Is There a Right to be Rescued?
Introduction
Many European countries such as France, Italy, Holland and Germany (there are 15 altogether) have what is known as “Good Samaritan” laws. These are laws which require citizens to render assistance to people whose lives are in danger i.e. laws requiring people to perform “easy rescues”. In France, for example, anyone who fails to perform an easy rescue may be jailed for up to five years. The legal systems in Anglo-Saxon countries such as Australia, UK and the USA typically do not have Good Samaritan laws, although five states of the USA have in recent times instituted them. To illustrate, the 1973 Vermont act reads:
“A person who knows that another is exposed to grave physical harm shall, to the extent that the same can be rendered without danger or peril to himself or without interference with important duties owed to others, give reasonable assistance to the exposed person unless that assistance is being provided by others.”
The case of Kitty Genovese
In New York in 1964 Kitty Genovese was returning home after work in the early hours of the morning when she was attacked and stabbed. Over a 35-minute period she was stabbed on three separate occasions, the attacker being interrupted briefly by someone calling out from a block of flats overlooking the scene. Despite her screams for help not one of the 38 residents of the flats called the police until almost one hour after the first attack. By that time Genovese was dead. After being called, the police arrived in two minutes and as they noted at the time, had they been called earlier Genovese would not have been killed.
Question: Are there good moral reasons for having “Good Samaritan” laws? Should there be laws requiring people to render assistance?
Some arguments against Good Samaritan laws
The American legal philosopher Joel Feinberg considers four arguments against Good Samaritan (GS) laws. I will give a brief summary of these arguments and his replies.
Enforced benevolence: GS laws make charity and benevolence compulsory, thus erasing the distinction between what ought to be done as a matter of duty or obligation, and what is beyond the call of duty. GS laws seem to force people to act in a way that benefits others, but this should be a matter of personal choice rather than law.
Reply: There are two relevant senses of “benefit” which can be explained in terms of the notion of a baseline. Your baseline is your normal level of functioning – health, wealth, happiness, etc. One sense of “benefit” is that where you are given more than your baseline, for example by winning Lotto. Another sense of “benefit” involves the situation where you are below your baseline, for example if you are drowning. In this sense of “benefit”, if someone rescues you then you are being brought up to your baseline (but not beyond it), and it is this sense which is relevant to GS laws. GS laws do enforce benevolence but only in the second sense. GS laws do not force people to benefit others in the sense of taking them above their baseline. Thus GS laws do not impose on people an obligation to go round making others better off.
Line drawing: There is no clear way of drawing the line between easy and difficult rescues. Thus a GS law which enforced easy rescues will also enforce difficult rescues involving great inconvenience and perhaps danger. Reply: It is possible to clearly identify a set of cases where there is no reasonable risk, danger or inconvenience. For example, shouting a warning, making a phone call or throwing a rope. Failure to render assistance would only be punished in these and similar clear-cut cases. Beyond that it would be left to juries to decide and they would normally acquit in doubtful cases.
Serious interference with liberty: GS laws are serious infringements of our freedom because they require us to actually do something rather than refrain from doing something as do laws against murder, robbery, rape, extortion and so on. No effort is required to refrain from stealing, for example, but considerable effort may be required to rescue someone.
Reply: Shouting a warning or making a telephone call requires very little effort, and your liberty is hardly infringed at all by a law which enforces the rendering of that sort of assistance. Moreover, traffic laws which require stopping at red lights or driving no faster than 60 km/h may be even greater infringements of our liberty and may even require more effort.
Causing and allowing harm: There is a clear moral distinction between intentionally causing harm and allowing harm to occur. Thus there is a sound moral basis for laws that make the intentional causing of harm criminally liable. However, there is no sound moral basis for laws which make criminally liable a failure to prevent harm.
Reply: This objection to GS laws rests on the doctrine of “Acts and Omissions”. This doctrine states that doing something morally bad is worse than allowing something morally bad to occur. This is a controversial view and does not seem to be true in general. For example, there does not appear to much moral difference between the following cases: Bill wants to be the CEO of the company so he kills the CEO by putting poison in his coffee. Jane wants to be CEO of the company. When in his office the CEO has a heart attack and Jane fails to pass him an out of reach bottle of pills which will save him.
Some questions
- Was the behaviour of the 38 residents in the Kitty Genovese case criminally liable?
- Is there a need for GS laws? Most people would, for example, shout a warning without thinking about it, so why is there a need for a law?
- If there were GS laws, would we be faced with an endless number of legal cases?
Reference
J. Feinberg, Harm to Others: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law.
R. Neurath