> Duty (criminal law), is an obligation to act under which failure to act (omission), results in criminal liability
You failed to act, which is why a law is sometimes required to compel action. However, saving a drowning person isn't something that triggers such a legal obligation in the USA unless you're the person who actually pushed someone into the water in the first place.
I don't get why this thread is getting so long or so abstract. The principles here are straightforward. Facebook don't actually have to care about what arguments activists make, but even if they did, it's on activists to win the argument for what they want. You don't get to automatically have your own way unless someone sits down and does a randomized controlled trial showing that you're wrong - and this is independent of what domain we're talking about.
But we're not talking about only the legal obligations. Plenty would argue that a person with a life ring and a drowning person in front of them have a moral imperative to act; the court of public opinion would be certainly negative about a video of someone casually watching the person die while holding the means to save them, even if you can't criminally prosecute.
In this particular case, changing the rules (and making the blog post explaining those changes!) is pretty clearly an action.
Here, the law flows from the moral judgment that there’s a fundamental distinction between action and inaction. Otherwise, you’d be morally culpable for not basically enslaving ourself to helping whenever happens to be the poorest.
> I don't get why this thread is getting so long or so abstract
Activists use abstraction to attempt to overcome settled understandings and norms. Of course there is a distinction between action and inaction—as you recognize it’s even a legally significant distinction. The very existence of that norm is the reason anyone would say “inaction is really a form of action.”
It’s like how the notion of “antiracism” is an effort to reframe race neutrality as a form of racism.
That's not really how language works. If not choosing to do something is a choice, then today we have all made an infinite number of choices. Nobody would ever express themselves that way.
But even if you want to play word games, choices and actions aren't the same thing. Choosing to act is quantitively different from choosing not to act because it involves a different level of effort. It's wrong to assume that they are morally equal.
This seems to be presuming that there is some clear delineation between acting and not acting, but going through some daily occurrences it's difficult for me to find an objective line, mostly because there are choices one could make that allow one to call something inaction while it requires active action.
Say for example I'm passing by a beggar on my way to work. Before deciding whether I give them money, I can first decide to ignore or not ignore them. From a basic human perspective I want to say hello and be friendly (and I choose to do this), but it does make me feel worse if I decline than if I had ignored them, exactly because it makes it feel like a choice. But if I ignore them, can I call passing by without giving them money less of a choice? I only moved my choice up one level in the tree of all possible decisions I can make.
Or, moving it to the example of the drowning man: imagine you're holding out your arm to see how long you can do it, and see the life ring flying towards you. If you choose not to act, it'll hang on your arm, and the person will drown. Is it nevertheless inaction on your part?
>then today we have all made an infinite number of choices
The way I like to think about it is that once a choice has risen to the level of conscious awareness, it is an illusion that a person can just decline to choose.
