My reading of the post is quite different: This isn’t an argument that, morally, you ought to save the drowning man. The distant commotion thought experiment is designed to help you notice that it would be great if you had saved him and to make you genuinely want to have saved him. Applying this to real life, we can make sacrifices to help others because we genuinely/wholeheartedly want to, not just because morality demands it of us. Maybe morality does demand it of us but that doesn’t matter because we want to do it anyway.
Weird, that sounds strange to me because I don’t really regret things since I couldn’t have done anything better than what I did under the circumstances or else I would have done that, so the idea of regret awakening compassion feels very alien. Guilt seems more clear cut to me, because I can do my best but my best may not be good enough and I may be culpable for the suffering of others as a result, perhaps through insufficient compassion.
My reading of the post is quite different: This isn’t an argument that, morally, you ought to save the drowning man. The distant commotion thought experiment is designed to help you notice that it would be great if you had saved him and to make you genuinely want to have saved him. Applying this to real life, we can make sacrifices to help others because we genuinely/wholeheartedly want to, not just because morality demands it of us. Maybe morality does demand it of us but that doesn’t matter because we want to do it anyway.
Weird, that sounds strange to me because I don’t really regret things since I couldn’t have done anything better than what I did under the circumstances or else I would have done that, so the idea of regret awakening compassion feels very alien. Guilt seems more clear cut to me, because I can do my best but my best may not be good enough and I may be culpable for the suffering of others as a result, perhaps through insufficient compassion.