ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the roles and responsibility of the bystanders who by definition were just allowing bad things to happen but without directly doing anything wrong. It will first review the rival views regarding the significance of the distinction between action and inaction. Those who find inaction inevitable and morally neutral would invoke the notion of ‘limited altruism’ and argue that the choice not to intervene is vital to agents living ‘lives properly constituted’. Whereas Samuel Scheffler argue that we are an inescapable part in a larger causal web and inevitably caught in some causal chain of events we did not initiate, our failure to take the opportunities to intervene in the causal process would be a secondary manifestations of our agency and hence we are still subject to the norms of individual responsibility. Strength and limitation of these arguments will then be illustrated with reference to cases of bystanders in the Cultural Revolution. We will see that some bystanders may defend that their deliberate refusal to participate was virtually a brave act of resistance against the revolution, hence are commendable instead of blameworthy. However, those who did ‘nothing’ in the sense of withdrawing minimally decent treatments by, for example, ceasing from visiting or talking to friends who were being persecuted as if they were real criminals, would apparently be more liable to blame and responsibility.
