A 22-year-old law student boards the last bus home after a night out. She finds she’s 20p short of the £5 fare and pleads to be let on or given time to visit a cash machine. The driver refuses, leaving her stranded in Nottingham city centre at 3am, where she is subsequently attacked and raped. It’s an agonising story of “what might have been”, says Jenny McCartney, a story that should haunt not just the driver but also his passengers. While she was pleading for a full eight minutes with the driver, not one of them – as CCTV footage shows – made the slightest effort to intervene or divvy up the 20p. Had it been their daughter in such a position, they’d all have wanted others to help; yet they did nothing.  Alas, “don’t get involved”, even if it means no more than a bit of “extra effort or potential embarrassment”, has become the mantra of our age. Though we live in an “era of endless gabble and self-assertion on social media”, we shy away from direct engagement with our fellow citizens. Yet it’s those little civic-minded gestures that count – in this case, “more than anyone might have imagined”. ( Quoted in “The Week”)

Comment:   No Epicurean would behave so stupidly or so, selfishly.