3H1P: morality of witnesses

3H1P is a blogging project wherein three heathens (Ziztur, Flimsy and Petter) and one pastor (Keith) answer questions posed by readers of the blog and discuss various issues related to religion, philosophy, science, etc. If you have a question that you’d like to see answered by 3H1P, ask it in the comment box. We promise we’ll probably get to it. The following comment is asked by Lord Runolfr, a long time reader/commenter of this blog (he even wrote a guest post here, just because he felt like it). It is answered (sort of) by Ziztur. I say sort of because I didn’t really answer it. Instead, I pondered…

There was a very serious crime a few weeks ago, right around Hallowen:
a high school girl was assaulted by a gang outside of a dance. I
remember hearing it discussed on a talk radio show while I was driving
through Birmingham.

Leaving aside the crime itself and how the criminals should be
treated, the host expressed his outrage at the fact that there were a
dozen or more witnesses to the crime who did nothing about it. Their
inaction left him completely flabbergasted.

If it’s morally wrong for people who are witnesses to a crime to do
nothing whatsoever to stop it, what about God?

If…
1) You believe God exists, and
2) You believe God has the power to intervene in human affairs, and
3) God is aware of essentially everything happening on Earth, and
4) You believe that taking some kind of action to stop a horrible
crime in progress is the morally correct thing to do,…

… then why consider God any sort of moral authority when He
routinely allows horrible crimes to occur without taking any action?

-Lord Runolfr

Admittedly, this question is not one I can really answer. The idea of some god as a moral authority does not make sense to me (and before someone says: “saying that something does not make sense is not a good argument”, know that I am not using “this doesn’t make sense” as an argument. I’ve written about god being a source of morality many times on this blog) Morality should be decided by the application of reason to reality. My personal leanings regarding morality are fairly close to the natural ethic explained by Jeff Schweitzer in Beyond Cosmic Dice: Moral Life in a Random World. I find the whole idea of there being a personal god who allows horrific suffering on earth and who does nothing about it to be morally bankrupt. Why wouldn’t he stop a 3 year old boy from being tortured, raped and murdered? Why would he let an infant with eczema suffer in horrific pain until death while her parents fed her homeopathic remedies? Saying that we’re judging the actions of said god with our fallible human morality is a cop-out, placing god squarely in the realm of you-can’t-question-land.

I think that this question of god’s morality is interesting, but I think an equally intriguing question is this: what caused people to react in this way – to see a crime and do nothing about it?

For a little bit of background, here is a link to the story. Basically, during a homecoming dance, a girl was gang-raped and assaulted by high-schoolers. She was not only raped, but other students stood by and did nothing, laughed, and recorded the incident on their cell phones. My guess is that the teenagers who were involved in this indecent acted in the way they did due to several factors. Reports said that the victim struggled to fit in at school, which very likely meant that she was dehumanized, mocked, or bullied before this incident. In-group bullying is a high problem in high schools – remember high school? If a teen involved considered calling for help, they would have risked being similarly treated. When I was in high school, a group of teenage boys tied up a friend of mine with jump ropes during gym class, so I can see how that type of behavior could be magnified in more hostile situations. There is also the bystander effect, which is a phenomenon in which individuals do not help in an emergency situation because there are other people present. Teenage brains are a work in progress.

I would agree that taking action to stop a horrible crime in progress is the moral, ethical thing to do, and I also think that it is possibly morally wrong to fail to intervene when witnessing a horrible crime. The wrongness of non-intervention depends in the specifics of the crime, and we could debate for eons about whether or not crime X in situation Y warranted intervention, and of what kind. Obviously, there are some actions that are currently criminal that are in a moral gray area where some people believe they are morally wrong and others do not. I, for example, would not intervene or report the crime of someone smoking marijuana, because I do not feel that it is immoral to smoke marijuana, even though I recognize that such activity is a crime. I would absolutely intervene if I were witness to someone throwing a newborn baby in a dumpster. Obviously, there is also the trouble of putting oneself at risk of being injured if one intervenes or reports a crime. Would I intervene on behalf of someone being mugged at gunpoint? Perhaps not directly for want of my own safety, but I would certainly report such a crime.

Of course, if god existed and god had the power to intervene in human affairs, that god would be under no threat of negative repercussions or injury, so that god would be without excuse. Sure, we could blather on about free will and such, but is free will so important that a god would rather a man rape and murder a young girl than temporarily suspend the free will of the murderer to prevent the girl from suffering?