So there's no duty to a comrade in arms during a war. Every man for himself. Got it.
I didn't say that, nor imply it.
But there's no account of the morality of warfare that I'm familiar with that requires soldiers to make pointless sacrifices to try and rescue their comrades. Likewise in parallel situations (eg mountain climbing).
A parallel criminal law example: If A and B are climbing together, roped together, and the rope breaks and B falls, A is not guility of homicide for faiing to rescue B. If A and B are climbing together, and both will die and only A can save him-/herself by cutting the rope and sacrificing B, then A will be guilty of homicide. (The availability of
necessity as a defence to murder/manslaughter is highly controversial.)
Of course if B cuts the rope and sacrifices him-/herself, the situation is completely different.
Also, Bucky who can't fly and isn't invulnerable, was able to take care of himself while falling to his death. Interesting take on that scene. I would have called Bucky's situation hopeless, myself, but apparently I must be wrong since it isn't that complicated.
Bucky's situation might be hopeless, or no (that word doesn't appear in the quote you posted). But Bucky is a competent adult and was not in Cap's care. (A doctor who lets a patient die on the table, or a parent who fails to rescue a child in certain circumstances, may well be guilty of manslaughter. But those are exceptions to the general proposition that there is no duty to rescue.)
Yeah, no thanks. The fact that you would phrase it as "sacrificing those in your care for your own self preservation" means that we are simply not going to agree on this. Sorry, but, no. The paladin in no way "sacrificed" someone in his care. He was given zero choice. Do this or die. Dying would accomplish nothing and would prevent the paladin form later making some sort of attempt to fix the situation - either by tithing to the widow, possibly working to resurrect the dead guy, or any number of other options.
I'm kinda burned out watching people paint this in what I see as blindingly stupid light and praising utter cowardice. Living is the hard choice. Dying is the cowards way out.
You don't have to agree. But the analysis isn't hard to understand. In (more-or-less) contemporary moral philosophy, look at (say) GEM Anscombe, or Philippa Foot and all the ensuing literature on the trolley problem. Or a lot of mainstream Kantians. In law, look at the laws of armed conflict and assoicated ideas in just war theory; or the criminal law examples I've just provided in response to Maxperson (I'm drawing on Anglo-Australian criminal law, but I don't think US criminal law differs wildly on these issues. I don't know Japanese criminal law.) In literature, look at the attitudes displayed in JRRT's work, or in mediaeval and early modern Arthurian stories.
The view that
dying is the cowared's way out is essentially modernist (eg it seems to take atheism as a functional if not intellectual premise - so you could locate it in some Hellenistic ideas also like Epicrueanism, but they're the prototypes for modernist thought). It's no surprise that modernism has no room for the paladin archetype! I mean, you can do it at the table if you want to - after all, Gygaxi did, by bringing a class called "paladin" into a game whose ethics model that of Advanced Squald Leader - but it's plain as day that the resulting fiction will make no more sense from the paladin perspective than Mark Twain's
Connecticut Yankee - ie at best it will be an ironic commentary on the paladin as "lawful stupid" or similar. At worst it will just be an incoherent jumble.
