Philosophy

I have a moral question. This almost happened to me recently. Suppose you are stopped at a red light with one or more cars in front of you. You look in the rearview mirror and a big runaway truck that has lost its brakes is heading toward you at a high rate of speed. It looks almost certain that the truck will hit your car very hard and kill you. The only way you can save yourself is to move to an empty space on the street to your right, out of the path of the truck. But if you do this, the truck will strike the car in front of you and probably kill its occupant(s). What is the proper thing to do in this scenario according to Jewish law? Let yourself be killed, or save yourself and let the occupant(s) in the car in front of you get killed?   Fortunately, when this almost happened to me, no one got killed. The truck driver who lost his brakes swerved to the right and hit the brick side wall of a building. He did a lot of damage to the building and the truck and had minor injuries, but he didn’t need to go to the hospital, and no one else was hurt. Really, it happened very suddenly and there was no time to think about my choices.

I used to work for a collection agency and therefore I know a lot about how they work that many people do not know. Also, I am Jewish and I wonder what a Jew’s obligation is toward paying a collection agency when slapped with a bill from one, considering what I know. The reality is, if one has a debt that has been sent to a collection agency, making a payment to the agency will hurt one’s credit rating even more than simply ignoring the debt. It is unusual for a collection agency to sue a debtor. After three years, the debtor cannot be sued, and after seven years, the debt cannot cause any further harm to one’s credit. In other words, it is usually to a debtor’s advantage to simply ignore the debt and the agency’s demands and repeated phone calls. And collection agencies don’t want debtors to know that. Most people who have a debt sent to collections cannot afford to make payments. The collection agency industry is lucrative between the minute amount of debt that is actually paid by debtors who think they are doing themselves a favor and the sale of the right to collect delinquent accounts between collection agencies. When a debtor makes a payment to a collection agency, they are not giving money to the original creditor at all. What they do not know has already happened is the original creditor sold their debt to the collection agency for a fraction of its original value and resigned itself to collecting only that amount. From then on, it is in the hands of the collection industry to try to collect on what remains of the balance. The collection industry really exists not to help creditors recoup money they are owed, but it’s a bunch of entrepreneurs exploiting the fact that some people just don’t or can’t pay their bills.