I can’t really understand where you’re coming from. Self preservation is at the absolute core of us all. You can’t honestly expect the average human to put the lives of unknown strangers before the lives of their own, as you say, loved ones.

Well put. The extrem version is a world where everybody is expected to kill the people in the other car that killed a loved one, nullifying every advantage that choosing your own safety over another’s might have.

It sounds like the safest thing for you and your family is to buy a heavier car also. You’re also not literally making that choice between someone else’s family and your own. How many people have you killed while driving? Me, zero, after decades of driving. My parents are well into their old age, have driven heavy cars their whole lives, and still haven’t killed anyone. In fact, out of many people I’ve known, with all shapes and sizes of car, the only one (as far as I’m aware) who killed someone was drunk, and drove a small sports car very fast and killed someone.

To be fair to your argument, you _are_ talking about a “line of escalation” and an issue with a lot of moral complexity. I’m not even saying you’re wrong, rather just that I think you can’t view it so simply. Do you have kids or a husband or a wife? Could you _really_ put their own lives before strangers, or do you just want to see a world where people give more compassion to their fellow human? Because I want that too; I’m just not willing to sacrifice my loved ones for it.

> Sounds like it's safest for me and my family to physically prevent you from doing that. See how deranged this line of escalation is? How sick in the soul I would have to be to choose to harm your family to increase the safety of mine?

I wouldn't throw stones, we all live in glass houses. Pedestrians (and cyclists, etc.) could say the exact same thing about car drivers - they're putting their lives at much higher risk by not biking (or using a motorcycle, or public transportation, etc.). Heck, drivers are also endangering pedestrians' children through global warming. If you really tried you could probably name a dozen more examples of ordinary people like yourself putting others at risk for their own benefits.

This isn't to say the parent's decision is great, but that this sort of counterargument isn't all that strong, either.

> How sick in the soul I would have to be to choose to harm your family to increase the safety of mine?

First of all, this is human nature 101. Secondly, simply owning a large vehicle does not equate to 'harming your family'. Bad/impaired drivers are responsible for that. Any other inanimate objects people shouldn't own because you don't like them? People aren't going to simply put their families in Fiat's with Escalade's on the road to show solidarity with the "we need smaller cars" movement.

This! +1MM

"Think of the children" or not, it really doesn't matter the size of the vehicle. A SmartCar, or even a motorcycle, at 30 mph is likely to kill your kid too.

Actually medical ethics rejects herd immunity as the purpose of vaccination. All the recommended vaccinations are because the benefit to the individual vaccinated significantly outweighs the cost to them. Herd immunity is a public health benefit but ethically it wouldn't be enough to justify the intervention.

For HPV for example, the reason there's a period when it was given to girls not boys is that the evidence wasn't available to show a benefit for the boys. Obviously vaccinating boys means they're less likely to give the disease to anybody they have sex with, but that's not a personal benefit and so it's not an ethical reason to recommend vaccinating boys. The evidence that they wouldn't get a bunch of other rarer cancers caused by HPV was enough reason to vaccinate boys, and that arrived later.

That ethical dilemma about sacrificing one patient to save more? That's not a thing.