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In the past I have expressed the opinion that it is harmful to place obligations on people to help others. Here is a case that might cause people to wonder. Would the harm here outweigh the good? The requirement under international law is that vessels are to respond to distress calls that they receive from other vessels. I suspect that there might be obvious exceptions to this as a moral principle. Perhaps if vessels in a given area gave phony distress calls in order to lure in other ships for the purpose of piracy, this might go against regarding this as a moral responsibility.
The first thing we need to consider here is that this is a case where the responsibility to provide assistance singles out a certain target. In many other cases it is not immediately obvious who has a responsibility to provide assistance. We have to think whether they actually harm anyone by failure to provide such assistance. One could argue that vessels on the high sea have an interest in not colliding. Hence there is an actual harm that a vessel will do to another simply by being in the area. There is the effect of crowding.
In this case, some relief was apparently provided and an attempt was made to contact the authorities of those nearest country to provide further assistance. Another vessel may or may not have violated international law and refused to provide assistance. In any case there is some disagreement over whether the authorities actually were told about the stranded vessel.
Here the moral dispute is over whether we ought to confine ourselves to using praise in order to encourage people to assist others or blame those who fail to help in this specific incident. Of course by blaming people we would discourage travel by sea. That will do some harm. However, our moral intuition is that people have a responsibility to help. I don't think we will gain much by trying to overturn our intuition on this point.
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