Entitlement of the Actor

Having considered the potential positive and negative consequences of an action to the actor himself, it has been concluded that an action that has no consequences for any other party is not within the scope of ethics to evaluate.

There is, however, a precipitating (or perhaps underlying) premise: that an individual is entitled to undertake action in his own welfare, which include undertaking actions that may ultimately be detrimental to his own welfare.

Objectively, it may seem that there are situations in which another party may wish to intervene in order to prevent an individual from undertaking action that poses a threat to his own welfare, or even to compel an individual to undertake an action that would improve his own welfare, but intervention is ethically questionable, as any party other than the actor does not have sufficient knowledge of the intentions of the actor and is likely to be mistaken about whether the action in question is intended to be beneficial or harmful to the actor.

In situations where another party's own welfare is at stake, the desire to restrict the actions of others can be based in a desire to defend against a threat to their own welfare. As such, the act of intervention is pursuit of personal interest, in which instance the person who means to intervene must consider the ethics of their own (intervening) action.

In situations where this other party's interests are not at stake, there is no justification for intervening. There remains an emotional motivation to act, the notion that another party will feel a sense of regret at their failure to have intervened, but emotion is no basis for logic (though again, it may in some instances be a cue that the logic bears greater scrutiny), nor are the consequences of not acting to be equivocated with the consequences of undertaking to act.