No, it's important to point out hard facts here: by driving a car with less visibility, you become more dangerous to your family and your neighborhood. You don't even protect your family, because you've now entered a vehicle significantly more likely to flip over in an accident-- which you are now more likely to have because you bought a vehicle with reduced capacity to see what is in front of you.
Your choice is your choice-- but it's important not to lie to yourself or others about what that choice entails.
Drunk driving is illegal, having a large vehicle isn't. If it's illegal, I won't do it.
And even ignoring that, this isn't what I'm saying. I'm saying that because you haven't killed anyone drunk driving, you're not morally culpable for drunk driving deaths. Which you're not.
> I'm saying that because you haven't killed anyone drunk driving, you're not morally culpable for drunk driving deaths
This is a weird statement... which I guess is true in the narrowest possible meaning. It's true in the way that it is written, but not in a way that matters.
If you drive drunk but haven't killed anyone yet you aren't directly culpable for drunk driving deaths.... but it is still an immoral action. Just because it hasn't caused the worst possible results yet doesn't mean it doesn't significantly raise the risk.
similarly, regardless of whether or not you've killed anyone with a larger vehicle, the fact is that larger vehicles pose a greater danger of running over children.
Legality and morality are not the same things.
Surely it doesn’t supersede any obligation you have to protecting strangers. If you’d greatly increase the likelihood that you end up killing a pedestrian to only slightly increase the safety of your own family, I think that is morally wrong.
In and of itself it is not an excuse to curtail freedoms because nothing would get done. There needs to be an acceptable risk level for things. We need to talk about "unreasonable risks" that are based on evidence and not what might or could happen.
Same story with guns: the danger of guns is entirely correlated with demographics. People outside of certain demographics and locales face very little risk from guns.
The fatalities per 100 million miles driven are as follows (NHTSA data):
- 1.1 for car and truck drivers
- 2.3 for all motorcyclists
- 21.8 for motorcyclists over 50
Why is a 50 year old 20 times more likely to die on a motorcycle than a 20 year old? Here are some reasons given by the MSF:
- Decline is physical and cognitive abilities
- Increased risk-taking behavior (20 year olds don't typically do poker runs from bar to bar, for example)
- Riding bigger, faster bikes (as you know, tourers cost a lot of money, money that a 20 year old simply doesn't have)
Now I know neither you nor I are going to park our bikes, but it behooves us both to recognize the dangers in riding at our age and doing what we can to mitigate those risks.
Also, remember this: when those 20 year olds do something stupid on their sport bikes and crash they're pretty much good to go due to the resilience of their young bodies. Us? We're going to the hospital or the morgue. Those are just life's realities.
Keep the rubber down!
I remember how fun riding was after a few beers when I was young, and that's why I don't do that now, but biker gang culture, which is older doesn't care.
I don't know a lot of people who've died while riding, but for the couple I do they were riding late at night (wee hours of the morning) and were well over the legal limit for a DUI. One was a buddy of mine who was having a bit of problems in his personal life and went to the bar and got shit faced and left around 2:30 AM. Went riding home on a 4 lane rd here that has a 50 MPH speed limit and winding curves. He failed to negotiate a curve.
So stay sober and enjoy your ride!
* https://ifunny.co/picture/a-semi-truck-has-better-visibility...
Newer models have forward collision sensors that partially mitigate that. (And backup cameras that do an even better job of mitigating the rear low-height blind spot, as long as people use them instead of direct vision when backing up.)
So I wouldn't expect a rise in pedestrian deaths (particularly over a very short 2 year period which could just be an aberration in the data) to necessarily mean there was a similar rise in child deaths if they happen in fundamentally different circumstances for different reasons.
[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
It's The Onion, so you don't need to read the article to get the point. Its title is "Conscientious SUV Shopper Just Wants Something That Will Kill Family In Other Car In Case Of Accident."
A sucky arms race.
Also, large SUVs are waaay more likely to roll in the event of a "dodge to not die" scenario.
I don't mean to be snarky, but most moral dilemmas boil down to some trade off between what is best for yourself and whats best for society. In an evolutionary sense, our monkey brains see our children as an extension of our self. It seems to fit well.
You might decide that trade off is well worth it, which is a fair conclusion, but you can't deny that moral calculus is there to some degree.
Also TIL about the massacres of Korean civilians after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Great_Kantō_earthquake#En...
That slogan has always been bullshit. Plenty of road rage and similar impulsive shootings happen in the most heavily armed states. A well armed society has more guns is really the only takeaway.
You certainly can what the hell. Nowhere is it guaranteed that moral necessities align with comfort or safety.
(0) a place where nobody else can have an SUV whose extra size directly increases the danger to your kids, but you also can't own one to keep your kids slightly safer while you drive them; or
(1) a place where you can have an SUV that keeps your family slightly safer while they're in it, but everyone else can also own one and they make your family less safe whenever they're not in an SUV themselves?
Social rules are, at least at their best, a way to do better than a Nash equilibrium of mutual defection.
If they took away gas guzzling V8 engines, they can take away unwieldy oversized light pickups and SUVs.
At some point your family is going to be on the receiving end. We don't have to be so shortsighted.
The harm/benefit to society would have to be much larger for even the most altruistic people to give it more weight than the harm/benefit to their own family.
That’s not the case here.
If being in traffic is so dangerous to your family then your protective response should be to reduce their exposure to it as much as possible.
People in this thread are jumping straight to their right to increase the overall danger of driving, and put more of that danger outside their personal sphere, before taking any other actions to reduce or mitigate it.
They certainly have that right under the current arrangement. And I'm not saying all evaluations or decisions along these lines are immoral, I can approach this with understanding of real conditions and nuance. But along with that right comes being considered morally culpable or even cowardly for exercising it.
An individual who needs to commute by car has two options:
1) put themselves and their family in greater danger by driving a lighter car.
2) protect themselves and their family but increase total danger to society by driving a heavier car.
I am unconvinced that there is an obvious morally correct answer. What are one's moral obligations to themselves, their families, and their society? How are these prioritized?
You can't just say "don't drive lul". It's literally not an option. We should have better public transportation, but we don't.
In a world of only smaller sized cars, having a larger car would likely be less safe for the reasons you listed. However, with large cars being so popular, it would make sense that being in a smaller car is less safe as you are more likely to be in a collision with a vehicle that has more mass than yours—not to mention you have less room for crumple zones and the larger vehicle would hit you at a higher point on your vehicles, which is known to be more lethal.
picking up and moving to a location on earth which doesn't require you to own a car to live is the safest bet
it's possible; i'm one (of many many millions around me)
This can all be priced in. If bigger vehicles are more dangerous, we could make auto insurance premiums a function of weight (and other criteria).
You can't seriously tell someone they have a moral obligation to buy a smaller vehicle when doing so puts their family and themselves at increased harm.
If you want to ban vehicles above a certain weight or a certain displacement, fine let's talk about that. But until that happens I'm not going to intentionally make my kids less safe to reduce some wishy-washy definition of my "moral culpability" for accidents and deaths I've played no part in.