Topics Ethics

Question Greetings. In regards to the situation of Jean Baptiste Clamence in La Chute (The Fall) of Camus, can we say that "doing nothing means also doing something"? Being more specific, for instance if one has witnessed something "bad/evil" which s/he could have done something about and chose to do nothing for avoiding a row of enormous, maybe even deadly consequences like a chain reaction for other people's lives if he chose the opposite; should we consider him as "acting in bad faith or guilty"? Of course in the second option things would get worse also for him too. But by doing nothing, this time he will have to carry the burden alone like Clamence. The content of bad/evil can be understood as subjective, but i meant a valid moral perspective in general by using that term. (E.g., killing a random person in the street)

Accepted:
December 6, 2012

Comments

We often do nothing in such situations without recognizing this failure to act as a choice, and perhaps even really without making a choice not to act (see Hilary Bok: Acting without Choosing). Bad faith is manifested not in doing nothing, but in the failure to acknowledge our responsibility for doing nothing. Whether we make a conscious choice or not: we have a choice, we are fully responsible for what we do and we ought to face up to this responsibility -- or so I understand Camus' point here.

Doing nothing in the face of an impending bad/evil is sometimes the right thing to do (for example, when intervening would afford little protection to those under threat relative to the costs and dangers to which it would expose third parties) and sometimes at least permissible (for example, when the dangers and cost of intervention to oneself would be high relative to the protection one might afford to those under threat). If, in La Chute, Clamence would have run a serious risk of dying by jumping into the river after the suicidal woman, then his doing nothing would have been morally permissible. Again, on my understanding, what undermines Clamence is not his conduct but his later recognized failure to take responsibility for this conduct.

Philosophers often draw a distinction between acts and omissions and make this distinction morally significant: other things (particularly: what is at stake for the agent and those affected by her agency) being equal, it is worse wrongly to prefer one's own good to that of others in an action than in an omission. For example,taking two bagels from a blind man in order to save a dollar is worse than saving a dollar by refusing to buy a blind man two bagels (assuming that the two bagels are equally important to the blind man in both scenarios). While this seems quite right in many straightforward cases, it is notoriously hard to draw the distinction in a precise way while preserving its alleged moral significance (see Jonathan Bennett: The Act Itself). Cases like the ones you have in mind are difficult in this way. One can easily describe Clamence's conduct as an omission, adding perhaps that when he kept walking he did what he would have done if the woman had not been there. But one can also describe it as an action, pointing out that she might not have jumped had he not walked past her with such indifference to her palpable distress. Not responding to a fundraising commercial on the TV is a pretty clear case of an omission, but turning away a needy person is a pretty clear case of an action. This gets us to a different meaning (not in focus in Camus) of "doing nothing [sometimes!] means also doing something": in some cases, doing nothing is tantamount to an active refusal and thereby becomes more wrong, if it is wrong.