Conclusion
In this chapter, I have surveyed a huge variety of scenarios in which people who may claim to be bystanders to cases of wrongdoing, harm, and danger nevertheless share in some form of responsibility with respect to the events they witness.
Section 22.2 examined how witnesses may share in the responsibility for what are reasonably described as other people’s misdeeds. Section 22.3 observed that some problems can only be solved when people act together and asked how people who witness such problems might have a responsibility to help solve them. In both discussions, I documented a tendency among writers on moral responsibility to encourage witnesses to see themselves as actors rather than bystanders. The passivity of witnesses is presented as morally problematic, and typically for good reason. Section 22.4 focused on the enforcement of moral norms as a collective action in which bystanders to wrongdoing may see themselves as sharing the responsibility to act. From one point of view, the responsibility to help enforce moral norms is just another responsibility to provide aid to others. From another point of view, one must take up the responsibility to enforce morality in order to avoid sharing in the responsibility for wrongdoing and injustice. But, the issues raised in section 22.4 suggest that active bystanders are not always preferable to passive ones in this context.While there is a good case to be made for the view that ordinary people share some degree of responsibility for enforcing moral norms, the sheer destructive power of public naming-and- shaming campaigns indicates that sometimes it is better to correct wrongdoers in private or even to remain a mere bystander to another person’s wrongdoing. A world in which anyone’s misdeed is treated as everyone else’s business is a frightening prospect. The era of social media in which we are living makes further discussion of the moral responsibilities of bystanders a pressing issue.
Whose responsibility is it to enforce morality, and who ought to stay on the sidelines?6Notes
1 In this chapter, I focus on witnesses who are individuals. For discussion of the responsibility of states that are witness to wrongdoing and suffering, see the literature on humanitarian intervention (Luban 2002; Evans 2002; Bellamy 2004).
2 Dempsey posed this question at a conference on Gardner’s work at Wadham College, Oxford in 2018. A spirited exchange broke out in response. Thanks to Dempsey and to the audience members, who raised many of the points included here.
3 Specific training programs include Green Dot and Bringing in the Bystander. As Sarah L. Swan reports, active bystander training has been endorsed by a number of high profile entities, including the Obama White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American College Health Association and the World Health Organization (Swan 2015: 977).
4 For criticisms of active bystander programs see Swan 2015 and Radzik 2014b.
5 One response to these problems is European Union legislation defending a “right to be forgotten,” which provides legal recourse to having certain information removed or blocked from internet searches (McNealy 2012).
6 Much of the research behind this work was supported by grants from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M. The author is grateful for that support, as well as for the helpful suggestions and support of Saba Bazargan-Forward and Deborah Tollefsen.
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