Take all of your fears, drives, and insecurities, add your unreliable risk-assessing abilities (common to most humans) and an amount of adrenaline that many of us will never experience, and cram them into the space of seconds in the face of certain death, in front of an audience. I simply don't see the use of second-guessing a decision made under those circumstances.

For example, it could well be that someone "freezes" in motion, unable to discontinue the effort, compelled by adrenaline and emotion and whatever else. I've experienced this myself in far less serious situations.

Or it could be Mr. Scholz was in complete control of his faculties, and made a ordered, rational decision to keep up the effort at all costs. We'll never know.

It's fun to think about what I might do, but I have no way to relate to the actions of someone else. It's just too complicated.

That's why you have to try to war-game these things in advance -- because in the heat of the moment you won't have time or capability to analyze them rationally. (It's the same reason why athletes and soldiers and sailors train incessantly, so that they can rely largely on trained pattern recognition, a.k.a. reflex.)

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> It's fun to think about what I might do, but I have no way to relate to the actions of someone else. It's just too complicated.

Um, OK.

I've accepted what I thought at the time was a relatively low risk to myself to extricate someone, and it later turned out to have been vastly more dangerous than I'd thought originally. I made a quick assessment of the risks and my capabilities, was wrong, and got lucky. (I generally weight my own survival disproportionately highly vs. that of others, too, so I don't think I'm really reckless.)

I judge people much more harshly for situations where they have a long time to reflect and choose not to.

In this case, he probably either thought the train was slowing/stopping, and thus he'd have more time, or that he could extricate the person more quickly than he did. It might be the case that what he did had a high expected chance of success and he was just unlucky, or he had wrong information in the instants before, or overestimated his abilities, or underestimated the difficulty, or just had bad judgement; we probably won't know.

How is this any different?

It's entirely possible that he made an error in judgment, and made the whole situation worse because there are two people wounded (well, one dead, one wounded), while despite any attempt he made, there would have been at least one.

I wouldn't want someone to try to save me if I were going to die either way, and they were going to die if they tried.

And it's entirely possible that his decision was reasonable. Currently the facts presented are wholly insufficient to draw either conclusion. So one must ask why the presumption is that the judgement was obviously flawed, and what one's motivation is for commenting on such an unclear matter in such a way that effectively implies that the deceased is an idiot.

One aspect of this is that people vastly overestimate how foreseeable an outcome is. If B occurs as a result of A, we tend to assume that B was an entirely foreseeable consequence of A, and that the person who did A either knew this or was an idiot for not knowing it.

Key difference is that this probably wasn't something he was _taught_. He was acting purely in the moment.

I think was you take that first step you tend to throw out risk assessment. Once you've looked someone in the eye, made whatever thread of personal connection, to then walk away and choose to let them die is possibly worse than death to some.

I'm aware that we don't know nearly enough details here to judge what he should have done; I was responding to the emotive response that we should laud every attempt to help someone in danger.

> not everyone would want a stranger to try and help them in every situation

This isn't relevant to the ethics of the situation. When the desires of the man on the tracks can't be ascertained, his life should by default be considered worth saving, as a fellow human being.

> sometimes not helping a stranger in mortal danger really is the ethical choice.

I have no idea what the "sometimes" are to which you're referring. Barstool philosophers are prone to saying that "sometimes things are other things," which is awfully hard to refute since probability of all events is finite in some universe.

I don't think it was a selfish action, and I do think the guy on the track was worth saving. But all the same, what we do know is that two people died because one person tried to save him, when doing nothing would've only had one die.

We don't have enough information to know if it was reasonable to try and save him or not, or the ability of the guy to know those facts at the time - the information is too sparse.

I was just pointing out that it's quite possible that it was inevitable that the guy on the tracks was going to die, and the guy trying to save him simply made it worse.

There are also numerous stories of drowning victims drowning their would-be saviors.

I don't think any and every attempt to save someone should be lauded as something good, and think those times we can ascertain that there's a good chance both people will die (versus the chance both will live), we should simply leave the victim to die, painful as it is to sit there impotently watching it happen.

Doing otherwise gives is a net negative expectation of the number of people alive, and I can't say that's an ethical choice.

I think people (including you) are very emotional about these kinds of situations, and aren't approaching them from a "try to maximize the number of people who live" perspective.

It's a question of which duty takes priority. I like to think that I'd take some risks to save someone else. I've never had occasion to put it to the test, but it certainly was pounded into me in the military in my younger days.

In civilian life, I'm not going to knowingly put myself anywhere near grave danger on behalf of an adult stranger (the calculus might be different for a child). Granted, there's always the possibility of misjudgment in the heat of the moment, as other commenters have pointed out. Even so, I'm going to err on the side of caution -- because as between an adult stranger and my family, there's absolutely no question in my mind where my higher duty lies.

If my wife were in the same situation, I sure hope she'd consider the effect on me and our children if she were hit by a train before entering such a dangerous situation without any understanding of the overall circumstance

Everybody can't and shouldn't always be a superhero.

Of course, I don't think anyone here, parent included, would be so tactless as to bring this up with anyone closely connected to the situation during their time of loss, but I don't think it's good to shy away from asking difficult moral questions.

e.g. if I'm alone and unarmed, and I see someone stopped involuntarily by the side of the road and relatively safe, in a bad area, in a normal-to-sketchy car, etc., I will probably call the police to report it, rather than stopping myself. If I see an elderly person in a rich area in a non-threatening car with a flat tire, I'll possibly stop and offer to help, or at least put better flares or whatever behind his car and make sure he's ok for water/health while waiting. If I see an actual accident in realtime, or the aftermath of an obvious accident, with likely trauma to passengers, I'll almost always stop (unless police/paramedics are already there).

Similarly, if someone was standing on the tracks with an approaching train, I'd verbally command him how to GTFO, and possibly belt/bag-as-rope, but particularly if it were an adult stranger who is potentially suicidal or otherwise unlikely to cooperate, I'd be instinctively reluctant to get in front of the train myself. Someone who accidentally fell would scare me less, but would also be more likely to be able to get out on his own or with assistance from the platform.

But the time to make all these decisions is well in advance of the incident; what level of comfort you have with different kinds of threats, skills in dealing with things, etc. I'd probably be more comfortable with water rescues (since I actually trained for this as a dive master) than most people, but less comfortable dealing with crazy/mentally unstable people, and more comfortable with end-a-hostile-threat vs. prevent-self-harm.

And if you want a more complex model and don’t mind using made up numbers, I’d prefer to weight myself and my family members with 2 points, and give my daughter at least 5 points.

Condolences to both families.

To mindlessly kill yourself for any person is pointless, especially if that person is already suicidal. The burden of knowing someone died to save you is not something depressed people cope with well.

(And yes, I understand the irony of this comment!)

This man acted bravely by trying to save this stranger, this fellow human being. Since no one else stepped up to help (or did I miss the part in the article where it talked about everyone trying to lend a helping hand?) he took it upon himself to do the decent HUMAN thing and try to help.

It's easy to criticize and pick apart this man's actions and judgement from behind your keyboard and after the fact. This man did a brave thing that had bad consequences. Yes it's a sad loss for this family, but this man is a hero in my book. He died trying to help people, regardless of whether he knew them or not.

Out of curiosity, are you married? Do you have kids, or aging parents, or anyone else to whom you feel any sense of long-term duty? I'm not trying to be snarky, just to assess where you're coming from.

The only reason I speculate that might be the case was when I was held at gunpoint (long story), my mind immediately switched to a "detached observer" point of view. No fear or heroism, just observation of events.

Yes I have -- and I've decided that for purposes of governing my conduct, in nearly all circumstances, my duty to my own family unquestionably takes priority over my duty to an adult stranger's family.

EDIT: And so there's no confusion, I would expect the same if the roles were reversed -- if I were trapped on a railroad track with a train bearing down on me, I'd be really pissed if some other dad (or mom) were to put his own life at grave risk to try to save mine. Just because circumstances are about to inflict a loss on my family doesn't justify his risking the same for his.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wang_Yue