How the West made passivity the only safe strategy
You watch someone drown. You do nothing. Legally: no liability. Morally: "tragic, but not your fault."
You try to save them. You fail. They die anyway. Legally: potential liability for negligent rescue. Morally: "why didn't you do it properly?"
You try to save them. You succeed, but break their rib doing CPR. Legally: they can sue you. Morally: "was that level of force really necessary?"
The structure is clear: interaction creates liability; detachment creates immunity. The safest move is always to walk away.
This essay traces how this asymmetry emerged, how it became encoded into Western institutions, and why it now functions as a civilizational selection mechanism against agency itself.
It wasn't always this way.
Roman law focused on actus reus—the guilty act. Jurists found it conceptually difficult to assign causation to a non-event. For an omission to be punishable, it required a pre-existing specific duty, usually derived from paternal authority or contractual obligation. The baseline presumption: the law punishes the sword stroke, not the failure to use the shield.
But this asymmetry was held in check by countervailing forces. Honor cultures punished inaction in defense of kin as social death. Feudal obligations created webs of positive duties—a vassal owed consilium et auxilium to his lord; a knight who failed castle-guard had breached fealty. Canon law held that omission could be sinful, keeping alive the concept that inaction carries moral weight. Noblesse oblige meant the powerful were obligated to act; inaction was shameful, not safe.
The asymmetry existed in embryonic form, but it was contained by duties that made passivity costly.
English Common Law hardened the asymmetry into rigid doctrine.
The key case: Hurley v. Eddingfield (1901). A physician refused to travel to treat a dying patient, despite being the family doctor and the only available aid. The court held: no liability. The ruling underscored the common law's commitment to individual liberty—the law forbids you from hurting your neighbor, but does not force you to be his savior.
This became the "no duty to rescue" rule. The logic: negative rights (not to be killed) are stringent; positive rights (to be saved) are optional. The non-rescuer doesn't cause the death; the drowning water does. Anglo-American individualism encoded as jurisprudence—a defining feature that would diverge sharply from Continental traditions.
(Yes, Good Samaritan laws exist in most US states—but they merely provide immunity for rescuers, not a duty to rescue. They reduce the penalty for helping without creating any penalty for not helping. The asymmetry remains.)
The Utilitarians challenged this. Bentham and Mill introduced a consequentialist framework where outcomes matter regardless of method. If morality is determined by consequences, then failing to prevent a death is mathematically equivalent to causing a death, provided the cost to the agent is low. Mill wrote explicitly: "A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable."
But the Deontological backlash reasserted the asymmetry. For the Kantian, the moral quality of an agent is determined by adherence to rules—primarily negative prohibitions. The consequences of inaction are tragic, but they are not violations of the moral law in the same way as active harm. Requiring men to be "good" (positive duty) is religion; requiring them not to be "bad" (negative duty) is law.
The Trolley Problem (Foot 1967, Thomson 1985) formalized the intuition: pulling the lever to divert the trolley (action) feels viscerally different from standing by while five die (inaction), even with identical body counts. Philosophy tutored by law; law reinforced by philosophy. A feedback loop that made the asymmetry feel like moral truth rather than contingent legal convention.
The 20th century embedded the asymmetry into the DNA of bureaucratic institutions. What began as a legal doctrine became an operating system.
Withholding life-sustaining treatment (not starting it) is viewed as omission. Legally safer, psychologically easier. The disease is seen as the cause of death.
Withdrawing treatment (stopping it) is viewed as action—an act of commission. Fraught with fears of liability for "causing death."
The outcome is often identical. But physicians are measurably less likely to withdraw support than to withhold it, driven by the feeling that turning off a ventilator is an act of killing. Result: defensive medicine, overtreatment, prolonged suffering—not because it helps patients, but because stopping feels like a culpable action.
Under the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 324A, a company that voluntarily undertakes a safety audit assumes a duty of care. If they perform this voluntary act negligently and "increase the risk of harm," they face liability.
This creates a liability trap: do nothing and no duty exists—if an accident happens, the company is liable only for the accident itself. Try to help and a duty is assumed—if the audit is flawed or the rescue bungled, additional liability for "worsening" the situation. A poor compliance program may increase liability exposure, making it worse than doing nothing. This incentivizes willful blindness: if you don't look for the problem, you can't be sued for failing to fix it properly.
The FDA faces asymmetric consequences. Approve a drug that kills: massive public scandal, congressional hearings, career destruction—the action is visible, attributable, punishable. Delay a drug that would save lives: invisible deaths, no scandal, no attribution—the people who died waiting never become a story. Institutional structures are designed to prevent Commission Errors (approving something harmful) at the expense of Omission Errors (blocking something beneficial). The safest path for a bureaucrat is always delay. Result: "drug lag," technological stagnation, preventable deaths that never generate headlines.
The same pattern appears in self-defense law: the requirement of "imminence" forces defenders to absorb the first blow before acting. Striking preemptively—even against a certain threat—transforms defender into aggressor. (For the full treatment, see The Thermodynamics of Power.)
As systems become more complex, interconnectivity increases. In a complex system, any action has side effects. If liability attaches to any negative side effect, and all actions have side effects, then:
P(Liability | Action) → 1
When the probability of liability approaches certainty for any action, rational actors stop acting. Agency approaches zero. Call this the Liability Singularity—the heat death of agency.
This is not hypothetical. It is the lived experience of anyone who has worked in a modern institution. The question is never "what should we do?" but "what can we do without creating liability?" The answer, increasingly, is nothing.
The internet age weaponized the asymmetry through visibility.
The term "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" names the phenomenon: like observing a particle collapses its wavefunction in quantum mechanics, interacting with a problem makes you responsible for it. Ignoring the problem grants immunity.
The mechanics:
Case studies:
Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to Newark schools. The donation faced years of scrutiny for structural failures, consultant fees, and conditions attached. Whatever the validity of specific criticisms, the intensity of backlash compared to billionaires who donate nothing creates selection pressure against public altruism. The donor is held responsible for the school system's continued problems; the non-donor is not.
During the Kabul evacuation, private contractors offered evacuation flights for a high price. Public discourse labeled this "profiteering" and "evil." The action (providing a flight) was strictly better than the inaction (providing no flight). Yet the actor was vilified while those who offered nothing faced no criticism. The profiteer is hated more than the bystander, even if the profiteer saves lives and the bystander saves none.
The pattern: marginal improvement is punished more harshly than total neglect.
The Copenhagen Trap explains one of the great paradoxes of modern energy policy.
Coal kills millions through particulate matter, respiratory disease, and climate effects. These deaths are statistical, diffuse, invisible. No single death can be attributed to a specific decision. No one is liable.
Nuclear risks meltdown. Meltdowns are concentrated, visible, events. They generate headlines. They create liability. Someone approved the plant. Someone is responsible.
The result: we burn coal instead of splitting atoms. We prefer statistical death (millions of invisible casualties) over liable risk (possible visible casualties). The decision-maker who approves nuclear and faces a meltdown is destroyed. The decision-maker who continues coal and presides over diffuse death is safe.
This is not irrational given the incentive structure. It is perfectly rational given the asymmetry. The asymmetry is what's irrational—but no individual actor can change it.
The Copenhagen Trap doesn't just affect decisions. It affects who makes decisions. This is not about individual choices. It is about civilizational selection pressure.
The Ombudsmen vs. Operators problem:
People who actually fix things—operators—accumulate "liability mud." They've made decisions. Some decisions had negative side effects. Their record includes visible failures, even if the failures were necessary costs of larger successes.
People who manage process without touching outcomes—ombudsmen—have clean hands. They've never approved anything that failed, because they've never approved anything. They've never been blamed for a negative side effect, because they've never caused a side effect.
As the liability environment intensifies, ombudsmen rise and operators are filtered out. The people who reach the top of regulatory agencies, HR departments, and legal teams are disproportionately those who have never taken a consequential action. They are selected for not having done anything.
Result: we are ruled by the Unstained Incompetent. The system selects for people whose primary skill is avoiding decisions. These are not the people who will reform the system. They are the people the system was designed to produce.
Why do people accept this? Because agency is terrifying.
The Copenhagen Trap is a relief. It tells the risk-averse: "You don't have to act. In fact, it is moral not to act. You are being 'responsible' by ignoring the drowning man, because you aren't trained. You are being 'prudent' by not intervening, because you might make it worse."
The Trap transforms passivity into virtue. It is the ultimate Hospice narcotic—the comforting assurance that doing nothing is the ethical choice. (For how the system channels remaining agency-drive into harmless simulations—protests, voting, posting—see Simulated Metamorphosis.)
This is not a human universal. Continental Civil Law systems (France, Germany) criminalize failure to rescue—you can face imprisonment for not helping when you could do so without risk. Islamic law's Fard Kifaya creates communal duty: if no one rescues the drowning, the entire community is considered sinful. These traditions recognize that the bystander is not merely an observer but a citizen with affirmative duties.
The Peng Yu Case (China, 2006) demonstrates what happens when Copenhagen ethics is legally codified. A man helped an elderly woman who had fallen. She sued him. The court ruled against him, reasoning that "common sense" dictated he wouldn't have helped unless guilty. This precedent had catastrophic effects: a decade of people refusing to help accident victims. China subsequently passed Good Samaritan laws to undo the damage.
When helping implies guilt, no one helps. Social trust collapses entirely. The Western "no duty to rescue" hasn't reached that extreme, but the trajectory is visible.
Entropy increases in closed systems. Fighting entropy requires work—coordinated action against the gradient.
A legal and social system that penalizes action and rewards inaction is a system that penalizes the fight against entropy. It makes the thermodynamically expensive choice (coordinated action, building, defending, creating) also the legally and socially expensive choice.
The result is predictable: the system stops fighting entropy. Institutions decay. Infrastructure crumbles. Problems compound. The civilization that adopts this architecture becomes incapable of preemptive defense (must wait for imminent attack), rapid innovation (must prove safety before acting), crisis response (acting creates liability, inaction doesn't), and altruism (helping creates liability, ignoring doesn't). These are not hypothetical future failures. They are the present condition of Western institutions.
This is T- (Homeostasis) encoded as legal structure. The action/inaction asymmetry is the mechanical linkage that converts safetyism into institutional reality.
The Copenhagen Trap is not a bug. It is a feature of a civilization that has chosen comfort over agency, safety over adaptation, clean hands over effective action.
It is the legal expression of a deeper axiological shift: a system that uses its own abundance to fund the mechanisms of its paralysis. When survival was hard, inaction was punished by reality. When survival became easy, inaction became safe—and the law followed.
The Trap is self-reinforcing. The people it selects—ombudsmen, the Unstained Incompetent—are exactly the people who will never reform it. They owe their positions to it. Reforming it would require action, which would create liability. The architecture selects against reformers. Anyone with the agency to change the system has already been filtered out by the system.
A civilization that cannot act cannot survive. The West has built an elaborate architecture ensuring that the only safe strategy is passivity. The architecture produces the leaders it deserves: people who have mastered the art of not deciding, not acting, not touching.
The Unstained Incompetent inherit the earth. Until the earth is inherited by someone else.
This essay draws from Aliveness: Principles of Telic Systems, a physics-based framework for understanding what sustains organized complexity over deep time—from cells to civilizations to artificial intelligence.
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