Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience
Transcript of Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience
Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience
Candice Delmas
� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract In this paper, I defend the existence of a moral duty to disobey the law
and engage in civil disobedience on the basis of one of the grounds of political
obligation—the Samaritan duty. Christopher H. Wellman has recently offered a
‘Samaritan account’ of state legitimacy and political obligation, according to which
the state is justified in coercing each citizen in order to rescue all from the perilous
circumstances of the state of nature; and each of us is bound to obey the law, as the
state demands, because we each have a responsibility to help rescue others when
this assistance is not unreasonably costly. Though Wellman recognizes that there
can be reasons for disobeying the law and resisting injustice in otherwise legitimate
states, he overlooks the possibility that at least some of these reasons could be
Samaritan in nature, grounded in the duty to rescue people from peril. As I shall
argue, the Samaritan duty supports obligations to disobey the law, when the law
prohibits Samaritan rescues, and to engage in civil disobedience, when unjust laws
and practices contribute to endangering people. The discussion proceeds as follows.
After a brief overview of the Samaritan duty, I articulate my case for Samaritan
duties to disobey the law, and duties to engage in civil disobedience when unjust
laws, institutions, or practices enable what I call ‘persistent Samaritan perils’. I then
examine and respond to several objections to my account: first, that the costs of law-
breaking are unreasonable, and thus cannot be morally required; second, that
individuals’ particular acts of protest and civil disobedience do not appear to make
any difference to the rescue, and thus cannot be required; third, that I stretch the
Samaritan duty beyond recognition; and fourth, that the Samaritan duty binds us to
help people in need or peril anywhere, not particularly at home. I consider in
conclusion the advantages and limits of my account of citizens’ Samaritan duties in
the face of injustice.
C. Delmas (&)
Department of Philosophy and Religion, Clemson University, 126D Hardin Hall, 403 Calhoun Dr.,
Clemson, SC 29634, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
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Res Publica
DOI 10.1007/s11158-014-9249-7
Keywords Samaritan duty � Injustice � Political obligation �Civil disobedience
What ought we to do in the face of injustice? Paragons of civil disobedience, including
Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., affirmed
that disobeying unjust laws was a moral duty. Contemporary philosophers writing on
the topic, however, have by and large failed to consider the possibility that civil
disobedience (broadly understood as conscientious law-breaking) might sometimes
be morally required (Bedau 1969; Cohen 1971; Rawls 1999, pp. 319–343; exceptions
include Walzer 1967; Brownlee 2012; Lyons 2013; Delmas 2013). This neglect is
surprising given that, as Peter Suber (1999, p. 110) notes, ‘[m]ost of the moral and
legal theory surrounding [civil disobedience], as well as most of the instances in the
street, have been inspired by Thoreau, Gandhi, and King’. Philosophers usually reflect
on civil disobedience within the context of nearly just societies, where political
obligation (i.e., the duty to obey the law) is thought to obtain. From this perspective,
justifying civil disobedience involves showing that political obligation has been
overridden, and that civil disobedience is morally permissible under the
circumstances.1
In this paper, I defend the existence of a moral duty to disobey the law and
engage in civil disobedience on the basis of one of the grounds of political
obligation—the Samaritan duty. The Samaritan duty requires us to aid people in dire
need or peril. Familiar bases of political obligation include consent (see, e.g., Locke
1980), gratitude (Walker 1988); fairness (Klosko 2005), the natural duty of justice
(Rawls 1999), and associative obligations (Dworkin 2011). Christopher H. Wellman
(1996, 2001, 2005) has recently offered a ‘Samaritan account’ of legitimacy and
political obligation. In his view, the state is justified in coercing each citizen in order
to rescue all from the perilous circumstances of the state of nature; and each of us is
bound to obey the law, as the state demands, because we each have a responsibility
to help rescue others when this assistance is not unreasonably costly. But since each
individual’s compliance with the law is not necessary for the state to accomplish its
rescue mission, Wellman complements Samaritanism with non-consequentialist
considerations of fairness, suggesting that ‘we understand our political obligations
as our fair share of the communal Samaritan chore of rescuing others from the perils
of the state of nature’ (Wellman 2005, p. 31). Wellman’s account not only offers, in
his words (1996, p. 735), a ‘new solution’ to the old problem of political obligation,
but it does so on the basis of a familiar and widely accepted moral duty.
Wellman recognizes that there can be reasons for disobeying the law and
resisting injustice in otherwise legitimate states. These reasons, in his view, stem
from the injustice of particular laws. For instance, he argues (2005, p. 86) that
1 To put it in Hohfeldian terminology, some theorists (e.g., Raz 1979, pp. 233–249) defend a ‘liberty-
right’, while others (e.g., Lefkowitz 2007; Brownlee 2008) argue for a ‘claim-right’, to engage in civil
disobedience.
C. Delmas
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Martin Luther King, Jr. ‘was morally at liberty to break the particular laws he
disobeyed simply because they were unjust’, and even though the state generated a
Samaritan duty to obey the law. However, I shall contend that many reasons for
disobeying the law and resisting injustice, including some of those that arose under
Jim Crow, are Samaritan in nature, grounded in the duty to rescue people from peril.
In particular, I shall argue that the Samaritan duty supports obligations to disobey
the law, when the law prohibits Samaritan rescues, and to engage in civil
disobedience, when unjust laws and practices contribute to endangering people.2
Why should the grounds of the reasons for disobeying matter, if the resulting
obligations are the same, and since appeals to justice seem to provide a much more
straightforward route than Samaritan considerations do?3 For one, champions of
Samaritanism should welcome my project insofar as it extends the theory beyond
legitimacy and political obligation, to citizens’ obligations in the face of injustice.
The ground of one’s obligations further matters because of what it implies regarding
the direction, force, and limits of said obligations. The Samaritan duty is generally
deemed among the most stringent requirements of ordinary and critical morality.
According to Joel Feinberg (1984, p. 171), it is ‘virtually as stringent’ as the duty
not to harm or put someone in harm’s way. Obligations based on the Samaritan duty
are thus particularly weighty—indeed, weightier than the duty of justice—and they
might come to override political obligation (or other reasons in favor of compliance
with the law). From this perspective, proponents of the duty to obey the law who
defend non-Samaritan accounts (say, using consent or associative duties) should
also be interested in my arguments, insofar as they help address an important and
previously neglected question: what happens when political obligation fails or is
overridden? Finally, skeptics and opponents of the duty to obey the law may
appreciate the project for the simple reason that it draws out the implications of the
Samaritan duty—an intuitively appealing moral duty—in contexts of injustice, and
finds it may support engaging in civil disobedience.
To be clear, my conclusions are compatible with both the belief in, and denial of,
political obligation, though they should weaken theorists’ confidence in the content-
independence of the duty to obey the law. But what is interesting is the idea that the
Samaritan duty could justify both the duty to obey the law (as Wellman proposes)
and duties to disobey the law and resist injustice (as I propose). One need not
endorse Wellman’s Samaritan account in order to be persuaded by mine; but one
does need to accept the validity and force of the Samaritan duty, which I shall
assume throughout without argument (for critiques of Wellman’s Samaritan theory,
see, e.g., Simmons 2005, pp. 91–196; Klosko 2003, 2004-5; Renzo 2008). The
premise of my (and Wellman’s) inquiry is a somewhat stringent version of the
Samaritan duty, according to which we may be bound to rescue people at distance,
not just in close physical proximity to us (see also, e.g., Singer 1972; Unger 1996;
Murphy 2000; Fabre 2002). I do not, however, assume any particular understanding
2 To be clear, I understand duties or obligations as pro tanto, not absolute, reasons for action, such that, if
S has a duty to do X, then S ought to do X and S’s failure to do X is wrong, unless S has a reason not to do
X at least as strong as his moral reason to do X. This holds for the duties to disobey and resist which I am
about to delineate, as well as for the duty to obey the law.3 I thank an anonymous reviewer at Res Publica for pressing me on this question.
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of the Samaritan duty’s source; and I shall set aside the questions whether Samaritan
duties imply correlative rights and are enforceable.4
The discussion proceeds as follows. After a brief overview of the Samaritan duty,
I articulate my case for Samaritan duties to disobey the law, that is, duties to break
laws that prohibit Samaritan rescues, and duties to engage in civil disobedience
when unjust laws, institutions, or practices enable what I call ‘persistent Samaritan
perils’. I then examine and respond to several objections to my account: first, that
the costs of law-breaking are unreasonable, and thus cannot be morally required;
second, that individuals’ particular acts of protest and civil disobedience do not
appear to make any difference to the rescue, and thus cannot be required; third, that
I stretch the Samaritan duty beyond recognition; and fourth, that the Samaritan duty
binds us to help people in need or peril anywhere, not particularly at home. I
consider in conclusion the advantages and limits of my account of citizens’
Samaritan duties in the face of injustice.
The Samaritan Duty
The Samaritan duty obligates us to rescue people from serious peril when we can do
so at no unreasonable cost to ourselves and others. It arises in situations in which
(i) some fundamental human interest or non-contingent basic need, including
minimally the interests in life, security, and bodily integrity is threatened; (ii) the
threat is immediate, imminent, or probable; and (iii) someone else—typically an
innocent passerby or bystander—is able to help at no unreasonable cost to him- or
herself and others.5 The severity of ‘Samaritan perils’, as I shall call them, depends
on the magnitude of the harm threatened or inflicted, as well as its probability.
Per condition (iii), a person who is unable to help, or unable to help at a
reasonable cost to herself and others, is not a potential Samaritan rescuer. The cost
qualification attached to the Samaritan duty shouldn’t be misunderstood: ‘not
unreasonable’ or ‘reasonable’ does not necessarily mean ‘easy’ or ‘trivial’. Cecile
Fabre (2002) offers an illuminating way of understanding the ‘reasonableness’ of
the costs of Samaritan assistance. On her account, a potential rescuer has a duty to
help someone in peril ‘only if the following three conditions obtain: (a) they are
physically able to help; (b) the costs of doing so is not such as to jeopardize their
prospects for a flourishing life; and (c) giving the required assistance would not put
them at a high risk of incurring those costs’ (Fabre 2002, p. 366). For short, I shall
consider that someone is bound by the Samaritan duty when one can help a person
in need without jeopardizing, or risking to jeopardize, one’s prospects for a
flourishing life.
4 I do not think that settling these issues matters for my inquiry, though I briefly return to them later in the
paper. For discussions of the issue of source, see, e.g., Feinberg (1984, chap. 4), Wellman (2001). On the
issue of enforcement, see, e.g., Weinrib (1980), Lipkin (1983), Ripstein (2000). On Samaritan rights, see,
e.g., Feinberg (1992), Fabre (2002).5 This basic account synthesizes the following sources: Maimonides (1954, 1:14), Luke 10:30–37,
Wellman (2005), Feinberg (1984), Fabre (2007).
C. Delmas
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Fabre notes that although individuals cannot be held under a moral duty to incur a
high risk of dying for the sake of another, they can be held under a duty to incur
some life-threatening risk. Swimming to rescue a drowning child, for instance,
carries some life-threatening risk, depending on the particulars of the situation:
perhaps the swimmer has a heart condition, or it is dark and the water is choppy.
Presumably, lesser Samaritan perils demand lesser sacrifices: the cost of assistance
in cases that involve less probable and/or less serious harm could be, let us say, far
from jeopardizing one’s prospects for a flourishing life.
According to Wellman (2005, p. 32), ‘Samaritanism becomes morally operative
only when a particular course is essential to save the imperiled person’. Elsewhere
he says the course of action must ‘in fact [be] necessary’ for the rescue (Wellman
2005, p. 21). This high bar makes sense for coercive interventions like that deployed
by the state to rescue everyone from the perils of lawlessness. Good Samaritans (I’ll
use this expression to refer to people who discharge their Samaritan duty in a
praiseworthy way) may sometimes resort to coercion or violence in the rescue, as
may be the case when someone threatens another person’s life (Fabre 2009). In such
cases, the course of action must be justified by showing that it reasonably seemed
necessary for the rescue. Some theorists (e.g., Hurka 2008) constrain coercive
Samaritan interventions with a principle of proportionality, which prohibits
disproportionate use of force; others (e.g., Brownlee 2012, pp. 185–188) with a
principle of parsimony, which demands using the most modest means of action. But
one need not demonstrate that the course of action chosen is necessary for the rescue
in standard cases, where there are non-coercive ways of accomplishing a rescue
(e.g., jumping in the pool or throwing a floating device or alerting other swimmers).
In general, the Samaritan intervention must be reasonably calculated to protect
the interest under threat. The agent ought to choose among different courses of
action the one that appears the most likely to succeed. The foregoing sketch of the
Samaritan duty shall suffice, as it is not necessary to settle on a specific account of
Samaritan intervention before examining the duty’s implications in the face of
injustice.
Illegal Samaritan Rescues
The first potential implication of the Samaritan duty is straightforward: If I am in a
position to help someone in dire need or peril at no unreasonable cost to myself or
others, then I have a (putative) duty to do so, even if it requires breaking the law.
The breach of law may be incidental or direct, depending on the connection between
the law being broken and the Samaritan peril.
Law-breaking is incidental to the Samaritan rescue when the connection between
the law being broken and the endangerment of the person is accidental. For instance,
a hiker may break into a cabin in the mountains, thus trespassing on private
property, in order to find resources to take care of an injured companion hiker. Had
the particular circumstances been different (suppose someone was home) there
would not have been any need to violate the law to rescue the person. The law
recognizes that a technical breach of the law, in situations involving an emergency
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or a threat of death or serious injury, sometimes averts a great evil or furthers some
greater good, and that such advantageous result could not be achieved by strict
adherence to the law—this idea underlies the necessity defense.6 I shall not address
incidental Samaritan disobedience, as I am primarily interested in cases where the
peril that calls for a Samaritan rescue is causally connected to the law being broken.
Law-breaking is direct when the law explicitly prohibits the Samaritan rescue, so
that the rescuer must violate the law to assist the imperiled person. One infamous
example is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which prohibited aiding runaway slaves
and demanded that people assist officers in slaves’ capture. Arguably, citizens of
antebellum US were morally required to take care of wounded escaped slaves
knocking at their doors even though such assistance directly violated the law. For a
recent example, take Alabama’s HB 56, which criminalizes ‘certain behavior
relating to concealing, harboring, shielding, or attempting to conceal, harbor, or
shield unauthorized aliens’. US citizens who help undocumented immigrants, say,
by serving them food at a soup kitchen, or driving them to the hospital, are liable for
felony charges. Yet such Samaritan assistance may be morally required. The illegal
acts considered here are directly related to the Samaritan rescue insofar as the law
that is violated prohibits assisting a certain category of persons. Laws banning
Samaritan rescues appear inherently unjust: they prohibit the exercise of basic moral
duties and violate the fundamental dignity of individuals as agents capable to
engage in practical deliberation, pursue moral ends, and take responsibility for their
actions.
One may object one of two things: (a) that in those and many similar cases, the
duty to obey the law or some other consideration would outweigh the Samaritan
duty; or (b) that the Good Samaritan would assist the person in need and then report
him or her to the authorities, as the law demands (thereby satisfying both the
Samaritan duty and the duty to obey the law). Regarding (a): the duty to obey the
law being pro tanto, i.e., defeasible, it is unlikely that it would often or generally
outweigh the Samaritan duty, though other considerations might. To take just two:
one will not be bound by the Samaritan duty if the costs of providing assistance risk
jeopardizing one’s prospects for a flourishing life. So, prudential considerations may
well override the Samaritan duty at certain times, or indeed prevent it from arising.
Further, one might weigh the justification of the law (e.g., the purported protection
of state interests behind HB 56) against the Samaritan duty and find the balance tips
in favor of compliance with the law. But these considerations do not refute my
point. On the contrary, they assume that practical deliberation in those cases
involves a balancing of reasons for or against accomplishing the Samaritan rescue.
If this is the correct framework, then it is just as possible that the Samaritan duty
will sometimes outweigh the reasons for complying and thus demand disobeying the
law.
Point (b) raises a more serious objection: the Good Samaritan being a law-
abiding citizen, as Dudley Knowles (2012) has recently argued, she would always
6 The defense is recognized in the U.S. as part of common law and most states’ statutory law. For an
overview of the necessity defense, see, e.g., Levenson (1999). For a discussion of the rationales behind
the necessity defense, see Brownlee (2012, pp. 181–4).
C. Delmas
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seek legal ways to assist persons in peril. For instance, a law-abiding Samaritan in
Alabama could rescue an undocumented immigrant from a grave peril by driving
him to the hospital, and then report him to the authorities. In this way she would
fulfill her Samaritan duty without flouting the law (assuming that one who reports
after helping cannot be charged with a felony).
However, no one would press this objection in the Fugitive Slave Law case,
where reporting the runaway slave to the authorities would clearly amount to
throwing him back into a terrible Samaritan peril (viz. brutal punishment or death
for his attempted escape).7 In this case at least, the Samaritan duty excludes abiding
by the law. This point is sufficient for my present claim—that the Good Samaritan
may be morally required to directly violate laws that ban Samaritan rescues.
Samaritan Civil Disobedience
If one agrees that the Samaritan duty may demand breaking the law in the course of
a rescue, one ought to accept that the Samaritan duty may also support engaging in
civil disobedience in some cases, as I shall now argue. The case for ‘Samaritan civil
disobedience’ simply extends the reasoning applied to cases of illegal Samaritan
rescues examined above to more complex situations, in the following four steps:
i. Persistent Samaritan Perils: The argument applies where an injustice (unjust
law, policy, or institution) generates, enables, or aggravates Samaritan perils,
leading to their frequent occurrence.
ii. Citizens as Passersby: Citizens are passersby to persistent Samaritan perils
occurring in their society.
iii. The Rescue-through-Reform Argument: Rescuing people from persistent
Samaritan perils involves eliminating or righting the injustice at the root of
the peril, i.e., reforming the unjust law, policy, or institution.
iv. The Civil Disobedience Argument: Civil disobedience may be an effective
means of highlighting the persistent Samaritan peril and the need for rescue-
through-reform.
Persistent Samaritan Perils
My argument for Samaritan civil disobedience applies to cases of Samaritan perils
that are induced, enabled, or aggravated by injustice (viz. unjust laws, policies,
institutions, or practices). They are ‘persistent’ because they arise again and again,
given the interrelated system of social norms, practices, and institutions in which they
occur.
Take Jim Crow, the racial caste system that was in place in the US South from
the 1880s to the 1970s. It consisted in the legally and socially enforced segregation
of facilities, services, opportunities, and roles along racial lines. It excluded African
7 I leave open the question whether the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants might
amount to perilous situations.
Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience
123
Americans from political participation and kept them in a condition of extreme
material deprivation. The system was maintained through coercion, intimidation,
and terror, including brutal police treatment, bombings of homes and churches,
killing, and lynching.
This violence was enabled and aggravated by southern state police and officials’
own active involvement in lynching and killing and systematic failure to apply laws
to arrest and prosecute white-on-black offenders. Thus, not only were African
Americans frequent victims of physical assault, including murder, but they knew
that whites were not deterred from attacking them. In this way, Jim Crow induced
and enabled the emergence of countless Samaritan perils, as it tolerated—even
encouraged—grave and widespread violence against African Americans (see, e.g.,
Woodward 2001; Klarman 2004).
Citizens as Passersby
Citizens may be viewed as passersby to persistent Samaritan perils; and they
constitute potential rescuers insofar as they are able to help. The parties to be
rescued are the current and potential future victims of Samaritan perils. Not every
single citizen is properly described as a passerby, for some people might not be
aware of the peril or might be unable to help. So the generic ‘citizens’ does not refer
to all, but rather to many or most citizens, including the potential victims themselves
(e.g., African Americans under Jim Crow).
One may deny that many or most citizens are passersby to persistent Samaritan
perils on three distinct grounds: (a) passersby must be in close proximity with the
peril; (b) they must be aware of the peril; and (c) they must be able to help the
imperiled. Yet many citizens are (a) not in close proximity with the injustice-
induced Samaritan perils, (b) unaware of their existence or persistence, and/or
(c) unable to help. Contra the third objection, (c), I explain in the Civil Disobedience
Argument below why it is reasonable to hold that many citizens are able to help in
the Samaritan rescue effort in one way or another, through legal processes, political
channels, or civil disobedience. For now, let me address the two other objections.
Proximity?
First, potential rescuers are typically innocent bystanders, who happen to be in
spatial proximity with the imperiled person—they ‘stumble’ into Samaritan
situations, in Feinberg’s phrase (1984, p. 171). One may therefore deny that
citizens are Samaritan ‘material’, as Simmons did in his critique of Wellman (to
which I return below).
Spatial proximity is often critical in standard cases of rescue. It makes plain the
perilous situation and further allows immediate rescue. But Simmons himself
acknowledges that awareness and ability to help may come without proximity, as he
notes that ‘the moral burdens of the rescue fall… on those who happen to be present
at the emergencies… or have the knowledge that allows them to make themselves
present’ (Simmons 2005, p. 184).
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Consider, too, transnational cases of aid and rescue, such as disaster relief
operations. They involve long distances between those in need and the potential
rescuers, thereby indicating that spatial proximity is not a prerequisite of Samaritan
assistance. Perhaps this is because television and digital media have short-circuited
the connection between spatial proximity and knowledge of the need for rescue, by
making us bystanders of people’s perilous circumstances worldwide. What matters
here is the ability to help, and some people may be in a position to provide
Samaritan assistance to others who are not geographically close to them. This, in
any case, is the gist of Singer’s case for transnational Samaritan duties in ‘Famine,
Affluence, and Morality’ (Singer 1972).
Citizens fall somewhere in between the ‘literal’ passerby and Singer’s distant
bystanders. Because Samaritan perils that are enabled by injustice arise frequently,
people (be they privileged persons or potential victims) are likely to have witnessed
first-hand the incidence of some of them, and to be aware of their common
occurrence, for instance, through acquaintances’ testimonies or in the news. Citizens
are also in relative spatial proximity with those persistently imperiled, since they
live under, and partake in, the same social structures (though some factors such as
residential segregation may affect this ‘co-dwelling’). Many citizens are further
well-positioned to contribute to the Samaritan rescue, in virtue of their membership
and standing in the community. The ability to help is thus crucial and explains why
citizens may aptly be viewed as passersby.
Awareness?
Second, one may object that many citizens are in fact unaware of the persistent
Samaritan perils that surround them, so that they cannot be potential rescuers. In the
case of Jim Crow, it is sadly plausible to argue that many white southerners might
not have been aware of the persistent, structural endangerment of African
Americans. They may have failed to recognize the injustice of racial segregation,
as a result of self-deception, indifference, or moral blindness—all of which would
have been facilitated by the prevailing ideas of the time.8 And if they did not
perceive the racial caste system as unjust, then they were unlikely to see how it
enabled widespread violence against African Americans.
This is a serious worry. The blind person who walks by the shallow pond without
realizing that a toddler is drowning in it does not have a moral duty to rescue her,
even though he could if he were aware of the Samaritan peril. Insofar as awareness
of the peril is crucial to one’s ability to help, citizens who do not know about the
persistent Samaritan perils are not bound to contribute to the Samaritan rescue. One
difference between the blind person passing by the shallow pond and the morally
blind southerners, however, is that the latter are ultimately responsible for their
ignorance. Moral theorists have argued for the existence of various ‘second-order’
duties, i.e., duties regarding what to do to understand and implement one’s primary
moral obligations, which are especially salient in contexts of oppression. These
8 Self-deception, indifference, and moral blindness are common effects of privilege under systems of
oppression. See, e.g., Frye (1983, chap. 1), and Bailey (1998).
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include, for instance, duties to seek information, respond to evidence, show due care
in moral deliberation (see Hill 2010), exercise self-scrutiny, resist self-deception
(see Garrett 2010), and develop empathetic understanding (see Spelman 1988, chap.
7; Thomas 1998; Harvey 2007). Many citizens under Jim Crow could thus have
been blamed for failing to satisfy at least some of these duties, say, insofar as they
lacked basic information about the harms of racial segregation, and the motivation
to learn about it. In short, I do not believe that ignorance automatically gets one off
the ‘duty-hook’, especially if this ignorance is blameworthy.
Furthermore, once people engage in protest to draw attention to the injustice, as I
will argue they ought to, awareness can spread through society. In this way,
Samaritan duties may gradually bind more and more people, as people’s
consciousness about the persistence of Samaritan perils also grows, and denial
becomes increasingly blameworthy. All in all, the Samaritan burdens do not fall
equally on everyone, because people are differently situated relative to the persistent
Samaritan perils: some are in a better position than others, based on their knowledge
and ability to help (viz. resources and influence). But as I shall argue next, many
citizens are well-positioned and able to assist in the rescue at no unreasonable cost
to themselves and others.
The Rescue-Through-Reform Argument
Samaritan perils generate duties of rescue. The Rescue-through-Reform Argument
suggests that the principal way of rescuing people from persistent Samaritan perils
is through reform. Standard one-off rescues are insufficient in the face of such
perils, which endure past specific rescues. For instance, even if people habitually
assisted victims of physical assault under Jim Crow, the system’s white supremacist
norms and southern states’ systematic failure to enforce the equal protection of the
law would still ensure the frequent incidence of Samaritan perils. One needs to
correct or impede the systematic endangerment; that is, reform the unjust law,
statute, or institution that enables the perils.
One may object that the Samaritan duty demands physical assistance, not
structural reform, and that the Samaritan in the biblical parable, for instance, does
not have to find the wounded man’s assailant and bring him to justice in order to
discharge his duty. Yet in cases of humanitarian intervention, we are used to
associating Samaritan rescue with serious, sometimes prolonged, interventions. If
one accepts that the Samaritan duty sometimes requires rescuing groups of people
from extremely dangerous situations through military or peaceful intervention, then
one can reasonably accept that the Samaritan duty may also entail reforming the law
or institution that entrenches persistent Samaritan perils.
The Civil Disobedience Argument
There are many ways of bringing about reform in our societies; and the etiology of
political change is too complex to allow us to ascertain the necessary and sufficient
conditions for reform. Here I want to focus on the first step toward reform: namely,
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the call for reform. Calling for reform in the face of persistent Samaritan perils
involves highlighting the peril and the injustice it is rooted in and sustained by.
The account of civil disobedience I favor emphasizes its conscientious nature and
communicative function. William Smith (2013) has recently put forth an attractive
‘deliberative democratic’ theory, which defines civil disobedience as ‘a public,
nonviolent, conscientious yet political act, contrary to law, carried out to
communicate opposition to laws and policies of government’ (see, e.g., Milligan
2013 for an alternative account). Civil disobedience, thus conceived as an address to
the community, may be an effective means of calling for reform. Some individuals
may be well situated to contribute to the reform effort through other courses of
action than civil disobedience. For instance, public officials, journalists, and
lawyers, because of their access to the political arena or to legal processes, are well
positioned to address the community and highlight the need for reform in the face of
persistent Samaritan perils, without engaging in illegal protest. But for most
citizens, who lack such access, civil disobedience may be an effective way to reach
the political forum.
Historical evidence suggests that campaigns of civil disobedience have been
crucial to draw attention to injustices. In the US, the Civil Rights movement’s
marches, boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and registration campaigns, for instance,
exposed the persistent Samaritan perils that African Americans faced under Jim
Crow (widespread racist violence was manifest in the brutal repression of these
campaigns), and thus highlighted the need for reform. Assuming the methods of
protest are permissible; and assuming the principle that if one wills the end—
reform—one also wills the (permissible) means to that end, then one may infer that
civil disobedience is an effective means and important part of the rescue effort.
It is reasonable to submit that legal measures such as boycotts should be
attempted first, unless it is obvious that they would be pointless.9 Note, however,
that in the examples above, the black voter registration campaigns and the 1961
Freedom Rides, though legal, were often met with brute force; and peaceful
marches, such as the one that led Martin Luther King, Jr. to a Birmingham jail, were
often declared unlawful by court injunction. This suggests that the line between civil
disobedience and legal protest is not a stable one, and may be of little significance in
practical deliberation.
The available and appropriate courses of Samaritan action under Jim Crow were
by and large determined by the particular time and place in which one lived. Given
the systemic nature of racist violence under Jim Crow, it is reasonable to think that
the rescue mission should be accomplished through collective action. Erica
Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (2011) argue, on the basis of their statistical analysis
of 323 violent and nonviolent civil resistance campaigns that took place in the last
century, that mass participation is a critical source of the success of nonviolent
resistance: ‘as membership increases, the probability of success also increases’
(Chenoweth and Stephan 2011, p. 39). This is true not only in contexts of
9 This presumption in favor of legal means accords with both the principle of proportionality and the
principle of parsimony, though neither principle excludes a priori illegal means or requires illegality only
be a last resort.
Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience
123
‘concentration’, where large numbers of people gather in public (or private) spaces,
but also in contexts of ‘dispersion’, where acts are coordinated and widespread, as in
cases of consumer boycotts (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011, p. 56). So if an
organized movement was already in place, joining it may well have reasonably
seemed the best method of action. Where no organized movement existed, perhaps
some individuals with talent (e.g., organization skills) and influence were able and
bound to launch one. In any case, a number of actions were available to frustrate or
alleviate the persistent perils of life under Jim Crow, such as reporting violence and
engaging in everyday resistance against racist stereotypes.
Let me now consider several objections against my Samaritan arguments for
disobeying the law and engaging in civil disobedience.
Unreasonable Costs
First, one might argue that there could never be all-things-considered requirements
to disobey the law or engage in civil disobedience, insofar as the costs of law
breaking are always unreasonable. In particular, one may agree that laws that
criminalize the exercise of moral duties or enable persistent Samaritan perils are
unjust, while stressing that the costs associated with legal disobedience jeopardize
or risk jeopardizing one’s prospects for a flourishing life. To take an earlier
example, if in aiding an undocumented immigrant in Alabama, under HB 56, one
risks a felony conviction, and if a felony conviction jeopardizes one’s prospects for
a flourishing life (say, given the stigmatization of convicted felons), then one might
never be morally bound to come to the rescue of an undocumented immigrant.
Two general worries further arise. One: the worse the state, the costlier it makes
legal disobedience. Two: because the oppressed have less to lose than the
privileged—they don’t have a flourishing life to jeopardize—they might be unfairly
burdened by Samaritan duties of resistance. Let me explain and address each worry
in turn.
First, a state that harshly and systematically punishes disobedience appears to
ensure that Samaritan rescues and civil disobedience never come at a reasonable
cost. Tyrannical states do just that: they deter all law-breaking (including civil
disobedience) by attaching very heavy costs to disobedience. At the limit, there may
not be any Samaritan duty to rescue people from standard or persistent Samaritan
perils through illegal means in tyrannical regimes, given the costs of noncompli-
ance. This is paradoxical, if not even tragic, since Samaritan perils are presumably
the most frequent—and Samaritan rescues the most urgently needed—in tyrannical
states. Polish subjects under Nazi occupation were routinely executed for
‘Judenbeherbergung’ (sheltering Jews). In such a situation, where Samaritan
assistance carried such a high risk—death—one could not be morally bound.
In response, note that there is no reason to think that there could never have been
a Samaritan duty to break the law under Nazi-occupied Poland or in antebellum US;
indeed hundreds of Polish rescuers, interviewed after the war, reported simply
fulfilling their Samaritan duty (Oliner and Oliner 1988). After all, the risk of getting
caught may sometimes be very low, even under a tyrannical regime. Furthermore,
the Samaritan duty’s weight is proportional to the gravity and urgency of the peril.
C. Delmas
123
Recall that, according to Fabre, individuals can be held under a duty to incur some
life-threatening risk. Hence one may assume that Samaritan duties to rescue people
from peril in tyrannical states carry heavy weight.
Second, the requirement that the costs of disobedience be reasonable appears to
yield the unpalatable implication that the worst-off in society, who do not have a
flourishing life to jeopardize, are more bound by the Samaritan duty than their
better-off counterparts. And this would be unfair. However, it isn’t the case that the
Samaritan duty weighs more heavily on those already burdened by oppression.
Simply put, being able to help—which is crucial to Samaritan standing—is not the
same as having nothing to lose. One’s ability to help is a function of one’s position
in society and opportunities; and the greater the ability to help, the weightier the
duty. This suggests weightier duties on the part of the privileged than on the
oppressed.
No Difference
A second objection one might press rests on the notion that in cases of civil
disobedience, where the rescue mission is a collective undertaking, no individual act
appears to make any difference to the outcome. The fate of racial segregation does
not hinge on whether I join the sit-in or not. As we saw, the Samaritan intervention
must be reasonably calculated to protect the interest under threat. Yet no particular
person’s engaging in civil disobedience appears necessary or sufficient for the
campaign’s or rescue’s success. If there is no reason to think that one’s efforts can
make a difference to the outcome, then it is not clear why one ought to undertake
such efforts. The No Difference problem, as one may call it, is a serious worry for
my account.
Note that although it seems not to make any difference whether or not particular
citizens take action to eliminate persistent Samaritan perils, it makes a difference
that enough people do (Nefsky 2013). In any case, I do think that particular acts of
protest can make a difference for the better, for instance by showing the example (so
that others might follow), and by increasing the number of participants, which, as
noted above, matters a great deal to the success of the campaign.
One might further solve the No Difference problem by appealing to fairness, as
Wellman does in his account of political obligation.10 The fact that the rescue
mission can be accomplished without everyone’s participation (either because such
individual participation is not necessary or because it won’t make any difference)
makes free riding possible, and the costs of Samaritan assistance make it tempting.
Appealing to considerations of fairness, one would simply argue that everyone
ought to do their fair share of the Samaritan rescue, when they can do so at no
unreasonable cost to themselves or others. In this way, fairness preempts free riding
on other people’s Samaritan efforts. Everyone’s fair share of the rescue is not the
10 I am grateful to an anonymous referee at Res Publica for suggesting this response. Note that Wellman
does it in order to fend off the objection that not everyone’s compliance with the law is necessary for the
state to rescue everyone from the perils of the state of nature. But the point is that past a certain threshold
of general compliance, particular persons’ obedience to the law does not make any difference to the
state’s overall stability.
Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience
123
same, as citizens have different talents and opportunities. But every citizen may
have a prima facie duty to contribute to the Samaritan mission.
Stretching the Samaritan Duty
Rescue, Charity, or Justice?
Third, one might object that my account stretches the Samaritan duty beyond
recognition. This is one of John Simmons’s main objections to Wellman’s theory: to
wit, that his Samaritan argument rests on a conflation of the duty of rescue with a
duty of charity. Duties of rescue, Simmons insists, are addressed to one-off
emergencies that occur in close proximity, typically in face-to-face situations.
However, he writes, ‘the moral task to which Wellman thinks the [Samaritan] duty
is addressed is an ongoing problem (of providing security for all), not the kind of
local, occasional task to which duties of rescue seem to be addressed’ (Simmons
2005, p. 184). This objection appears to apply to my account of Samaritan civil
disobedience too, since I propose that the Samaritan duty is addressed to an
‘ongoing problem’ of eliminating the injustice at the root of persistent Samaritan
perils. The moral task of reforming the system, for Simmons, would be a matter of
charity or beneficence, not of rescue.
My response is twofold. First, I am inclined to agree that Simmons’s objection
threatens Wellman’s theory, insofar as the perils of the state of nature constitute
hypothetical or potential, rather than imminent, threats. Even Knowles, who
recently defended Wellman’s Samaritan account against its critics, recognizes that
‘Wellman’s talk of rescue [from the dangers of lawlessness] is hyperbolic’
(Knowles 2012, p. 168). However, I would insist that the persistent Samaritan perils
that I believe Samaritan duties are addressed to are aptly and non-metaphorically
described as emergencies. They consist in situations in which some fundamental
human interest or non-contingent basic need, including minimally the interests in
life, security, and bodily integrity is threatened, and the threat is immediate,
imminent, or probable.
Second, I fail to see how eliminating the injustice that sustains widespread
violence would be a matter of charity, though I see how it could be deemed a matter
of justice. Insofar as Samaritan concerns and concerns of justice are not mutually
exclusive, claiming that eliminating persistent Samaritan perils through structural
reform is a matter of justice does not undermine my account. At the outset of this
paper, I set aside the question whether Samaritan rights exist, i.e., whether the
imperiled have a right to be rescued. An affirmative answer to this question would
entail that Samaritan assistance is a matter of protecting people’s rights—hence a
duty of justice. According to Fabre (2002), the duty to rescue is a duty of justice
which is owed to the imperiled and can be enforced by the state.
Perfect or Imperfect?
Another way of understanding the objection that Wellman conflates rescue and
charity rests on the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. Whereas the
C. Delmas
123
duty of rescue as standardly conceived is a perfect duty, owed by those who can
help to those in danger, and demanding an immediate rescue, the content of the duty
I describe in cases of Samaritan civil disobedience looks like the content of
imperfect duties such as the duty of charity. If I am in a position to step in the
shallow pond to lift the drowning child out of the water, then I cannot satisfy the
Samaritan duty and refrain from saving the child—the duty is perfect. In contrast, I
may refrain from participating in a particular demonstration or sit-in and still satisfy
the Samaritan duty in other ways—here, the duty is imperfect.
This is a fair point. A variety of courses of action counts as discharging the
Samaritan duty to engage in civil disobedience; and one has discretion as to which
one to choose, and whether to take action at all. In this sense, the duty to engage in
civil disobedience to rescue people from persistent Samaritan perils is imperfect.
But it does not follow that it is thereby less weighty.
Identified v. Potential Victims
Finally, one might point to the following major difference between standard
Samaritan cases and persistent Samaritan perils. In standard cases, the party in peril
is an actual identifiable person—this brown-haired girl drowning in the pond—
whereas persistent Samaritan perils concern future potential victims, or ‘statistical
people’. Though this is an important difference, I do not think that it is morally
relevant for determining our obligations. Note first that persistent Samaritan perils
engender a feeling of insecurity in all members of the targeted group (e.g., African
Americans living under Jim Crow). From this perspective, the situation of oppressed
people, much like that of individuals in the state of nature, is characterized by a
climate of fear and insecurity, which thwarts the possibility for a meaningful human
life (Delmas 2014).
In any case, let us assume that when it comes to intervention, the Good Samaritan
is concerned only with whoever will predictably be assaulted, i.e., statistical people.
Research shows that people will pay an amount much greater to save an identified
victim who faces a high risk of death than they would pay to save an equivalent
number of statistical lives spread over a broader population (Small and Loewenstein
2003). For many philosophers (e.g., Daniels 2012), this disposition to favor the
interests of identified victims is a bias, not a justified moral judgment.
Some philosophers (e.g., Narveson 1976; Broome 1999) have defended moral
actualism, the view that only the interests of actual people are relevant for
determining the moral status of an action, while those of merely possible people are
morally irrelevant. It is beyond the scope of this paper to take part in this vexed
scholarly debate. But I shall mention Caspar Hare’s (2007) decisive arguments
against moral actualism. Hare (2012) has also recently scrutinized the problem of
statistical people, arguing that the fact that we cannot identify the particular people
who will be harmed or benefited by our actions is not particularly relevant to
determining the strength of our obligations. Hare (2012, p. 379) suggests that ‘if it
does matter, it does not matter very much. Our moral obligations are not
significantly weakened by the absence of a person to whom we are obliged’. Careful
Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience
123
thinking about the issue therefore doesn’t support favoring the interests of actual
people in peril over those of statistical people.
Particularity
Fourth, Simmons criticizes Wellman for his failure to account for the ‘particularity’ of
the link between citizens and their society. If there is a duty to obey the law,
philosophers agree that it must bind us specially to our state. But as Simmons shows,
theories based on natural duties, such as the Samaritan duty or the duty of justice,
cannot explain this special connection, since they bind people equally, regardless of
their voluntary undertakings or relationships (Simmons 2005, chap. 7). This objection
applies to my account to the extent that standard or persistent Samaritan perils can arise
anywhere, thus potentially binding us to help everywhere, not especially at home.
I agree that the Samaritan duty does not bind citizens specially to their society.
But this isn’t a problem for my account, because the particularity requirement is a
desideratum of theories of political obligation, not of an investigation into citizens’
obligations in the face of injustice, for which there is no reason to exclude
transnational duties. So there may well be numerous Samaritan duties binding us at
home and abroad. The interesting question, I think, is whether there may be any
transnational duties to engage in civil disobedience—a question which philosophers
have not systematically entertained, as far as I am aware.
The answer is ‘yes’. There may be situations in which one ought to engage in
civil disobedience at home in order to highlight persistent Samaritan perils abroad,
assuming this will help draw attention to the issue. For instance, solidarity protests
were organized around the world in the aftermath of the April 24, 2013 factory
collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 people. The goal of the
protests was to denounce the dangerous and unfair labor conditions in Bangladesh’s
booming garment sector, which, arguably, engender persistent Samaritan perils.
Though most solidarity protests were legal, some of them involved acts of civil
disobedience, for instance when protesters refused to comply with police orders to
disperse, or when activists violated restraining orders. These protests may be viewed
as instances of transnational Samaritan civil disobedience.
In conclusion, while Wellman uses the Samaritan duty to defend the moral duty
to obey the law, I argued that the Samaritan duty sometimes requires disobeying
laws that ban Samaritan rescues, and engaging in civil disobedience to protest
injustices that contribute to putting people in peril. Although I illustrated my
argument for Samaritan civil disobedience with the case of Jim Crow, the argument
is meant to apply to other cases of persistent Samaritan perils, such as hazardous
labor conditions in factories. For another example, think of patriarchal and sexist
societies that enable sexual violence against women or commit ‘gendercide’ (i.e.,
gender-selective mass killing). Samaritan duties arise, demanding to rescue girls and
women from persistent Samaritan perils in such societies.
Samaritan duties constitute important allies in moral and political theorizing,
insofar as they are deemed very stringent, intuitively compelling, and widely
C. Delmas
123
embraced. At the same time, however, they equip us with blunt tools of analysis:
their appeal is paradoxically also what limits them. Samaritan duties’ exclusive
application to situations in which fundamental interests such as life and bodily
integrity are under threat drastically reduces the scope of political action in the face
of injustice. Only dangerous circumstances are concerned, while a number of rights
violations may not imperil the persons concerned in the way required for Samaritan
duties to arise. So there is a Samaritan duty, for instance, to rescue undocumented
immigrants in peril, but not to afford them the protection of the law in cases of
exploitation and abuse. This is not a defect of the Samaritan duty of course—but it
indicates the need to go beyond the Samaritan duty to articulate a complete account
of our obligations in the face of injustice.
Acknowledgments I have benefited from discussions with friends and audiences at Boston University,
Clemson University, the Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Conference at St Anne’s College,
Oxford, the International Social Philosophy Conference at Northeastern University, the Mentoring Project
for Pre-Tenure Women Faculty in Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the Rocky
Mountains Ethics Congress at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Workshop on the Duty to
Resist Oppression at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Special thanks are owed to David Lyons, Ann
Cudd, Jill Delston, Meena Krishnamurthy, Kristina Meshelski, Melissa Yates, Samuel Huang, Julia
Nefsky, Erich Hatala Matthes, Kimberley Brownlee, Carol Hay, Daniel Star, and Gabriel O’Malley for
their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.
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