Fleeing from buses

Heading home on the GO at night, driving through an eerie fog, sitting next to a creepy man who apparently had never seen a v-neck t-shirt before, my ipod kindly serving up Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (I don't even know why I have that on my ipod), I found myself thinking of Tim McLean.

Some people have criticized the other people on Tim's bus for fleeing the bus instead of fighting off his attacker. However, sitting there looking around my bus, it occurred to me that even if people in general were morally obligated to fight the attacker, everyone who was sitting in front of Tim was morally obligated to leave the bus.

Why? Because you can only exit the bus through the front door and the aisle is only one person wide. If anyone who was in front of the attack had tried to help, they would have had to run towards the back of the bus, thus blocking the aisle for anyone who wants to flee.

It is everyone's own prerogative to put their own life at risk to help someone else (or for any other purpose, really). But we don't have the moral right to prevent one innocent from saving their own life in order to attempt to save the life of another innocent. To run from the front of the bus back to where the attack took place would be like if firefighters ran into a burning building to save some trapped people, and in doing so blocked the way of people trying to flee through the fire escape.