Introduction

This chapter explores the moral responsibilities of bystanders, and more specifically the ways in which witnesses to wrongs, harms, and other ills come to share responsibility with other parties.

I am interested in the figure of the bystander because, although “bystander” is a familiar category in both ordinary and scholarly discourse, it is both conceptually unstable and mor­ally fraught (Brudholm 2005). Applications of the category often come under fire for denying relationships of causal influence and agency that are in fact present. He is not merely a witness; he is an actor. So, the bystander is not really a bystander at all, says the critic. At other times, the objections are more straightforwardly moral as, for example, with the slogans “no bystanders” and “don’t be a bystander,” which are becoming common on college campuses. Witnesses are capable of action, and often they should act in order to prevent bad outcomes. On this version of the criticism, although the witness may be properly described as a bystander, he is not “merely” a bystander. He is also a person who bears a kind of responsibility with respect to the ills unfolding before him.

This chapter surveys the variety of ways in which people who may appear at first to be bystanders, or mere bystanders, to wrongdoing, harm or danger might instead share respon­sibility with other actors. My discussion divides cases into three rough, non-exclusive cat­egories: (a) shared responsibility for wrongs and harms; (b) shared responsibility to provide aid; and (c) shared responsibility to enforce moral norms. Categories (a) and (b) have received quite a bit of attention in the philosophical literature. In both cases, discussion generally decries the passivity of witnesses to suffering. The witnesses, in remaining passive, fail to recognize how they nevertheless contribute to wrongdoing or otherwise fail to satisfy their obligations to other people. In response, scholars and activists work to identify the sources of passivity and recom­mend measures to overcome them.

The internet and social media have, in many ways, made it easier to join in group actions both for good (e.g. crowd-sourcing medical research) and for ill (e.g. cyber-bullying). They have also led to an upswing in group actions related to category (c) listed above. In these cases, we see witnesses to wrongdoing take up the responsibility for enforcing moral norms, for example, by joining boycotts or naming-and-shaming campaigns against bad actors. Group actions like these can be appropriate and productive. But, they also raise a number of concerns, as suggested by the aggressive language sometimes used to describe these groups (e.g. “Twitter mobs”) and what they do to their targets (e.g. “dragging” or “canceling” them). My modest goal for this portion of the chapter is to highlight some ways in which the responsibilities of witnesses to wrongdoing need to be more thoroughly theorized. But, furthermore, I want to suggest that these cases show that active bystanders are not always preferable to passive ones. Sometimes, it is better for witnesses to wrongdoing to remain mere bystanders.

22.2