almost every situation; someone who always immediately knew the right thing to do; someone who was able to contribute in every single instance; someone who had charisma and was very vocal with his or her group members. I noticed certain individuals in my school and elsewhere who had those qualities, and so it seemed as if they were natural born leaders.

But I’m nothing like this

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