Open question: What do you think a normal person’s moral responsibilities are and why?
Some angles you can (but don’t have to) consider:
To themselves, family, friends and strangers?
Do you have thoughts about what it takes to make a good person or at what point someone is a bad person? (Is there a category of people who are neither?)
What do you think the default state of people is? (Generally good, evil or neutral by nature?)
Conversely do you believe morality is a construction and reject it entirely? (Even practically speaking when something bad happens to you?)
At the very base level you should simply never make any situation worse.
If you can help make things better, great! But at the very least don’t make it worse. I’d rather see a guy watching a house burn, than watch a guy actively making the fire bigger.
That word “simply” is doing a lot of very heavy lifting there.
Early in my stay in China, I lived in a little city¹ called Jiujiang. There was a hotel that had an attached restaurant making “western” food that other expats in the city would congregate in for a taste of “home” when China was being too Chinese for them. (Culture shock is real and profound.) I was hanging with the gang once, one of whom was a former collegiate Aussie Rules football player. Big, strong, tough guy. With us was one of our “foreign affairs assistants”.
Just outside the hotel window, near where we were sitting, was a drama blowing up. A husband was berating his wife and, at one point, smacking her hard several times. Like shockingly hard. Phil (the aforementioned football player) was up in an instant, rushing for the restaurant door. As one of the few expats who could speak the local language he started lacing in to the guy, grabbing his arm and twisting it up behind his back, such that the farmer’s face was pressed up against the glass of the window. From what he reported later he was apparently telling the guy that if he ever saw him raise hands against a woman again he was going to be a bloody mess on the ground.
The farmer and his wife hastily shuffled off when Phil let go.
When Phil came back, he was all pleased with himself for leaping in to stop a problem. For saving the weak against the abusive strong.
I’m going to let you think a moment on Phil’s actions and decide if his actions were “moral” or “immoral”. If he was making things better or worse. I’ll put the outcome into a reply.
¹ Where “little” means “population of about 4.5 million”. Scales are … different here.
TL;DR summary: It's not always so simple to not make things worse. The choices are not always obvious; the situations aren't always clear.
When Phil came back basking in what he was sure was going to be profuse praise for his bravely intervening in a domestic violence situation he was surprised to find out that only his fellow expats (spoiler warning: myself excluded, because Mom’s Chinese and I knew what was coming) were doing so. Chinese witnesses were glaring at him. Our “foreign affairs assistant” had a very stony expression on her face. (Yes. Her.) Here’s the paraphrased conversation that ensued:
Foreign Affairs Assistant (FAA): What did you think you accomplished here?
Phil (P): I stopped a guy from beating his wife.
FAA: No. No you didn’t. You made him lose face.
P: Well if he didn’t want to lose face he shouldn’t have beaten his wife!
FAA: All you have done is made him angry. He knows he can’t do anything to you, both because you’re much larger and more violent than him [Phil was very shocked at the ‘more violent’ part of this.—zdl] and because you’re a foreigner and will be protected by the police.
P (slowly dawning): …
FAA (increasingly angry): Now that man is going to take control of his face once more by ‘proving’ to himself and his wife that he is the strong one. What would have been handled by her relatives talking to his relatives and getting justice done through private censure is now getting handled by that woman probably winding up in the hospital … and the social approach to justice will have its hands tied; police will become involved, the man will be jailed, the woman will lose her source of household income, and will be in great pain possibly requiring more money to pay for medicine. You haven’t saved her from anything. You’ve made her life immeasurably worse. (final words in great sarcasm) You are truly a great hero.
My point of view would generally be that people who try to make things better, even if in individual cases make them worse, will, generally, overall learn from those mistakes and get better at their decision-making. (Similarly if someone who helps themselves at the expense of others accidentally helps them, they will “learn” from is as well, not making that “mistake” in the future).