Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics

Recently I came across the “Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics”, a term defined by Jai Dhyani in a now-offline blog post:

When you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it

It rang a bell, and I think it describes many phenomena around entrepreneurship, social media, and also just the general aversion to doing (and not only is doing punished, critiquing the doers is rewarded!)

Still, I was surprised on reading Elias Kunnas’s exposition of the phenomenon in their post, The Copenhagen Trap:

The trap operates wherever action creates liability but inaction doesn’t. It manifests as tort liability in the Anglosphere, as self-defense restrictions in Nordic countries, as institutional paralysis everywhere it takes root. This essay traces how the asymmetry became encoded into legal and social architecture, and why it now functions as a selection mechanism against agency itself.

What struck me is how this tendency has jumped from ethics to our very laws.