Equality Activity

This activity is designed for participants to think about their duties in contexts of inequality and/or oppression. Participants will practice self-scrutiny, courage, and open-mindedness.

Thomas Hill on the Moral Responsibilities of Bystanders

Thesis:

1) People have duties to resist oppression, even when they are bystanders.

It is disrespectful to the value of others’ autonomy to continue in the role of a bystander when one can protest or do something about it.
It is also disrespectful to oneself to be a bystander that tolerates oppression because bystanders are self-deceived by trying to put a good face on their moral weakness by framing it as an inability to help. It is also weak willed to violate one’s moral commitments for the sake of one’s well-being

2) People also have duties to exercise due care in deliberation, to scrutinize their motives for remaining passive, and to cultivate their strength of will so that they can do the right thing when faced with oppression.

3) When we neglect our duties (1-2) we contribute to ongoing oppression through our negligence and we also fail to respect ourselves properly by failing to do what we can to stand by fundamental moral commitments.

First Order Duties of Bystanders: Bystanders must do what they can to stop oppression, and they must oppose oppression by all morally legitimate means. Bystanders must also bear some sacrifices, but there are limits to the sacrifices one must incur.

Question: What form should resistance take? Violence? Civil Disobedience? Lawful Protest? Divestment and boycotts? Symbolic acts of resistance? Public opposition/speech?

Question: Do bystanders have these duties even if resistance will surely be ineffective?

Second Order Duties of Bystanders: Bystanders must take steps to understand and implement their first order duties.

Second Order Duties:

1. Bystanders fail to exercise due care in moral deliberation.

This is a duty to have the right beliefs.
Conscientiousness in moral judgment is required, ignorance can come from negligence that is itself blameworhty (recall Guerrero on this)
Bystanders are also required to check empirical facts
Bystanders should investigate what their moral beliefs entail and be aware of their basic values.

2. Bystanders fail to scrutinize the ethics of why they do what they do.

This is a duty to have the right motivation.
Bystanders are vulnerable to self-deception (recall Price/LL on this) out of a desire to seem better to themselves than they are.
Bystanders make excuses for themselves.
Passivity can be motivated as well.

3. Bystanders fail to develop virtue.

This is a duty to be the right kind of person.
We all have a duty to commit ourselves to act rightly, but we also have a duty to become the kind of person who can carry out right action when we are called to.
Just as we should reject self-interest that would motivate us to steal, so too should we reject fear that would motivate us to be passive in the face of injustice.
Bystanders should cultivate moral fortitude/strength of will

ACTIVITY:

IDENTIFYING INJUSTICE

A Problem for Bystanders:

American politics is very polarized. People’s opinions on a range of unrelated topics tend to cluster around their partisan beliefs. Yet there is no reason to think that reality reliably aligns with one party and that another party is reliably wrong about such a wide range of things. This suggests that political polarization+ partisanship makes people epistemically reliable. (Joshi)