Everyday thousands of individuals put their lives at risk for no more than a sense of thrill. These daredevils decisions usually result in situations that require rescues that cost society large amounts of tax dollars. People who put themselves in a life-or-death situation should be held accountable for their rescue and should also be responsible for their actions. Being in a life-or-death situation does not excuse anyone from choosing a wrong path while knowing it isn’t the correct decision. Being in a life-or-death situation leads people to make dangerous and selfish decisions. But that does not mean that they shouldn’t be held accountable for the actions that they choose to take. It is still important to know right from …show more content…
It shouldn’t even be legal to put your life on the line at all. “Some incidents stem from a lack of judgement, some from a lack of training” (pg 53 para 3) People know what they are getting themselves into, but they still decide not to prepare to minimize their chances of something going wrong. “Many times I have tried to warn climbers and backpackers of nature’s cold and harsh realities” (pg 53 para 4) Risk takers have most likely been warned many times of all the danger that exist in nature but their still decide to proceed to put themselves in life-or-death situation. So their actions and the cost of their rescue should be with them instead of being on tax dollars when we could use the tax dollars for something better. “Everyone has a personal responsibility to maintain self-sufficiency in the wilderness and should always base decisions on getting back on their own.” (pg 53 para 11) People in Alaska believe that it is their own responsibility to stay alive since it was their own decision to put their life in the situation they are in at the moment. That couldn’t be any more true, but that does not mean that they can’t call for help they just have to pay for the money the help cost. Life is full of hard decisions, but the ones that come upon us during a hardship are the
Accountability is a subject that ranges through every spectrum of life. From simply knowing your food supply by opening the refrigerator, to knowing the exact amount of ammunition a military convoy has at its disposal, down to each individual round. When we know what the situation is, and hold each person responsible for they're actions in the situation, that is the concept of accountability at its root. If we are not to hold each other responsible for each of our own actions and choices then we will never be able to correct problems and concerns, which will make us fail as a whole because the smallest individual action can account for the gravest of concequences. In this essay I'm going to show how important accountability is in the everyday life of a United States Marine. I will do this by presenting the textbook definition of accountability then dissecting it and defining it in my own words. I will then show you how the military practices accountability with everything it does; by applying a system that is similiar to that of checks and balances. I will tie into this the Incident that occurd in 29 Palms, CA on August 31, 1988, where the failure to have accountability of all the marines on Base ultimately resulted in the negligent death of one Marine, and the ruined careers of those who were in charge of him. Lastly I will go down to the basic level of the Marine Corps: the life of the individual Marine and how he can, and naturally does to a point, apply accountability to his every action, be it on or off duty.
Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson have written a book that many people may find difficult to read. Why? Because it is like holding a mirror in front of one’s own face and looking into it. The book is about something most, if not all of us, have done: Justified our actions or words no matter how wrong they were. As Tavris and Aronson (2007) wrote in their book, “. . . most of us find it difficult, if not impossible to say, ‘I was wrong; I made a terrible mistake.’ The higher the stakes – emotional, financial, moral – the greater the difficulty.”
Comparative Analysis The power of blind obedience taints individuals’ ability to clearly distinguish between right and wrong in terms of obedience, or disobedience, to an unjust superior. In the article “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism,” Marianne Szegedy-Maszak discusses the unwarranted murder of innocent individuals due to vague orders that did not survive with certainty. Szegedy-Maszak utilizes the tactics of authorization, routinization, and dehumanization, respectively, to attempt to justify the soldiers’ heinous actions (Szegedy-Maszak 76-77). In addition, “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You” by Theodore Dalrymple distinguishes between blind disobedience and blind obedience to authority and stating that neither is superior;
There are some cases where I am for this idea and there are some cases were I am against it. I believe that people are responsible for their actions but not all of them. They may be responsible for their actions but it wasn't their choice to carry out the action. Ultimately, the responsibility is theirs. If you were a pilot that carried nukes and the army demanded you to drop the bomb on a defenseless village. If you had a family back home that was living off your pay check and you decided not to bomb the target, your whole family would have to pay for what you thought was the right thing to do. What would the right choice be? To let your family suffer because you thought is it was wrong to bomb a certain place? This is like making someone choose between one form of torture or another, it doesn't really matter which one you pick, you get hurt somehow in the end. Another example is when you don't know that what you doing is wrong. Say you grew up on a different planet were it was acceptable to kill the weak people who had deformities. If you were to relocate to another place were it was wrong to kill the weak and you kill a person the first day you get there before you learn anything about any laws or anything. Would that person be responsible for their actions? He wouldn't the faintest idea of the laws in his new environment. It could have been just his natural instincts telling him to do what he does at home. I would think that was no one's fault.
When someone finds themself in a life-or-death situation, their judgement becomes clouded. People can make a decision that they may regret in the long run, but it has saved their life. Most of the time, these people do things that they don’t know enough about- leading to clouded judgement in life-or-death situations. They do not inform themselves as much as they should, and they decide to do something that would put them in threat of danger. People take risks every day, they know what these risks are- but they still choose to go through with their actions. People in life-or-death situations should be held accountable for their actions because they have control over putting themselves in these types of situations that have any risk.
Many people are afraid to make decisions concerning their wishes when they die. This includes fear of making wills and making critical decisions that affect lives of others when they are not there. When the patients are terminally ill, they become incapable of making these decisions and they are often assisted or directed by some external forces to make these decisions. This paper exploits options and conditions of different terminally ill patients with a keen look at their mental and health status. It is also going to explore on those patients with DNR (Do not Resuscitate) orders and advance directives.
Critics of capital punishment hold that because most homicides are situational and are not planned, offenders do not consider the consequences of their actions before they commit the offense” (Mooney, Knox, & Schacht, 2015, p.133). Most people on death row committed their crimes in the heat of the moment, usually while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or, in some cases, due to suffering from mental illness. These individuals are highly unlikely to make rational decisions based on a fear of future consequences for their actions. Criminals are mainly concerned with whether or not they’ll be caught, not what might happen to them afterwards.
In the pursuit of safety, acceptance, and the public good, many atrocities have been committed in places such as Abu Ghraib and My Lai, where simple, generally harmless people became the wiling torturers and murderers of innocent people. Many claim to have just been following orders, which illustrates a disturbing trend in both the modern military and modern societies as a whole; when forced into an obedient mindset, many normal and everyday people can become tools of destruction and sorrow, uncaringly inflicting pain and death upon the innocent.
...ial norms and laws - it is to help save someone’s mom, someone’s daughter, someone’s sister.
The procedure known as “parole” in the criminal justice system has been in practice in the United States since the late 1800’s when it was begun in a reformatory in Elmira, New York. It’s process provides for early conditional release from prison for convicted felons, after part of their prison sentence has been served, and they are found to be eligible for parole based on factors such as: conduct while incarcerated, rehabilitative efforts/progress, type of offense, and remorse for their crime. Its use has been expanded to many states, and today has become the primary way by which offenders are released from prisons and correctional institutions. Unfortunately, parole is not always rewarded to worthy inmates, thus putting society at risk for repeated crimes that often outweigh the benefits of parole, therefore, parole should be abolished and inmates should be made to complete their full sentences. Prison inmates are usually sentenced by the severity of their crimes, as well as their mental intention at the time of the act. For example: a person who commits murder intentionally expects to take the life of another in reckless disregard for human life, and knows that the act itself which he or she has decided to commit, will surely bring about death. However, in the case of manslaughter, which is also the taking of a human life, there is no actual intention to bring about death. The act that lead to someone’s death, is measured by the circumstances that made the person kill such as self-defense, or a crime of passion because the killer was provoked in such a way that a chain of events lead to violence which eventually resulted in peril. Because of the difference in how these crimes are carried out, inmates are sentenced differently; some are sentenced to life in prison, and others are sentenced to several years and will be eligible for parole after serving part of their sentence. In lieu of inmates completing their full sentences, parole tries to achieve releasing inmates early based on the idea that the inmate has been sufficiently punished, and should be given the opportunity to become a law abiding citizen, capable of functioning in our society with adequate supervision. Although parole attempts to carefully screen inmates prior to granting early release, their decisions often do not merit wise choices. As a social worker, I e...
The mother-son case illustrates that there are more factors in play than just the two that Thomson presents in her thesis. Thomson’s conditions by themselves cannot explain every situation. The relationship between the people involved can also affect whether a decision is morally permissible or not. If that relationship entails that one person is emotionally bound and ethically responsible for the security and well-being of the other, the first cannot knowingly contribute to the death of the second. Thomson’s thesis must be modified to include this condition as well.
negative obligation not to destroy or injure human life directly, especially the life of the innocent
We have been taught that we should always follow our priorities, whether it is dealing with jobs, families, education, or faith. Ethical egoism teaches us that if our interests are any one these or something else, we should put it first because these are our values. But how far should we go in protecting our values? Is there a limit of how they should be protected? Am I doing what’s best for my priorities or for me? Although we should protect our values, there needs to be a limit and a focus of how I should protect my values with the best intentions. The film, Prisoners, presents this moral dilemma of torture through the characters’ decisions and emotions.
Utilitarianism "Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in spring......" A perfect example of a product of utilitarian education, Bitzer defines a horse off the top of his head in a split second. Utilitarianism is the assumption that human beings act in a way that highlights their own self interest. It is based on factuality and leaves little room for imagination. Dickens provides three vivid examples of this utilitarian logic in Hard Times.
When searching today’s society for those that show courage and nobility like that of Iphigenia, one acknowledges the work of the firefighters and police departments. Every time a person of this profession leaves their station in lieu of a call, they are potentially sacrificing their lives for the lives of others. The many possible things that could happen to one of these workers while on the field could put them in a situation where their safety is questionable. It is understood that this worker must sacrifice his or her life for whatever person that is in need of help.