This arises from my previous post. After being in the situation with the abusive man and the woman who refused help, I spent a lot of the following day thinking about what I believed, and the ethics involved in choosing my reaction to it all.

First of all, the victim had told us she did not *want* us to do anything. However, if the man had physically assaulted her, I think legally and morally it would have been within my rights -- indeed, it would have been an obligation -- to do something.

If she still refused help, we would have had to go ahead and do something anyway, against her will. This is the grey area for me. I would have done it. But it's hard to justify why that would have been the right thing to do. How can something be wrong when the only person being affected by it insists that it is not?

I could avoid the whole issue and say it was VERY easy to decide what I should do, simply because maritime law placed me in the position of being required to do what my superiors told me. A commercial vessel is not a democracy. In this case, what I was told to do was exactly what I would have felt morally obliged to do anyway. It's nice when that happens, but it doesn't get around the whole issue of *why* taking action in this case would have been right or wrong. Beyond the nice easy "it's right because somebody with more gold braid on his shirt said so" option.

I know that sometimes a victimised person does not have the confidence or the experience to say they are being mistreated and take steps to stop it. Many cases of domestic violence don't even make it to court because the victim refuses to bring charges. I have spoken to people who thought these women (it's almost always women) were stupid, weak, or crazy -- even cynically saying "She probably likes it."

This post was going somewhere, but I'm sort of tired and thinking about all this again is making me miserable, and I don't remember where that was. I guess I just wondered if anybody can come up with a good line of reasoning on why we should go around helping people who don't want to be helped. I don't really need a reason, but it would be nice to think there *was* one out there somewhere.