This activity is designed for participants to think about their duties in light of their theory of justice. Participants will practice self-scrutiny, courage, and open-mindedness.
ACTIVITY:
IDENTIFYING INJUSTICE
1) People have duties to resist oppression and mistreatment, even when they are bystanders.
Bystanders fail to respect the people who are oppressed or mistreated
Bystanders lack self-respect because they either deceive themselves, they are weak-willed, or they knowingly fail to live by their values.
2) People also have duties to become the kind of people who resist oppression and mistreatment.
Bystanders have duties to exercise due care in deliberation
Bystanders have a duty to scrutinize their motives for remaining passive.
Bystanders should cultivate their strength of will so that they can do the right thing they encounter injustice.
3) When bystanders neglect their duties (1-2) they contribute to injustices.
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)
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