Ethics

Can there be a moral duty not to help? Suppose two persons, A and B. A suffers from an illness that makes him behave antisocially, at times constituting a danger both to himself and to others. B, a close relative, has been caring for A for many years, preventing A from the most serious consequences (jail/psychiatric clinic). However, A's state of health is not improving. Doctors suggest that B's help may indeed be counterproductive - they suppose that A needs to feel the consequences of his acts to find the strength to fight his disease. How to act in this situation, from a moral point of view? Imagine A, not 'supervised' by B anymore, injured another person. Even if the punishment helped A, what about the damaged person? And what if the punishment did not help?

Comments

I think you are using the verb "help" in two different senses. When you talk about B helping A, you mean something like B intervening in A's situation with the intent of improving it. When you speak of the punishment helping A, you mean the punishment actually improving A's situation. Either sense can apply without the other.

It's pretty obvious that there can be a moral duty not to help in the first sense. In many cases, an amateur should not help others in situations she does not understand, for example, when there possibly is a considerable danger of her making matters worse.

There can also be duties not to help in the second sense -- for instance in situations where the potential helpee is explicitly asking not to be helped. A frail man is struggling to get up from his wheelchair. You walk over to help; but he says "please don't help me, I want to do this on my own."

It seems right that such duties not to help (in both senses) may give way when the interests of third parties are affected. Perhaps an amateur may help an injured woman in order to prevent her husband from killing himself in dispair. And, similarly, you may help the frail man if a bomb will go off in a nearby school if his weight is not lifted off the wheelchair quickly enough. But in such cases what you are doing is typically not best described as helping the woman or the frail man, but rather as protecting the relevant third parties -- and your word "supervise" brings this out. It may be permissible for B to supervise A, with or without A's approval, if A would otherwise pose a risk to third parties. Of course, a lot here depends on the facts and probabilities as well as on the alternatives open to B (e.g. on whether B can protect third parties by getting A checked into a psychiatric clinic before A does any harm).

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