Topics Ethics

Question I was recently watching a program on National Geographic about North Korea in which a young man was interviewed about his time in the country. He was being imprisoned in one of the 'work camps' in the country in which he was treated as a slave. I understand that North Korea relies on slave labor to keep its weak economy moving because it's so insular. Anyway, this young man managed to escape the camp, and eventually, the country. I believe he lives in South Korea now, as a free citizen. However, because this young man escaped, his entire immediate family was murdered. Apparently, this is a way that North Korea dissuades people from escaping. Additionally, this young man knew that his family was going to be murdered if he successfully escaped from the work camp and he did so anyway. Is he morally responsible for his family members' deaths? After all, he knew they'd be murdered if he succeeded, and because he undertook the task, he intended to succeed...and yet, there seems to be some nagging question about moral responsibility or 'agency' involved. I was just looking for some input from some professionals because I thought this question was very interesting.

Accepted:
December 17, 2010

Comments

It is an interesting issue, and stems from the distinction between directly doing something and letting something happen. Some philosophers think that this is a largely false distinction, and that if we know what the consequences of an action are, but we are not ourselves the primary agents of those consequences, then we are nonetheless responsible for those consequences. There are a whole variety of different cases where this seems more and less plausible. If someone is held to ransom and the ransom is not paid, and the prisoner is then killed, is the person who did not pay the ransom the murderer? This seems wrong, since although he could perhaps have prevented the murder, he did not actually kill anyone at all.

In the example you give, someone is suffering horribly and his only way of relieving his suffering is to escape or perhaps commit suicide, and this has terrible consequences for his family. Certainly he has a role in their subsequent deaths, but it seems to me a stretch to say that he has moral responsibility for that outcome. Instead of writing this reply I could now be standing by the side of the road preventing children from running into the traffic and getting killed, but I am not, and if sadly a child is subsequently killed I am surely not responsible through my not being there.

These cases are all different from each other to a degree and those who want to do away with the distinction between direct action and letting something happen seem to me to want to remove significant yet subtle differences that exist morally between what we do and what as a result takes place.

I disagree with Oliver's response to this question. In my view, "letting happen" is best understood as remaining passive when one might instead be averting harm from others by helping or protecting them. The failure to save a drowning swimmer would be an example, as would be the failure to prevent a child from running into a busy road. But the case you described is not one in which the agent remains passive. He actively escapes the camp and then the country, thereby knowingly triggering the events that lead to the deaths of his immediate family. Had he remained passive, his family would not have been killed.

It is normally wrong to act in a way that one knows will lead to the deaths of innocent people -- even if one does not intend these deaths. It is wrong, for instance, to buy up a lot of corn in poor countries for ethanol fuel production when one can easily foresee that this will lead to many starvation deaths among the poor due to higher food prices.

In the case you describe, two special factors are in play that may justify or at least excuse the agent's choice. One special factor is that the agent is -- through no fault of his own -- in a very bad situation from which he has no other escape. Many would consider it permissible for a mountain climber to cut a rope on which another climber depends for her survival when doing so is his only way of surviving himself. In the case you describe, the trade-off is rather different, of course: the agent's immediate survival is not at stake (though conditions in a North Korean work camp may be as bad as death, or worse) and the agent's action predictably leads to the deaths of a much larger number of people. With such a lop-sided trade-off, the action can at best be deemed excusable: it would not be permissible to cut a rope on which six other climbers depend for their survival in order to save one's own leg which would otherwise be lost to frostbite.

The other special factor is that the effect of the agent's action is mediated through morally wrong conduct by others. Suppose someone credibly threatens to kill a child unless a popular film star abandons her plans to star in a certain Hollywood movie. Is the actress morally required to give in to this blackmail? Or can she permissibly go forward with her plan even while she knows that her action will trigger the death of a child? Clearly, it would be quite wrong for her to kill a child in order to realize her plan. But in this case, where the foreseeable bad consequence of her conduct would come about through the free evil action of another, her moral responsibility for the child's death would be much diminished. To be sure: she must give some weight to the child's survival (if the blackmailer insists that she refrain from some action that has little significance for her, then she must refrain). But perhaps not so much weight that she would be required to abandon a role that is of substantial importance to her career.

Seeing that both these special factors are in play in your case, it seems clear that the escape from the work camp was excusable. Whether it was permissible (or justifiable) is harder to judge. This would depend on how horrible the work camp conditions were, on how likely the authorities were to implement their threat, on the number of family members under threat, and on details about these family members, such as their ages and the quality of life they would have enjoyed if the agent had not escaped.

While it is hard to judge (even with a lot more information) whether the man's escape was permissible, it is clear that his remaining in the camp would have been permissible. And so we should hope perhaps that, facing such a horrifying choice, we would have the strength to remain -- or, better still, the ingenuity to help topple or transform such regimes.