| | Oddly enough, what MSK is proposing was explored on the last episodes of SEINFELD. The four are stuck in a small town, and witness a mugging. Instead of helping, or even calling the police, they videotape it and make jokes typical of a big city ennui. Turns out the town had recently passed a Good Samaritan law. They stand trial for their inaction and all the characters come to testify against the big Four's perpetual callousness, and they are found guilty.
This makes me think of another example, where a person is having some kind of attack with the antidote just out of reach. A person a few feet away need only push a bottle of medicine into the person's hand. But instead of doing so, the person watches the other person twitch and struggle, with a mixture of curiousness and sadism, allowing the person to die. This example usually comes up in discusssions of what constitutes murder, and often in discussions of pscyopaths (I think I heard this example in regards to the movie THE BAD SEED).
I really don't want to touch this discussion with a 20 foot pole, because it does make me uneasy. It seems such a slippery slope to suggest legislation, and I personally side with Luke that the state has no right to legislage morality. Yet I would want to help a person in need and do what I can for them in an emergency situation. But to legislate emergency assistance would seem to be too subjective a call, and if the government is limited to preventing the non-initiation of force, it would be incompatible with Objectivism. Maybe the closest way to reconcile it would be Rand's example of boycotts as an appropriate way to deal with discrimination; ostracism by the community would be a more effective way of dealing with someone who does not hold the mutual well-being of the community as a value. But the slippery slope of "Good Samaritan laws" can only lead to more of what got us to our current situation.
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