Our Common Resposibility - on Bystanders

Our Common Responsibility---On Bystanders

As the most prestigious representative of Communitarianism, Harvard professor Michael Sandel demonstrates his profound speech skills and abilities by delivering his twelve vivid yet thought-provoking speeches under the cooperation of Harvard students. In his lectures, he tries to practice the best kind of academic populism, striving to introduce John Stuart Mill, John Rawls and Immanuel Kant without being simplistic or complicated. By proposing logical and challenging questions at proper time and in a suitable way, he uses understandable and common examples in our daily life to relate the big questions of political philosophy to the most vexing issues of our time, whether it is bank bailouts, taxes, and affirmative action or national service, same-sex marriage and some seemingly unsolvable ethical questions. He is quite excellent at applying humorous elements in his speeches, and he should also be highly praised for his outstanding arranging and organizing ability to successfully invite students taking an active part in discussing and debating through the whole process.

After appreciating some episodes which interest me most, I related it to another public speech that I have watched recently---Onlookers in an age of Internet, given by an Oxford anthropologist professor named Frances Larson. The two professors both pointed out a noticeable phenomenon which requires our keen attention. Professor Michael Sandel pointed out that human beings as an integrated community should take a common responsibility, and that partly means a sort of abstract loyalty. ‘Loyalties whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are.’ To analyze it from another perspective, apart from our obligations to our parents and other relatives, we should always have sympathy instead of mockery or indifference towards those who are suffering, especially strangers. Prejudice and bias are so dangerous yet invisible that most of us could not realize its devastating effect until some irreversible changes are made. Additionally, the notorious ‘bystander attitude’ or being indifferent is a form of perfect crime.

Take ISIS as an instance, we call them barbarians not only because their cruelty in war, but also because that they beheaded innocent people and put such videos on the Internet. However, what is worse is that millions of ‘spectators’ helped the spreading of such videos by clicking and watching those brutal and ruthless shows. A poll taken in the UK in August 2014 estimated that 1.2 million people had watched the beheading of James Foley, a reporter of The Globe and Mail, in the few days after it was released. If we take a bigger leap back in history, we would see that for as long as there have been public judicial executions and beheadings, there have been the crowds to see them. Lu Xun’s novel Medicine depicts a vivid picture of beheading a revolutionary, while ignorant bystanders waited impatiently to buy his blood. This sense of separation whether from other people or from event itself seems to be the key to understanding our ability to watch, and seems to erode individual moral responsibility. If we don’t stop our ‘bystander attitude’ and keep watching, keep mocking, and keep being totally isolated from victims, we are exactly  escaping our common responsibility and participating in a brutal crime without even realizing it.