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The question for me is, what is safer for my family? A huge proportion of the cars I see day to day are full-size SUVs like Tahoes, Yukons, and that QX80 monstr
by pc86 3y ago
The question for me is, what is safer for my family? A huge proportion of the cars I see day to day are full-size SUVs like Tahoes, Yukons, and that QX80 monstrosity from Infiniti. There's a decent chance if I'm involved in an accident it will be with one of those cars.
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.
- giraffe_lady 3y ago> 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. You certainly can what the hell. Nowhere is it guaranteed that moral necessities align with comfort or safety.
- pmg102 3y agoYou have a moral obligation to your own family though. I think that is the point that OP is making.
- dahfizz 3y agoWhy is protecting strangers a moral necessity but protecting your own family is not?
- giraffe_lady 3y agoI'm not even making that claim here, come on. 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.
- dahfizz 3y agoLet's take as a given that heavier cars are more dangerous to be around. 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.
- Zigurd 3y agoFor example, it's the only way that some means of disease prevention work.
- pc86 3y agoWhat means of disease prevention require not protecting your own family?
- pc86 3y ago"Make your family less safe to make strangers more safe" is certainly a hard to sell to approximately 99% of the world.
- asterix_pano 3y agoNot to 99% of the world, but to 99% of the people in an egocentric society.
- ben_w 3y agoWould you rather raise your family in: (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.
- rootusrootus 3y agoSince (0) is impossible, the answer is the one already proposed.
- ben_w 3y agoWhy do you think (0) is impossible? Do laws not exist where you are? Are you not able to change them?
- rootusrootus 3y agoTo make (0) happen you have to force 10s or 100s of millions of people to give up their current vehicle and buy a new one. To some people that sounds feasible, but they're a good bit more authoritarian than the average politician in the US.
- 3y ago
- slashdev 3y agoI completely disagree. Your moral obligation to your own family trumps that of your obligation to society at large. Even if you could argue that it should not be so, it is in practice. 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.
- EatingWithForks 3y agoThese cars are more likely to kill your children by running over them as they cross the street. You are more likely to kill your neighbor's kids by running over them because you don't have visibility 6+ feet in front of you. This isn't some sort of wish-washy definition. These are hard to swallow facts.
- pfisch 3y agoWhy does an suv not have visibility in front of it?
- ben_w 3y agoConsider the larger vehicle shown in the picture at the top of the linked article; now imagine a child before the adolescent growth spurt standing in front of it — how far away does the child have to be, for any part of them to be visible to a driver sitting in the driver's seat?
- dangom 3y agoBecause we can safely assume that under normal atmospheric conditions and within the distances we are talking about, light travels in straight lines and the SUV is too high thus blocking some of it from reaching the drivers eyes. I can't pull the sources now, but there was a study discussed here on HN a couple months ago showing an analysis of how this plays out.
- OGWhales 3y agoThis should help you understand the problem of higher vehicles limiting visibility of what's in front of them: https://imgur.com/a/aYbCbyg https://imgur.com/a/aYbCbyg
- pfisch 3y agoModern vehicles beep like crazy with sensors when something is in front of the car like that though. It is impossible not to know.
- 3y ago
- sorokod 3y agoA similar argument can be made about gun ownership: in an armed society, is it rational not to own a firearm?
- jewayne 3y agoConsidering how gun ownership makes you more likely to be killed by a firearm, I'd say yes, it's very rational to not own one.
- mrguyorama 3y agoThe largest threat to gun owners is their own gun.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoConsidering how car ownership makes you more likely to be killed by a car, I'd say yes, it's very rational to not own one.
- cmcconomy 3y agosadly yeah
- artificialLimbs 3y ago[flagged]
- brewdad 3y ago> A well armed society is a polite society. 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.
- rootusrootus 3y agoTexas has considerably more gun violence than, for example, Chicago. You may want to reconsider.
- t-writescode 3y agoYou'll have to look at individual crash safety ratings; but, if memory serves me, large SUVs have worse ratings than smaller cars, in general. That could have changed or I could be wrong, though. Also, large SUVs are waaay more likely to roll in the event of a "dodge to not die" scenario.
- Zigurd 3y agoWe could make it more expensive to think that way for sure.
- grayfaced 3y agoIntentionally putting others in danger is immoral to many. But morality is subjective. Putting the whole community at net negative risk so you can squeak out personal advantage is perfectly acceptable behavior to some.
- sophacles 3y agoDo you have any actual safety numbers? Or are you just going on your gut instinct of "bigger must be better just because"? There was a time when those big SUV vehicles were more likely to kill your family than a mini-van or sedan because the high center of gravity + no rollbar (and other such protection) made it both more likely to roll and more devastating when it did so.
- OGWhales 3y agoThe IIHS has stats on this and it does seem that larger vehicles have lower average death rates[1]. 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. [1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics
- sophacles 3y agoHumans can rationalize anything, thank you for linking actual data.
- stusmall 3y ago> 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. 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.
- tetrep 3y agoI suppose this article is lampooning you, then: https://www.theonion.com/conscientious-suv-shopper-just-wants-something-that-wil-1844930331 https://www.theonion.com/conscientious-suv-shopper-just-want... 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."
- falcolas 3y agoIf the vehicle weights are equal, both families will probably survive. But if they're unequal, the smaller vehicle will suffer more damage. A sucky arms race.
- d00mer 3y agoDon't SUV have less safety features than normal cars? They are classified as light trucks to avoid safety regulations. Does the increased mass make up less safe vehicle?
- jareklupinski 3y ago> The question for me is, what is safer for my family? 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)
- setgree 3y agoYou are describing a prisoner's dilemma where one person's decision to buy a bigger, more dangerous vehicle pushes you to do the same. 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).