The Moral Weight of Inaction

Recognising the Neutrality that Lies Between Good and Evil

M. D. Kwak

DON’T BE A BYSTANDER! BE AN UPSTANDER!

The words of that mantra still remain with me today – a testament to the psychological power and indoctrination that primary schools can exercise. Yet despite its obvious context of preventing bullying, it raises an incredibly interesting issue of inaction – and the morality behind it.

I think society would generally accept that remedying action in the face of injustice and suffering is necessarily a GOOD and PREFERABLE act. That’s why the mantra encourages one to be an upstander – to be one is to be a ‘good’ person by societal standards. However, is one a BAD person if they opt to remain a bystander? To what extent are they morally culpable for wrongdoing – if any at all?

I think society has created an incredibly pervasive moral intuition that doing nothing can be a crime in many scenarios. It is not just the case that positive action is good – it’s also the case that an inability to act when able and required is an active wrongdoing. Reinforced by things like religion, political rhetoric and educational institutions, many would attribute problems like murder, climate change and stagnating progressive movements to those that merely watch yet do nothing.

Logically, however, I have a problem with this. This is not to say that being a bystander is something to be encouraged – but rather than being morally unjustified it ought to be permissible. There is a difference between moral evil and merely the absence of moral good – that grey space of moral neutrality. After all, if I choose to do nothing, my net output is nil – a neutral act. For example, a car accident on the way to work isn’t something I necessarily caused nor opted into becoming involved with. Unless an individual’s action causes harm, either directly or indirectly,  it is not an immoral action. In other words, one ought to delineate between causing something to occur and letting something occur (in presumably ignorance or apathy). Logically, one causes harm and has moral consequences – the other does not.

Negligence is something a lot of people point to in this discussion. For example, a parent doing nothing to save their child from drowning would be criminally prosecuted for negligence. Similarly, the State may be criminally negligent for doing nothing to save its people from famine. However, the problem with drawing such an analogy is that it fails to account for the special moral relationships such reciprocal obligations are founded upon. The reason why a parent has a special obligation to its child is because it raised it into being – the parent necessarily consented into that relationship of protective ownership (although interestingly, the child didn’t). The reason why the State has a special obligation to its citizens is because of the social contract and its very reason for being an institution in the first place.

The same relationship cannot be said to always apply in the case of strangers. I have no legal or moral obligation to an arbitrary person for the same reason I’m not criminally liable for refusing to donate all my wealth to alleviate poverty (despite me being a good person for doing so). I have a moral obligation not to harm others, but that obligation does not extend to the instrumentalization of the self in order for the benefit of others. The reason for this is because an individual does not consent to being in a relationship that has reciprocal obligations every time they walk past another stranger. This is true, even if that relationship can benefit you. 

In a contract, for example, one actor cannot promise something to another party (in this case promising to help out if you need future assistance) and then demand compensation (current assistance). The other party needs to agree to be a participant in the contract – even if it’s pragmatically mutually-beneficial. This is the reason why society cannot force such reciprocal obligations onto people – even if it might be beneficial for all in the long run. If people are autonomous and morally significant of their own accord, it is unjustified to demand that they sacrifice their liberties in order to benefit another party. 

I think one of the biggest mistakes in moral education is to cast bystanders in the same limelight of fault and condemnation as we do for perpetrators. Not only do they commit fundamentally different acts, it is absurd to suggest that an action of neutrality and nothingness is akin to an action of harm and degeneration. Nothingness is not a virtue – but crucially, it is not a sin.