Copenhagen ethics are a good way to avoid blame
People often want to act in a moral way [Citation needed] . People often also subscribe to ethical rules that in general help them to be more moral. But that's not the only goal that ethics help people achieve. One of the very first things I blogged about here was a variant of the trolley problem that seemed to show that avoiding blame seems to be just as much a part of how people approach ethical decisions as any abstract notion of the greater good. There's a tendency that people have, "affectionately" labeled the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics where if a person completely ignores a problem they usually won't receive any aprobrium at all but if they provide an inadequate amount of effort towards solving it they'll often get a ton of flack. The person who doesn't get involved can just keep their head down and nobody will have any incentive to link them to the problem in the first place and if someone does that person is almost certainly equally