Shared Responsibility to Provide Aid

In this section, our attention shifts from a responsibility for wrongs or harms to a responsibility to provide aid. For example, while the bystander in the mugging case does not bear responsi­bility for the wrong (the assault), he is responsible for responding appropriately to the wrong by providing aid to the victim.

The least controversial way for a bystander to come to share such responsibility would be for her freely to volunteer to take it on. Assume that the bystander, though she might have an imperfect duty to act charitably, has no perfect duty to contribute to any particular charitable campaign. In making a promise to contribute to some group effort, she can come to have a perfect duty. Having thus committed herself, the individual may then face a number of diffi­cult issues that accompany working in groups, including questions about when to defer to the group’s decisions, oppose them, or leave the group (Thomas 1998; Kolers 2005).

Another way in which an individual may come to share in a responsibility to provide aid is by being responsible for some past wrong or harm, either by being solely, individually respon­sible or by sharing in the responsibility of a group (Radzik 2009; Isaacs 2014). Providing aid to improve a situation can be a means of making amends for wrongdoing. In cases like these, the term “bystander” no longer seems to apply. Wrongdoers are not bystanders, and once we determine that someone who appears to be a bystander shares in the responsibility for a wrong, then she is no longer best characterized as a bystander.

Making amends directly to victims is generally preferable. However, more indirect forms of amends that involve participation in joint efforts to solve social problems may yet be mean­ingful. Where victims are dead, unreachable, or resistant to further contact with the wrongdoers, aid to other people (especially those who relevantly resemble the direct victims) provides an opportunity for the wrongdoers to send appropriate messages of acknowledgment and regret, to reform their characters, and to help prevent similar cases of wrongdoing in the future (Radzik 2009).

In cases of group wrongdoing, and perhaps especially historical wrongdoing, forms of amends that consist in future-oriented efforts to do good remain appropriate for group members who share in the responsibility of the group while bearing little or no individual culpability for those wrongs. While guilt, blaming or punishment are morally problematic for such parties, shared responsibilities to preserve the memory of the past or to help guard against a repetition of those wrongs are not (Blustein 2008, Radzik 2014a).

In another interesting set of cases, individuals may be obligated to join in group efforts to provide aid in order to avoid sharing in responsibility for wrongdoing. Here I am thinking of cases in which the only way to avoid complicity in wrongdoing is by engaging in some sort of positive action.

This brings us to more straightforward cases of a responsibility to rescue, wherein a bystander sees someone facing a danger for which the bystander bears no individual or shared form of responsibility. For example, a bystander who witnesses a swimmer struggling in the water may have a duty to rescue him. In this sort of case, the label “bystander” seems to be descriptively appropriate, and our attention turns to the normative claim that one shouldn’t remain a mere bystander.

Defenses of a moral duty to rescue often rest on a general duty of benevolence (Beauchamp 2008). Benevolence is typically regarded as an imperfect duty, in the sense that the one obliged is generally free to choose when and toward whom to exercise benevolence. However, the duty becomes required on a particular occasion in cases of serious peril. A number of caveats are typ­ically attached, however. The bystander must be capable of performing the rescue. For example, she must be able to swim well enough to assist a drowning victim. There are also limits on the harms or dangers a bystander can be required to undergo in her attempt to perform the rescue.

Easy rescues are morally required of bystanders; dangerous rescues are generally considered supererogatory.

A well-known puzzle about the responsibility to rescue asks whether a random collection of individuals can be responsible for providing aid (Held 1970). We can pose the question in the form of a paradox. Imagine a number of people on a beach, who are unknown to one another, witness a stranger struggling in the water. Given the undertow, no individual can per­form the rescue alone. However, if the bystanders would form a human chain, they could reach the troubled swimmer with little risk to themselves. One might argue that no individual has a duty to rescue the swimmer, since no individual can perform the rescue. Furthermore, no group of individuals has a duty to rescue the swimmer because no “group” exists. A group, in the sense of the word relevant here, is an organized set of persons, which is capable of making a decision and jointly executing it (Held 1970). The people on the beach are merely a random collection of persons, not a group of the kind required. So, paradoxically, no one on the beach has a responsibility to save the swimmer, though it seems abundantly clear that they could save him quite easily.

Common solutions to the paradox focus on the content of the individual bystanders’ responsibilities (Held 1970; Collins 2013; Bjornsson 2014). Rather than each individual having a duty to rescue the swimmer, each has the responsibility to form a group (at least until a sufficiently large group has already been formed) for the purpose of saving him. Since forming an effective group requires leadership, we might also add that each has a responsibility to take a leadership role (at least until an apparently competent leader steps up). Whereas Held suggests that random collectives and their members are only responsible when reasonable individuals can be expected to know how they should act, Michael D. Doan recommends rethinking that requirement, given that some of the pressing problems that require collective action (including complex environmental problems) are ones that no one yet knows how to answer (Doan 2016).

We might also consider the responsibilities of witnesses who are unable to perform or con­tribute to rescues. For example, John Gardner presents another variation on a drowning case (Gardner 2004). This time, the bystander stands on a cliff far above the beach, with no path that would lead him to the water in time and no means of calling for help. In Gardner’s example, the bystander watches frantically from the top of the cliff, pulling his hair and running about in despair. Gardner asks whether the drowning provides the bystander with any reason to act. Michelle Madden Dempsey puts a spin on this question that fits our interests here, asking whether the bystander has any reason to contribute to a water safety campaign (Dempsey 2019).² Some might argue that, while the bystander has an imperfect duty to engage in acts of benevolence, as do we all, merely witnessing the drowning provides no reason for him to contribute his efforts to the water safety campaign as opposed to other worthy causes. While making a donation to water safety might help the bystander work through the trauma of his own experience, he has no duty to respond in this way.

However, others might argue that merely witnessing a wrongful or harmful event can pro­vide one with a (defeasible) responsibility to act in some way that will ameliorate that kind of harm. If others are unaware of the dangers posed by this particular stretch of water, the argu­ment for the bystander’s responsibility to support water safety efforts is strengthened. Because he is in an unusual epistemic position with respect to this particular danger, his responsibility to contribute to this cause is stronger than other people’s. Furthermore, even when nothing can be done to ameliorate the harm done to the drowning victim, there may be value in simply bearing witness to another person’s suffering, especially where that person is unable to speak for herself (Blustein 2008; Givoni 2014; Gillespie 2016).

A third response to the clifftop witness case interprets it through a comparison with Bernard Williams’ much debated category of agent-regret (Williams 1981).

This section has identified a number of ways in which someone who is (apparently) a mere bystander to danger or suffering may share a responsibility to provide aid, and more specifically, to provide aid by joining in collective efforts. Unfortunately, decades of psychological studies suggest that bystanders are likely to remain passive even when the need for aid appears obvious and poses little personal cost or risk (Latane and Darley 1970; Latane and Nida 1981). Indeed, there is abundant evidence of a phenomenon called the “bystander effect”: the more people who witness a person in dire need, the less likely it is that anyone will lend a hand (Latane and Darley 1970). Psychologists have offered a number of explanations for the bystander effect and other patterns of bystander passivity including: the diffusion of a sense of responsibility; plur­alistic ignorance (wherein several bystanders each falsely believe that the others are untroubled by what is going on); routinization and desensitization; fear of embarrassment, retaliation, dam­aging relationships, or becoming too involved; and the belief that one will be unable to make a difference (Latane and Darley 1970; Scully and Rowe 2009).

As evidence for bystander passivity and the mechanisms underlying it has grown, researchers and activists have turned to the problem of counteracting these tendencies (Latane and Darley 1970; Staub et al. 1984; Staub 2011). One branch of such efforts, which has reached many college campuses and workplaces, provides “active bystander” training (Scully and Rowe 2009; Swan 2015).3 The goal is to create campus and workplace cultures in which bystanders will be more likely to intervene to help people in need, especially in situations of sexual harassment, bullying, domestic and relationship violence, and rape. These training programs aim to increase awareness of the prevalence and harmfulness of these forms of abuse. They frequently share the psychological research mentioned above in hopes of disabusing people of the confidence that they would surely help if help were required. Active bystander programs are instead based on the belief that people must cultivate their abilities to spot problematic situations and, more importantly, to overcome the psychological and social factors that lead them to silence their internal alarm bells.

Active bystander training also typically shares a wide range of intervention techniques, emphasizing that intervention does not necessarily require confronting wrongdoers. Sometimes abusive dynamics can be diffused by introducing simple distractions. For example, bullying in the workplace can be interrupted by asking a long, boring question just as the boss seems to be building up to another outburst of abuse against a vulnerable colleague. Checking that an inebriated fellow party-goer has a safe ride home, or starting an innocuous but persistent con­versation with the person who seems to be leading her away to another location, are easy ways to reduce the likelihood of potentially traumatic outcomes.⁴

One way of characterizing the message of such active bystander programs is that they aim to emphasize that bystanders do not stand fully outside of the events they witness. In this way, such programs echo some of the messages of the philosophical literature on responsi­bility summarized in this section. Bystanders have the power to act in ways that can influ­ence outcomes for the better and they have the responsibility to help protect others. Moral responsibility requires bystanders to train themselves to notice dangers, to overcome the temp­tation to remain passive, and to influence the dynamics of the groups in which they participate so as to reduce risk suffering (Crawford 2009).

Another message of the active bystander movement is that we all share in the responsibility to change problematic cultural patterns of belief and behavior, including those that are known as “rape culture.” Indeed, one might argue that failing to help change such cultural norms amounts to acquiescence in their continuation. In this way, debate about witnesses’ shared responsibil­ities to provide aid intersects with discussion of witnesses’ shared responsibility for wrongdoing.

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