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Ah, the National Review — a publication that has a knack for leaving the reader wanting more… more substance, more honesty, and more relevance. The National Review is always a veritable goldmine of cringeworthy content and misguided opinions, tailor-made to tickle the fancy of wishy-washy, weak-minded “conservatives” who believe that mean tweets pose a greater threat than the possibility of nuclear war.
It seems that NR writer Jason Lee Steorts has become the go-to guy for all things “Good Samaritan.” Jason’s convinced that genuine heroes, like Daniel Penny, possess some uncanny power for carefully analyzing every angle before diving into a life-or-death situation. According to Jason, a true “Good Samaritan” doesn’t just jump into action; they take their sweet time contemplating the best approach before swooping in. Now, we hate to burst Jason’s bubble, but let’s be real here. When faced with a terrifying situation, we don’t always have the luxury of sitting back and pondering our choices. In those heart-pounding moments, most of us would instinctively react and give it our all to save lives. Time for overthinking? Ain’t nobody got time for that.
However, that falls short of Jason’s high expectations; as he redefines the true essence of a “Good Samaritan” in his blog post entitled, “What’s Wrong with Deeming Daniel Penny a Good Samaritan?”
It’s that being a Good Samaritan is about more than intentions. The Good Samaritan does not simply wish to help; he acts skillfully and to entirely good effect.
We should already find the parable suspect as an analytic framework given that the Good Samaritan does not use physical coercion to help the traveler whom thieves have beset. The thieves are gone.
Jason contorts himself into a pretzel, desperately employing hypothetical scenarios and “what if” reasoning in a futile attempt to muster even an ounce of sympathy for a deranged lunatic who wreaked havoc on a subway system for an entire decade.
One could be a Good Samaritan by defending someone against thieves. But suppose the Samaritan saw what he considered a potential thief approaching a traveler, restrained the suspected thief, and killed him in the process. How to view the Samaritan would not be immediately clear. A lot would depend on both whether we had strong grounds to conclude that the suspected thief was in fact about to attack and whether we thought the Samaritan had killed the thief — not merely restrained him and delivered him to justice — unreasonably. If we thought the Samaritan had jumped to a hasty conclusion and needlessly killed someone, we would have the makings of a poor parable.
Whether Penny jumped to a hasty conclusion and needlessly killed someone is not something I can judge. But it is of central importance to any moral or legal judgment of his lethal act. To say “Let’s take the side of the Good Samaritan because he meant well — but morally and legally important details will yet emerge” makes little sense. What follows that dash vitiates what precedes it.
That’s quite the word salad. We found ourselves nodding off reading it.
Jason concludes his brief lecture with a comical twist, frantically circling around like a cat chasing a laser pointer, obsessing over “dangerous analogies” before finally depositing his last contribution into the litter box.
Instant big-narrative responses to politically charged criminal accusations are reactionary. They demonstrate how reaction is not an exclusively right-wing phenomenon but can be found toward either end of the political spectrum. They also demonstrate one of the more insidious problems with reaction: analogies that, rather than clarifying our view, make it harder to grasp the situation supposedly under discussion.
Perhaps Jason should take his own advice and delete this article…
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