Matthew asked:

In criminal law it is a duty of certain people to act in given situations, and is therefore a crime to omit
to act. Should liability be extended to all people in situations were there is a moral obligation to act?

and Meg asked:

Are me morally responsible for our omissions? We assume to hold ourselves and others for our
actions, but what about our non-actions?

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We are responsible for our omissions, why some say we are not rests I think on a mistake concerning
the workings of ethics, a mistake I will outline below.

We can make a distinction between those omissions that allow bad things to happen and those
omissions that do not promote good things happening. These are not the same since whilst allowing
a bad thing to happen will avoid promoting a good thing, avoiding promoting good will not necessarily
mean that a bad thing will happen, things could just stay the same.

First, are we responsible for allowing bad things to happen? Consider the case of a burning house
with a child trapped inside. You are the only person nearby, the only chance the child has of
surviving, trying to rescue him will mean that you will certainly suffer burns and smoke inhalation,
possible even die, should you go in or let the child die? One day I was walking home from school, the
route took me across a busy road and up a public footpath, on the way up the path I saw a young boy
on a bike speeding down the hill screaming, obviously he was going to fast and had lost control, I
could have lifted him of off the bike as he past me, instead I sidestepped, let him past and he went
into the road hitting a car, breaking his arm and leg. Watching him go I felt terrible, I knew what was
going to happen and it did, I let a bad thing happen. I felt horrible then and every time I think about it I
feel terrible. I was responsible for his injuries even before they happened. When I ignored him, his
shouting, when I moved out of the way I was responsible for what happened next.

Karl Jaspers once wrote about the Nazi percussion of the Jews, "Each one of us is guilty in so far as
he remained inactive. The guilt of passivity is different. Impotence excuses; no moral law demands a
spectacular death...but passivity knows itself morally guilty of every failure, every neglect to act
whenever possible, to shield the imperiled, to relieve wrong, to countervail." (The question of German
Guilt).

The reason we may think that we are not responsible for our omissions is that there are limits to the
demands of ethics (of both consequentialist and deontological kinds), it permits us to pursue our own
goals and interests and steps in to prohibit anything that will affect others for the worse during these
pursuits, sometimes morality requires us to sacrifice some of our own interests for the benefit of
others but not at the expense of our own welfare.

This I think is the mistake in traditional thinking about ethics. Often ethics is seen and thought about
on the same model as economics, a book-keeping of gains and loses, pros and cons, weights and
measures. A balancing act of avoiding blame, keeping ones hands clean securing ones own self,
against helping others. Often the balance wins out in favor of oneself. We help others up to a point
but where it beings to interfere with our leisure time, our bank balance, our secure home, the limit is
reached. That's one reason why it is generally regarded that we are not responsible for our
omissions; there are limits to he demands of morality and our omissions point to those limits. This is
the idea that morality should be about stopping bad things happen, but not necessarily about
promoting good things happening and that the domain of responsibility only reaches as far as the
first. Omissions of the latter kind are on the traditional view not omissions at all but superogatory acts,
something above and beyond our normal call to duty. We can be praised for doing them but not
blame for not doing them.

But morality is not like economics, its not about balancing what I use with what I can give away,
morality breaks up this structure, there are no limits, it's looking after the other person bearing the
weight of the world. Some object that this would make intolerable demands on people, it would make
us all murderers for failing to help those in Zimbabwe, it would mean giving up more and more until
we have nothing left, for to do otherwise would mean that more people die, it would mean, to take up
Matthew's point that liability be extended and that's just unrealistic, if we put everyone in prison no
one will feed the poor! But that's exactly what morality requires. (Not that everyone be in prison — the
Law follows even more the pattern of economics, of give and take, I wonder if it makes sense to
punish someone legally for what they have failed to do ethically, since ethically we will all fail to do
something, perhaps then responsibility and punishment need to be separated.) According to
Emmanuel Levinas: "Responsibility becomes serious when it is not only my surplus that is affected
but all that sustains my life and my very occupancy of this post".

Morality for Levinas is answering for the needs of the other person, without concern for my own self.
A paradigmatic example is the giving of bread from ones own mouth to the beggar on the street. If I
turn the beggar away he will die, I have killed him. But someone will object: "there will always be
beggars on the street I can't feed them all I can't be responsible for them all!" Such an objection is still
tied to thinking of ethics as if it were a balance sheet. Levinas is fond of quoting Dostoyevsky:
"Everyone of us is responsible for everyone else in every way". Further there is no way to alleviate
this responsibility. We cannot make it lighter, Levinas recognizes that there will be more beggars of
course that's not a good thing, but it's no objection to denying our responsibility either: in fact
recognizing our responsibility increases it: "The more I face my responsibilities the more I am
responsible". When it comes to responsibility the accounts can never be settled.

The view that says we are not responsible for our omissions, of both kinds, is a view that does not
see the beggar on the street, it's a view that does not take ethics seriously.

Brian Tee