> Inaction is a manifestation of one of two things: ignorance, or conscious decision to not act.
Under which of these categories would you classify the following assertion:
> As much as I've learned about subject X, I still feel that neither I — nor most people who are already acting, for that matter — truly have enough information to take an informed stance here, as the waters are being actively clouded by propaganda campaigns, censorship, and false-flag operations by one or both sides; and I believe that acting without true knowledge can only play into someone's hand in a way that may damage what turns out to be an innocent party I would highly regret damaging, when this all shakes out a decade down the line. I find myself too knowingly ignorant to conscientiously act... yet I also do not highly prioritize gaining any more information about the situation, as I have seemingly passed the threshold where acquiring additional verifiable and objective information on the conflict is cheap enough to be worth it; gaining any further knowledge to inform my stance is too costly for someone like me, who is neither an investigative journalist, nor a historiographer, nor enmeshed in the conflict myself. So I fear I must opt out of the conflict altogether.
I find myself increasingly arriving at exactly this stance on so many subjects that other people seem to readily take stances (and allow themselves to be spurred to action) on.
I suppose I may differ from the average person in at least one way — that being that, if I were tricked into harming innocent parties, I would hold myself to account for allowing myself to be tricked, rather than externalizing blame to the party responsible for tricking me. After all, only by my learning a lesson in avoiding being manipulated, do I actually lessen the likelihood of the next innocent party coming to harm. Which is a lot more important to me, in a rule-utilitarian sense, than is avoiding social approbation for not taking a stance.