Say you have a billion dollars. You have the option to donate most or all of it to charities that will help very many people by bringing them up to some suitable standard of living. Instead you decide to use the billion dollars to buy a fleet of private jets. A lot of people would think that that is your choice - it's your money, after all, and you did nothing wrong by not donating it to effective altruism charities.

Now say you are walking down the street when you notice a man abusing a woman. You can intervene, or at least call the police. Instead you continue to walk, enter an ice cream parlor, buy a mint chocolate chip ice cream cone and walk home. Most people, I think, would find this to be wrong.

What is the difference between the two here?

Hume argued that people only feel compassionate towards others if they are somehow within the general vicinity of them, or have an emotional connection to them. Schopenhauer later condoned Hume's idea. Hume was concerned with spatio-temporal location, but this can also be expanded to socio-economic location: many rich people don't care about the poor despite them living across the street. It's as if the poor aren't even there.

Action, according to Donaldson, requires intention.

Apply this to the two scenarios above. In the first scenario, you know that there are starving people elsewhere that could be helped by your donations. Buying a bunch of jets requires not only your intention to buy these jets but also your intention to not help these starving people. In the second scenario, you have the intention of getting ice cream but also the intention of not helping the woman being abused.

So it seems difficult to defend non-interventionism based on intention alone.

Furthermore, for an event to take place (a non-agential happening that may nevertheless include actions), requires there to be certain variables in place. For example, the second scenario requires there to be a victim, a perpetrator, and any non-intervening bystanders.

It seems to stand, then, that being complacent and not "doing" anything (intervening) makes you complicit in an event transpiring, since you have a consciousness and can thus alter your position in the equation.

The victim, on the other hand, is not responsible for what happens to them. The actions are directed towards them. Whereas it seems rather absurd to complain that the victim is forcing responsibility on bystanders (i.e. it's the victim's fault), it does not seem absurd to complain that other's inaction is forcing harm on the victim.

To put it another way: say you have two circuit boards that has various transistor switches. Board 1 has only one LED light. Board 2 has more than one LED light. In order for LED A to light up on either board, no other LEDs can be lit up. Now, on board 1, there are no other LEDs to prevent LED A from lighting up. But on board 2 there are other LEDs. If we don't want LED A to light up on board 2, then at least one other LED needs to be lit up. It is the "responsibility" so to speak for the other LEDs to light up and prevent LED A from doing so. In other words, board 2 has additional variables while board 1 has none.

Now you might say that these other LEDs are merely "allowing" LED A to light up on board 2. But for LED A to light up, there must be a causal equation that is satisfied for LED A to light up. Whereas on board 1 this equation is satisfied in virtue of there not being any available potential-interventionists, board 2 only satisfies the equation if the other LEDs don't do anything.

From this, we can see how there is no real distinction between doing and allowing. Action requires intention, and to do something is to do an action. Therefore not-doing something (intervening) is nevertheless actually doing something (not-intervening). Therefore, allowing something bad to happen when you have the ability to do something counts as being complicit in the action.

However in the legal sense, there is a difference between doing and allowing. Potential intervening bystanders only have to intervene if someone instigates] a harmful action. It's not their fault that they are placed into a role of responsibility. So they usually can't be punished. But they don't seem to be able to get out scotch-free either - after all, they "allowed" the action to happen by not intervening, thus playing a role in the action's necessary and sufficient conditions, thus by proxy they were complicit in the action. A secondary mode of doing.

Additionally as a consequentialist myself I can't see how adding intentions into the mix suddenly changes everything. The outcome, the consequence, is what matters here. Even if it was an accident, somebody got hurt. What difference does it make?