Abducting People for Fun!

          Since this is my last blog post besides the reflection, I am going to come around full circle and end how I started off.  My first official post was about prank videos and how they are getting more and more extreme, even to the point where they are illegal, but they rationalize this by calling it a "prank" or "social experiment."
          I just watched this video this past weekend, where a a man pretends to be an uber driver but "abducts" them.
          The prankster's intentions were correct, as all social experimenters' are. He wants people to be more careful about how they go about entering a stranger's car. Harmless, right? Wrong.

1. He takes advantage of how drunk and disoriented the passengers are.
          Before he starts his spree of abduction, he speaks into the camera and directly stated that "people are gonna be getting out of the clubs and and the bars, and they're gonna be a little tipsy." If we know these people's attention are not at their capacity, shouldn't we expect them to not be as careful? If we really wanted to test how safe a person would be when entering an uber car, there should also be tests during different times of the day, and in different areas.  Although many people who use ubers, usually take one at night during this setting, it is not impossible to find people who called an über that are not drunk.
          Logic aside, taking advantage of how drunk someone is breaks a few of the pillars of character;  respect, and Hobart for sure (I don't have my handout wth me at the moment, so I don't know if there are more, but I will know it for the final.

2.  The prankster breaks the law.
          This dude willingly admits that he abducted the people that got in his car, shown by what he titled the video.  Regardless of how long he kept them in his car, or whether or not he let them out, abduction is abduction.  He straight up broke the law to make a video that is entertaining. This directly breaks the "Uncle Ben" philosophy: "with great power comes great responsibility." If he has the power to distribute any message he wants, it should be the best massage possible, yet he is saying that breaking the law is fine, as long as you are filming it. Just because you're making a video, it doesn't mean that it is impossible to make one that is is entertaining AND follows the law.

3.  He puts a band-aid on a flesh wound.
          As in my previous post, many pranksters use the line "it's just a prank" or "it's a social experiment" when things get out of hand. They think that just by saying this, everything is better. This prankster is no different. After he scares his passengers for a good 5 minutes, he tells them it's a social experiment, thinking that they will instantly be healed from ther brief second of trauma. After he tells them, he asks the passengers if they want him to actually take them to their destination. It seems that he is expecting them to say yes, as if they are now instantly best friends. Also, he justifies his action of committing a crime (#2) by relabeling the crime by calling it a social experiment.