[travisoliphant]

I didn't perceive it to be an argument for anything specific. I did not get the sense the author is suggesting either lifting restrictions or not. I saw it as more of a piece trying to get us all to think harder and better and expose the difficult trade-offs and the conundrum we face as humans of the morality vs utility argument of saving someone hurting in front of us at any cost versus saving more people at a lower cost potentially at the risk of not saving the person in front of us. I appreciated the author's parable of the river.

My own thoughts go in the direction of maybe the right thing to do is different at different "scales". The right thing to do in my family is different than the right thing to do in my job which is probably different than the right thing to do at the city level, the county level, the state level, the nation level, and the world level (to use labels appropriate for the USA). Leaders at each level have a different decision to make and things work better the more people we have making "good" decisions at each level. The process of figuring out what "good" decisions at each level is the really hard part that is not easily wrapped up with platitudes, memes, or other projections into a single one-dimensional axis (i.e. left vs. right) of a high-dimensional, multi-attribute space.