Essay :
Is it moral to refuse to save someone's life if there is any risk for your own. Write an essay explaining your views on this situation.
Pls guys help out in this
Answers
Answer:
The example I think of most is somebody drowning. If I see somebody drowning, my moral compass says that I can choose whether to try to save them or not, and still be considered a good human being. If my inaction causes their death, I may struggle with personal feelings of guilt or sadness, yet I don’t think it would be fair for society to try me on charges of negligent homicide.
When I imagine this example, I usually imagine an adult drowning in the ocean. Trying to save them could put my life at risk. I know of at least one excellent swimmer who died at my local beach trying to save someone else who was drowning.
Perhaps the only reason I’m not morally obligated to save a life in that example is because I would be risking my own. That leads me to the question, “If I can save someone’s life at no risk to my own, am I morally and socially obligated to do so?” Say the person drowning is a 3-year-old in a swimming pool at the shallow end — would it be appropriate to send me to jail if I didn’t save that child? This one’s a little harder for me to analyze, because I would always try to save the child, but I can still do a thought experiment. If I tried to save the child and failed, I might get sued, because I live in the U.S. and lawsuits like that happen here. So in that sense, trying to save the child is not a risk-free proposition. It’s hard to imagine an adult who wouldn’t try to save the child; when I postulate one, though, I feel that logically they can’t be punished for their inaction, even though emotionally it feels wrong.
When I think of all the ways it’s possible to save lives — pulling someone out of a fire, giving them shelter during the cold, giving them food when they are starving, giving them CPR or the Heimlich maneuver — it seems as though the pattern is that no individual is morally obligated to save another individual, yet society as a whole (at least in some countries) feels obligated to save as many individual lives as possible. This makes a certain amount of sense to me. As an individual, trying to save a life could have serious repercussions for me, from death to a lawsuit to opening my home to a potential criminal. As a society, the risks are decreased or financially rewarded. Police officers and fire fighters get paid more for risking their lives to save others. EMT drivers have training in CPR and may be protected from lawsuits if they break someone’s ribs administering it. People working or volunteering at shelters for the homeless may be less susceptible to theft or violence than people in private homes.
Some people argue that saving lives has become too big a risk for society. They want to cut funding for social programs. Others think there are more important things than saving lives, like going to war or protecting our constitutional right to bear arms. Others are so concerned with saving lives, they’d rather deny thousands and thousands of unvaccinated children a public education than see 13 children out of 73.6 million die of whooping cough.
It’s an interesting puzzle. If I have no obligation as an individual to save a human life, does society have one? Where I lived in Guatemala as a Peace Corps volunteer, the government didn’t have enough money to save very many lives. There were no police, no fire department, no emergency room, no traffic lights. Right before I left, a clinic opened, so they were starting to get government-sponsored health care available to them once a week. And there was non-government help available in the form of charitable organizations who distributed foods and goods, or, as in the case of Peace Corps, attempted to distribute education and training. Overall, though, people in trouble turned to their families for help.
It was pretty inspiring to see how people helped each other out, that in the absence of social services like welfare and enforced child support women who had been abandoned by their husbands were still able to raise their six kids. I’m sure part of why it worked there is that the community is small, everyone knows everyone and is related to a large percentage of the population by blood or marriage. It gets a little harder when people are isolated in big cities and no one knows their neighbor.
I think the key to this topic could be the distinction between what’s logically true and what’s emotionally true. I wouldn’t want to live in a society where I could be prosecuted for not saving a life, because that means I could be forced to let other people’s poor choices affect my life negatively. At the same time, I wouldn’t want to live in a society where nobody helped anybody. My ideal society is one in which people help each other out voluntarily, and fund social programs voluntarily, because their culture has successfully trained them to feel empathy for others and to act on it in a wise way. Even if I am not obligated to save a life, it is preferable when I feel the strength and motivation to try.