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Notes -
Right? There’s a mess of heuristics going on under the hood.
For example, many people see a strong moral difference between ‘doing X’ and ‘not preventing X’ as you say.
Then we seem to see a distinction made between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ values. People can relatively easily trade off profane dilemmas like ‘I could finish up my uber job for the day, or I could take another few passengers and earn enough to have a nice burger on the way back home’. But then they point-blank refuse to trade off ‘sacred’ values like not shooting children against any ‘profane’ sum of money.
And of course different people seem to have different sets of heuristics. Some people just don’t seem to see any moral difference between action and inaction, for example, and then those with and without the heuristic get baffled or angry when they try to debate each other.
Did you ever come across Jonathon Haidt’s moral foundations theory from 2010ish? His book was called “The Righteous Mind” and it goes into his research trying to identify the different moral foundations that people seem to use (harm, caring, purity, etc.) and the fact that different people seem to use different sets.
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