Society judges people far more harshly for taking an action that causes harm than for sitting back and letting the exact same harm happen, a moral blind spot called Omission bias.

A closer look

Society judges people far more harshly for taking an action that causes harm than for sitting back and letting the exact same harm happen, a moral blind spot called Omission bias. If you deliberately push someone out of a moving boat, you are rightfully considered a monstrous psychopath who belongs in federal prison. However, if you see someone accidentally fall out of the boat and you simply refuse to throw them a life jacket, people consider it a terrible tragedy but rarely view you as an actual murderer. Our broken ethical compass assumes that actively doing something wrong is fundamentally worse than passively allowing horrific things to occur, which completely absolves bystanders from any moral responsibility. This cognitive loophole allows entire populations to comfortably watch systemic injustice destroy lives, sleeping peacefully at night because they technically never pulled the trigger themselves