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Moral Icon.....or Lemming?

ZenG

ZenG

Guest
Dec 13, 2013
6,465
13,121
You can't get there from here
#1
Hypothetical situation:-

You are with a group (say 5 ) of your friends. You are in a situation where whatever the whole group does affects the outcome.

They decide to do something that is illegal and has an effect on certain innocent bystanders.

Now in this particular situation you could elect to be honest and own up about to it the innocent bystanders exonerating yourself.

But that would mean your friends are exposed as the culprits.

Are you going to man up and exonerate yourself, also correcting the situation?

Or are you going to say nothing and side with your friends, knowing that was a wrong you'll have to live with forever....?
 
#5
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#8
I go with Plato on this kind of thing; vices degrade, and thus harm, the persons practicing them, not only the outward victims of their vices. Ergo, the "friends" wanting to do the vicious thing are not only harming the innocent bystanders, but themselves, and also you by entangling you in the vice. Harming someone is not an act of friendship, therefore the word "friends" belongs in quotation marks - you don't owe these people anything. Separate from the herd.
 
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#9
It depends on what the activity and the effect are. It also depends if you were involved, which seems to not be the case from the post.

If the activity is illegal and something bad enough that you "have to live with it forever" it probably needs to be reported to the police. If your "friends" physically harmed someone or caused serious property damage they NEED to be exposed.

C'mon man... you're going to keep silent about a crime?

Unless it's not a serious crime were talking about.... seems less serious than that if confessing to the victims can exonerate yourself AND correct the situation...? How does THAT work??

The hypothetical is pretty sketchy and messed up. More information needed.
 
#11
A lot of this depends on what "illegal" activity we're talking about and what the impact on the bystanders is. Harmful crime is one thing, harmless prank is another. I remember hearing of one prank, I think it was MIT students, who took apart a professor's VW Beetle and rebuilt it... inside his classroom. I suppose that was illegal, to mess with someone's property like that without their permission, but it's a heck of a prank. I wouldn't have pressed charges... as long as they took it back apart afterwards and rebuilt it in the garage again, and it still ran. But if it's something damaging, I would stay out of it.
 

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