Yes, that’s the narrowly utilitarian perspective (on the current margin). My point was that if you mix in even a little bit of common sense moral reasoning and/or moral uncertainty, causing x harm and preventing x harm is obviously more wrong than staying uninvolved. (To make this very obvious, imagine if someone beat their spouse but then donated to an anti-domestic abuse charity to offset this.) I guess I should have made it clearer that I wasn’t objecting to the utilitarian logic of it. But even from a purely utilitarian perspective, this matters because it can make a real difference to the optics of the behavior.
Yes, that’s the narrowly utilitarian perspective (on the current margin). My point was that if you mix in even a little bit of common sense moral reasoning and/or moral uncertainty, causing x harm and preventing x harm is obviously more wrong than staying uninvolved. (To make this very obvious, imagine if someone beat their spouse but then donated to an anti-domestic abuse charity to offset this.) I guess I should have made it clearer that I wasn’t objecting to the utilitarian logic of it. But even from a purely utilitarian perspective, this matters because it can make a real difference to the optics of the behavior.