Judgment Difficult

So I was walking down the street the other day when my friend's [X] slipped his grasp and started barreling towards the road. My friend pushed me out of the way to recover his [X] – while nothing bad happened to me, I could theoretically have been pushed into the road and in that moment he didn't seem to know or care. Was my friend's behaviour acceptable?

I would like to suggest two things:
1) the acceptableness of the behaviour is highly dependent on the value of X
2) many people in many contexts make arguments that pretend this isn't so, and come up with way-too-general justifications for what is actually a specific judgment about the values of competing things.

So in this case, if [X] is "his 5 year old child", I would personally say it's fine for him to push me out the way, even though there's some chance I would have been injured as a result. If [X] is an apple, I would personally say it's not at all acceptable. And I think most people would agree with me on each of these judgments, though that's ultimately an empirical question.

I also imagine there are various intermediate cases – a puppy, a precious ring? – where different people would have different intuitions.

But what I see quite often is people making arguments that claim to be fully general, but actually smuggle in an assessment of how reasonable the underlying prioritization is. "It's never ok to push someone potentially into harm's way!", they'll say, when really all they mean is "it's not ok to push someone into harm's way in order to save your errant apple, come on, that's silly."

I see this a ton on reddit threads like "Am I The Asshole?", which I fear I browse through something closer to rubber-necking than (what could theoretically be very helpful) learning more about different people's social intuitions.

The average AITA thread will say something like "I disinvited my parents from my wedding, am I the asshole?" And people will reply en masse that either "it is never ok to disinvite your loved ones from your wedding!" or "it is always ok to disinvite your loved ones from your wedding!," and their response is 100% based on whether they consider the Inciting Incident reasonable, and they mostly seem to show ~0 awareness that they're doing it.

For example, if the disinvitation is because the parents are gay, that is judged Bad, and if the disinvitation is because the parents are homophobes, that is judged Good. But instead of saying "I think it's bad/good you disinvited them because I disagree/agree with your substantive assessment," they pretend that a universal principle about disinvitations is being followed. (I say pretend but I have no real sense of how much people realise they're doing this, whether it's conscious or unconscious or somewhere in between).

After (and only after) writing this blogpost, I realised I have recently made this exact same mistake myself: I was talking to a friend who was deciding whether to date someone, and unsure whether his reason for being hesitant to date this someone was reasonable or not.

The thing I said to him was "of course it's reasonable, you can choose not to date someone for any reason at all!", but this is not exactly what I actually believe. The more accurate statement would have been "I believe that the reason you just gave seems like a reasonable reason," yet the thing I responded with was unnecessarily more general than that. If the reason he'd given had been that he didn't like their hairstyle, I would not have said the same thing.[^1]

It's hard to suppress the feeling that the difficult part of everything is having good judgment, knowing when to apply A and when to apply B, and that this can't be boiled down into universal rules. Two thousand years later, it's hard to argue with Hippocrates:

Life is short,
and craft long,
opportunity fleeting,
experimentation perilous,
and judgment difficult.

[^1]: On some level it is true regardless, you can not-date someone for any reason at all, and sometimes your seemingly-insignificant reason for hesitance is really a mask for a deeper underlying reason, etc. If you are unsure whether to date someone and you want a second opinion, email me.