For those who are unaware: A couple billionaires, a pilot, and one of the billionaires’ son are currently stuck inside an extremely tiny sub a couple thousand meters under the sea (inside of the sub with the guys above).
They were supposed to dive down to the titanic, but lost connection about halfway down. They’ve been missing for the past 48 hours, and have 2 days until the oxygen in the sub runs out. Do you think they’ll make it?
I would also say that I don’t think people SHOULD be risking their lives at this point. We’re looking at a case of people who took an informed risk and understood that there was danger associated with the recreational activity they were undertaking. These people either had vast monetary resources and could have consulted the best experts in the world, or had significant prior experience and knowledge. While obviously withholding information interferes with informed consent, and that may or may not have played a role, I don’t think this is morally equivalent to rescuing someone from a burning building. There’s also simple probability - the odds of rescuing them alive and well aren’t good, and to put someone else’s life at risk for the off chance that they succeed would be unethical in my opinion.
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I’ve had to sign waivers like that to take my kids to bounce house birthday parties.
What do you consider “not informed” vs. “willfully ignorant”? Personally, I think that a billionaire, who could have afforded any reputable service (which does exist), and who could have hired experts to go over every miniscule detail of the mission was willfully ignorant. The CEO of the company, who was personally warned and knew all of the internal issues, was also willfully ignorant. If either of them thought this was equivalent to skydiving, or just though “fuck it”, that’s on them. Of course, if the company actively lied to them or hid information then that’s obviously a huge issue, but if they just said “yeah like, this tube is made of stuff from the junkyard and literally no regulatory body has OKd us” and they agreed with the resources and knowledge available to them, then they carry some responsibility.
I think the case of say, signing a waiver before you go ziplining is very different for a few reasons. Most people who go ziplining don’t have any expertise, and don’t have the financial resources to find out more about the activity or the company offering it. They’re essentially relying on what they’re being told, so it’s far more coercive to tell someone like that “yeah uhh, we’re mostly safe, here sign this”. Ziplining would also presumably have some regulation around it, so undisclosed risk would leave not only the provider, but also the regulatory body, and in a larger sense government and society morally culpable. Thirdly, I think in a legal sense you have to consider what an average reasonable citizen would have interpreted the risk to be, just like in other criminal cases. I think it’s fair to say that the average reasonable person would have understood the risk of a titanic mission to be far greater than that of ziplining, so the burden to convey risk is much higher in the ziplining case.
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That’s why the “average reasonable person” standard is used in criminal cases. Most people do not expect to die driving over a pothole, and don’t drive over them intentionally.
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