[Hong Wu]

There's a common default position in tort (personal injury) law. It says that if someone needs your help and you walk away from them, they can’t sue you for it. You can however be sued for trying to help them and doing a bad job of it.

To many people this sounds like a horrible policy. Let's envision some of the competing policies:

Policy 1: You are legally required to help a person in need. You can also be sued for negligence if you help incompetently.

Outcome 1: The court has to decide the following things. When is a person in need? What constitutes competent help? Can a court do this fairly when there is little evidence?

Dilemma 1: Every time someone is in need, they become a legal threat to other people who are nearby. This makes being in need shameful. It could promote frivolous lawsuits. If large numbers of people try to help at the same time (or pretend to be helping so that they can't be sued) it could actually make some problems worse.

Conclusion 1: It is better to leave this up to the public's judgment. A healthy society should not lack for people who want to help each other anyway.

Policy 2: You are legally required to help a person in need. You cannot be sued for negligence if you help them incompetently.

Outcome 2: Some people help frantically because the only thing that can go wrong for them is an accusation that they did not try to help. This potentially (maybe even likely) makes any given problem worse.

Dilemma 2: People are afraid to admit they are in need because they don't want to get mobbed by fools. It makes being in need dangerous.

Conclusion 2: The same as conclusion 1, it is better to leave these things up to the public.

Argument: Legally Requiring Morality is a Paradox
If morality is one person helping another for no reward, legally requiring morality is a paradox because the avoidance of punishment is an obscured form of a reward. To not require that people help each other seems unsatisfying and wrong, yet requiring it does not work well in practice. From a communal standpoint, morality makes perfect sense. From an individualistic standpoint it makes no sense because the moral person stands only to lose; he has nothing to gain.

My conclusion regarding this argument is two fold. First, communal ethics are the only real form of ethics; helping yourself is not deserving of the word morality. Second, communal ethics cannot be justified individually. They exist only within a form of a superego or group consciousness which itself is usually manifested as a religion. Without any coherent manifestation of this communal consciousness, communal ethics cannot be articulated and this causes a state of decline in real morality. One of the first responses to this state of decline is the attempt to legally require moral behavior from citizens but these efforts never seem to work.

[Hong Wu]

Anybody? It wasn't that long.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

Perhaps people were going with policy 3: you are not required to help a person (Hong Wu) in need.

This is legalistically complicated, and in some cities in China for example, people have been known to be less than helpful to people injured or in distress because it is incredibly easy for people to sue each other for providing insufficient help, or simply because they can sue for thousands of dollars. The title of the linked article is rather sensational and should be taken with a grain of salt.

It's a headache for the police to enforce laws punishing people for not helping, and it clogs up the court system when it's easier than ever for victims of accidents to prey upon their good Samaritans, but I suppose if the police were investigating an incident where the identities of various onlookers were known, and they did nothing to help someone who then suffered worse injuries or death, they should suffer the consequences.

[Cartertonian]

Just remove the nonsense about punishing people who try to help.

Simples.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

Just remove the nonsense about punishing people who try to help.

Simples.

*Strokes his mustache thoughtfully* How am I supposed to sue you for ten thousand pounds then, Mr Carter?

[Cartertonian]

Actually, speaking parochially, this malign litigious culture is an American import and I wish we had had the wit to block it. Now, it's too late and TV advertisements are full of 'InjuryLawyers4You' and other such similar shit. Some years ago, for example, we stopped referring to 'Road Traffic Accidents' and started referring to 'Road Traffic Collisions': because? because there's no such thing (apparently) as an accident. Someone is always to blame...or rather someone's misfortune can always be magnified a thousand-fold by litigation.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

Yeah well, maybe if you stopped driving on the wrong side of the road you wouldn't have so many bloody collisions.

The litigious culture you speak of is an awful, horrible thing, but once the genie was let out of the bottle I'm not sure how it can be put back in. In the example I used, the people in China who sue each other for providing assistance do so because the person providing help can simply be blamed for causing the accident/injury: if you're a particularly shitty person, I suppose you might as well sue the person who tried to save your life. The statistics may disagree with me, but it feels like this "litigious culture" correlates (at least in Western countries) to a rise in the cost of living/cost of necessities and a relative stagnation in income/growing wealth disparity. People still regularly go into incredible, massive, ridiculous levels of debt in America simply to earn university degrees, receive relatively routine medical treatment, etc. If you're not well-off, and living in this type of culture we do, and you order a pizza and it burns the roof of your mouth, perhaps you might be tempted to consider trying to sue.

[Hong Wu]

Good answer Cartertonian. I was also trying to make a deeper argument though, that requiring people to help each other in all cases is flawed and can only be encouraged through religion.

[Hong Wu]

I would add that getting rid of negligence charges for people trying to help could clear the way but it also wouldn't motivate anyone to help in of itself.

[Potemkin]

Good answer Cartertonian. I was also trying to make a deeper argument though, that requiring people to help each other in all cases is flawed and can only be encouraged through religion.

You cannot force people to be good, Hong Wu. You can, however, force them to do good, with greater or lesser success, by using the legal system as a blunt instrument on them. But this approach also has problems - the good samaritan might give bunglingly incompetent help and make things worse, or might even be mischievously sued by the person they helped.

As for religion, good luck trying to enforce a single religious faith on people and getting them to actually do what their religion tells them they should be doing. The Catholic Church has been trying to do that for two millennia now, with a notable lack of success.

[Gletkin]

As for religion, good luck trying to enforce a single religious faith on people and getting them to actually do what their religion tells them they should be doing.

First, minds have to be made up as to what exactly that is.

[Hong Wu]

You cannot force people to be good, Hong Wu. You can, however, force them to do good, with greater or lesser success, by using the legal system as a blunt instrument on them. But this approach also has problems - the good samaritan might give bunglingly incompetent help and make things worse, or might even be mischievously sued by the person they helped.

As for religion, good luck trying to enforce a single religious faith on people and getting them to actually do what their religion tells them they should be doing. The Catholic Church has been trying to do that for two millennia now, with a notable lack of success.

You didn't address my hypotheticals on the issue of forcing people to do good. The Catholic church had a lot of success for a long time but it's really irrelevant because the incentivizing affect doesn't need to be a single religion, it can also be gained through multiple different religions so long as they all encourage people to help out their fellow citizens.

[Potemkin]

You didn't address my hypotheticals on the issue of forcing people to do good. The Catholic church had a lot of success for a long time but it's really irrelevant because the incentivizing affect doesn't need to be a single religion, it can also be gained through multiple different religions so long as they all encourage people to help out their fellow citizens.

But this is what almost all (non-creepy) religions do, or at least claim to be doing. And let's face it, it hasn't really worked, has it?

[Hong Wu]

Eh, sort of. The usual Christian concept is that you go to hell if you do bad things and get resurrected if you do good things. Not helping someone is usually not doing a good thing which is different from doing a bad thing. A more accurate analogy would be if the government paid you for helping people which is not going to be applied broadly and would still send the wrong message. I also don't think the impulse to help people is rooted in individual material gain. It's more of a "God wants this to be done" conception, at least for me.

[Potemkin]

I also don't think the impulse to help people is rooted in individual material gain.

Actually, I think it is. As Adam Smith pointed out, if we relied on the goodwill of our baker for our daily bread, we would quickly starve to death. The baker provides bread for people because it is in his own material interests to do so. Most human social co-operation is of this nature - we do it because we have to. Our individual survival depends on our being an integral part of human society as a whole, and the benefits which that brings us. And we don't depend on other people's goodwill to supply those benefits, and thank God for that.

[Hong Wu]

I think you are dodging the question. Every instance of people helping other people is not analogous to this baker hypothetical. We could say that religion provides an incentive to action while law can only provide a disincentive to inaction and not very well. If you disagree, how can the law effectively provide a disincentive or an incentive? The implosion of people helping each other which seems to characterize communist countries suggests that this is an issue.

[Potemkin]

I think you are dodging the question. Every instance of people helping other people is not analogous to this baker hypothetical. We could say that religion provides an incentive while law can only provide a disincentive and not very well. If you disagree, how can the law effectively provide a disincentive or an incentive? The implosion of people helping each other that seems to characterize communist countries suggests that this is an issue.

Actually, what is astonishing about Communist countries is how much people did help each other (sometimes against the wishes of the Communist government itself - after all, even samizdat itself can be regarded as an example of grassroots social co-operation). In a Communist-run society, the economic incentives for people to co-operate with each other are largely removed (eg, the baker no longer has the profit motive to incentivise him to supply people with bread). This absence of economic incentive had to be replaced, in part by state coercion and in part by enthusiasm among the population for constructing a fair and just society. Eventually, the enthusiasm faded and the state coercion came to be regarded as intolerable. Nevertheless, this experiment lasted for three generations and was, in the crude terms of the economic and military power of the society as a whole, surprisingly successful.

[Hong Wu]

I'd be interested to see some sources for those claims since everything I've read about how people acted in defunct communist countries or act now in modern communist countries suggests widespread corruption, a lack of people helping each other and low levels of empathy.

[Tomato_Cake]

A good case for Good Samaritans' Insurance.

[Potemkin]

I'd be interested to see some sources for those claims since everything I've read about how people acted in defunct communist countries or act now in modern communist countries suggests widespread corruption, a lack of people helping each other and low levels of empathy.

That largely happened after the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union in 1991, although to be honest the seeds of that social degradation existed from at least the 1970s onwards. But during the 1930s and 1940s, especially, there was actually huge enthusiasm for the idea of building socialism, especially among the young and impressionable. The economic and military achievements of the time could hardly have been possible without such enthusiasm and self-sacrifice, especially given the lack of economic incentives. And merely pointing a gun at people's heads doesn't do the trick; if it did, then North Korea and the Islamic State would be economic powerhouses. And the Soviet system was not especially corrupt, especially given the fact that corrupt officials were liable to be shot. The criminality and corruption only skyrocketed after the fall of Communism, when criminal gangs seized control of the Russian state apparatus.