Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience

Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience

Candice Delmas

� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Abstract In this paper, I defend the existence of a moral duty to disobey the law

and engage in civil disobedience on the basis of one of the grounds of political

obligation—the Samaritan duty. Christopher H. Wellman has recently offered a

‘Samaritan account’ of state legitimacy and political obligation, according to which

the state is justified in coercing each citizen in order to rescue all from the perilous

circumstances of the state of nature; and each of us is bound to obey the law, as the

state demands, because we each have a responsibility to help rescue others when

this assistance is not unreasonably costly. Though Wellman recognizes that there

can be reasons for disobeying the law and resisting injustice in otherwise legitimate

states, he overlooks the possibility that at least some of these reasons could be

Samaritan in nature, grounded in the duty to rescue people from peril. As I shall

argue, the Samaritan duty supports obligations to disobey the law, when the law

prohibits Samaritan rescues, and to engage in civil disobedience, when unjust laws

and practices contribute to endangering people. The discussion proceeds as follows.

After a brief overview of the Samaritan duty, I articulate my case for Samaritan

duties to disobey the law, and duties to engage in civil disobedience when unjust

laws, institutions, or practices enable what I call ‘persistent Samaritan perils’. I then

examine and respond to several objections to my account: first, that the costs of law-

breaking are unreasonable, and thus cannot be morally required; second, that

individuals’ particular acts of protest and civil disobedience do not appear to make

any difference to the rescue, and thus cannot be required; third, that I stretch the

Samaritan duty beyond recognition; and fourth, that the Samaritan duty binds us to

help people in need or peril anywhere, not particularly at home. I consider in

conclusion the advantages and limits of my account of citizens’ Samaritan duties in

the face of injustice.

C. Delmas (&)

Department of Philosophy and Religion, Clemson University, 126D Hardin Hall, 403 Calhoun Dr.,

Clemson, SC 29634, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

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Res Publica

DOI 10.1007/s11158-014-9249-7

Keywords Samaritan duty � Injustice � Political obligation �Civil disobedience

What ought we to do in the face of injustice? Paragons of civil disobedience, including

Henry David Thoreau, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., affirmed

that disobeying unjust laws was a moral duty. Contemporary philosophers writing on

the topic, however, have by and large failed to consider the possibility that civil

disobedience (broadly understood as conscientious law-breaking) might sometimes

be morally required (Bedau 1969; Cohen 1971; Rawls 1999, pp. 319–343; exceptions

include Walzer 1967; Brownlee 2012; Lyons 2013; Delmas 2013). This neglect is

surprising given that, as Peter Suber (1999, p. 110) notes, ‘[m]ost of the moral and

legal theory surrounding [civil disobedience], as well as most of the instances in the

street, have been inspired by Thoreau, Gandhi, and King’. Philosophers usually reflect

on civil disobedience within the context of nearly just societies, where political

obligation (i.e., the duty to obey the law) is thought to obtain. From this perspective,

justifying civil disobedience involves showing that political obligation has been

overridden, and that civil disobedience is morally permissible under the

circumstances.1

In this paper, I defend the existence of a moral duty to disobey the law and

engage in civil disobedience on the basis of one of the grounds of political

obligation—the Samaritan duty. The Samaritan duty requires us to aid people in dire

need or peril. Familiar bases of political obligation include consent (see, e.g., Locke

1980), gratitude (Walker 1988); fairness (Klosko 2005), the natural duty of justice

(Rawls 1999), and associative obligations (Dworkin 2011). Christopher H. Wellman

(1996, 2001, 2005) has recently offered a ‘Samaritan account’ of legitimacy and

political obligation. In his view, the state is justified in coercing each citizen in order

to rescue all from the perilous circumstances of the state of nature; and each of us is

bound to obey the law, as the state demands, because we each have a responsibility

to help rescue others when this assistance is not unreasonably costly. But since each

individual’s compliance with the law is not necessary for the state to accomplish its

rescue mission, Wellman complements Samaritanism with non-consequentialist

considerations of fairness, suggesting that ‘we understand our political obligations

as our fair share of the communal Samaritan chore of rescuing others from the perils

of the state of nature’ (Wellman 2005, p. 31). Wellman’s account not only offers, in

his words (1996, p. 735), a ‘new solution’ to the old problem of political obligation,

but it does so on the basis of a familiar and widely accepted moral duty.

Wellman recognizes that there can be reasons for disobeying the law and

resisting injustice in otherwise legitimate states. These reasons, in his view, stem

from the injustice of particular laws. For instance, he argues (2005, p. 86) that

1 To put it in Hohfeldian terminology, some theorists (e.g., Raz 1979, pp. 233–249) defend a ‘liberty-

right’, while others (e.g., Lefkowitz 2007; Brownlee 2008) argue for a ‘claim-right’, to engage in civil

disobedience.

C. Delmas

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Martin Luther King, Jr. ‘was morally at liberty to break the particular laws he

disobeyed simply because they were unjust’, and even though the state generated a

Samaritan duty to obey the law. However, I shall contend that many reasons for

disobeying the law and resisting injustice, including some of those that arose under

Jim Crow, are Samaritan in nature, grounded in the duty to rescue people from peril.

In particular, I shall argue that the Samaritan duty supports obligations to disobey

the law, when the law prohibits Samaritan rescues, and to engage in civil

disobedience, when unjust laws and practices contribute to endangering people.2

Why should the grounds of the reasons for disobeying matter, if the resulting

obligations are the same, and since appeals to justice seem to provide a much more

straightforward route than Samaritan considerations do?3 For one, champions of

Samaritanism should welcome my project insofar as it extends the theory beyond

legitimacy and political obligation, to citizens’ obligations in the face of injustice.

The ground of one’s obligations further matters because of what it implies regarding

the direction, force, and limits of said obligations. The Samaritan duty is generally

deemed among the most stringent requirements of ordinary and critical morality.

According to Joel Feinberg (1984, p. 171), it is ‘virtually as stringent’ as the duty

not to harm or put someone in harm’s way. Obligations based on the Samaritan duty

are thus particularly weighty—indeed, weightier than the duty of justice—and they

might come to override political obligation (or other reasons in favor of compliance

with the law). From this perspective, proponents of the duty to obey the law who

defend non-Samaritan accounts (say, using consent or associative duties) should

also be interested in my arguments, insofar as they help address an important and

previously neglected question: what happens when political obligation fails or is

overridden? Finally, skeptics and opponents of the duty to obey the law may

appreciate the project for the simple reason that it draws out the implications of the

Samaritan duty—an intuitively appealing moral duty—in contexts of injustice, and

finds it may support engaging in civil disobedience.

To be clear, my conclusions are compatible with both the belief in, and denial of,

political obligation, though they should weaken theorists’ confidence in the content-

independence of the duty to obey the law. But what is interesting is the idea that the

Samaritan duty could justify both the duty to obey the law (as Wellman proposes)

and duties to disobey the law and resist injustice (as I propose). One need not

endorse Wellman’s Samaritan account in order to be persuaded by mine; but one

does need to accept the validity and force of the Samaritan duty, which I shall

assume throughout without argument (for critiques of Wellman’s Samaritan theory,

see, e.g., Simmons 2005, pp. 91–196; Klosko 2003, 2004-5; Renzo 2008). The

premise of my (and Wellman’s) inquiry is a somewhat stringent version of the

Samaritan duty, according to which we may be bound to rescue people at distance,

not just in close physical proximity to us (see also, e.g., Singer 1972; Unger 1996;

Murphy 2000; Fabre 2002). I do not, however, assume any particular understanding

2 To be clear, I understand duties or obligations as pro tanto, not absolute, reasons for action, such that, if

S has a duty to do X, then S ought to do X and S’s failure to do X is wrong, unless S has a reason not to do

X at least as strong as his moral reason to do X. This holds for the duties to disobey and resist which I am

about to delineate, as well as for the duty to obey the law.3 I thank an anonymous reviewer at Res Publica for pressing me on this question.


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of the Samaritan duty’s source; and I shall set aside the questions whether Samaritan

duties imply correlative rights and are enforceable.4

The discussion proceeds as follows. After a brief overview of the Samaritan duty,

I articulate my case for Samaritan duties to disobey the law, that is, duties to break

laws that prohibit Samaritan rescues, and duties to engage in civil disobedience

when unjust laws, institutions, or practices enable what I call ‘persistent Samaritan

perils’. I then examine and respond to several objections to my account: first, that

the costs of law-breaking are unreasonable, and thus cannot be morally required;

second, that individuals’ particular acts of protest and civil disobedience do not

appear to make any difference to the rescue, and thus cannot be required; third, that

I stretch the Samaritan duty beyond recognition; and fourth, that the Samaritan duty

binds us to help people in need or peril anywhere, not particularly at home. I

consider in conclusion the advantages and limits of my account of citizens’

Samaritan duties in the face of injustice.

The Samaritan Duty

The Samaritan duty obligates us to rescue people from serious peril when we can do

so at no unreasonable cost to ourselves and others. It arises in situations in which

(i) some fundamental human interest or non-contingent basic need, including

minimally the interests in life, security, and bodily integrity is threatened; (ii) the

threat is immediate, imminent, or probable; and (iii) someone else—typically an

innocent passerby or bystander—is able to help at no unreasonable cost to him- or

herself and others.5 The severity of ‘Samaritan perils’, as I shall call them, depends

on the magnitude of the harm threatened or inflicted, as well as its probability.

Per condition (iii), a person who is unable to help, or unable to help at a

reasonable cost to herself and others, is not a potential Samaritan rescuer. The cost

qualification attached to the Samaritan duty shouldn’t be misunderstood: ‘not

unreasonable’ or ‘reasonable’ does not necessarily mean ‘easy’ or ‘trivial’. Cecile

Fabre (2002) offers an illuminating way of understanding the ‘reasonableness’ of

the costs of Samaritan assistance. On her account, a potential rescuer has a duty to

help someone in peril ‘only if the following three conditions obtain: (a) they are

physically able to help; (b) the costs of doing so is not such as to jeopardize their

prospects for a flourishing life; and (c) giving the required assistance would not put

them at a high risk of incurring those costs’ (Fabre 2002, p. 366). For short, I shall

consider that someone is bound by the Samaritan duty when one can help a person

in need without jeopardizing, or risking to jeopardize, one’s prospects for a

flourishing life.

4 I do not think that settling these issues matters for my inquiry, though I briefly return to them later in the

paper. For discussions of the issue of source, see, e.g., Feinberg (1984, chap. 4), Wellman (2001). On the

issue of enforcement, see, e.g., Weinrib (1980), Lipkin (1983), Ripstein (2000). On Samaritan rights, see,

e.g., Feinberg (1992), Fabre (2002).5 This basic account synthesizes the following sources: Maimonides (1954, 1:14), Luke 10:30–37,

Wellman (2005), Feinberg (1984), Fabre (2007).

C. Delmas

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Fabre notes that although individuals cannot be held under a moral duty to incur a

high risk of dying for the sake of another, they can be held under a duty to incur

some life-threatening risk. Swimming to rescue a drowning child, for instance,

carries some life-threatening risk, depending on the particulars of the situation:

perhaps the swimmer has a heart condition, or it is dark and the water is choppy.

Presumably, lesser Samaritan perils demand lesser sacrifices: the cost of assistance

in cases that involve less probable and/or less serious harm could be, let us say, far

from jeopardizing one’s prospects for a flourishing life.

According to Wellman (2005, p. 32), ‘Samaritanism becomes morally operative

only when a particular course is essential to save the imperiled person’. Elsewhere

he says the course of action must ‘in fact [be] necessary’ for the rescue (Wellman

2005, p. 21). This high bar makes sense for coercive interventions like that deployed

by the state to rescue everyone from the perils of lawlessness. Good Samaritans (I’ll

use this expression to refer to people who discharge their Samaritan duty in a

praiseworthy way) may sometimes resort to coercion or violence in the rescue, as

may be the case when someone threatens another person’s life (Fabre 2009). In such

cases, the course of action must be justified by showing that it reasonably seemed

necessary for the rescue. Some theorists (e.g., Hurka 2008) constrain coercive

Samaritan interventions with a principle of proportionality, which prohibits

disproportionate use of force; others (e.g., Brownlee 2012, pp. 185–188) with a

principle of parsimony, which demands using the most modest means of action. But

one need not demonstrate that the course of action chosen is necessary for the rescue

in standard cases, where there are non-coercive ways of accomplishing a rescue

(e.g., jumping in the pool or throwing a floating device or alerting other swimmers).

In general, the Samaritan intervention must be reasonably calculated to protect

the interest under threat. The agent ought to choose among different courses of

action the one that appears the most likely to succeed. The foregoing sketch of the

Samaritan duty shall suffice, as it is not necessary to settle on a specific account of

Samaritan intervention before examining the duty’s implications in the face of

injustice.

Illegal Samaritan Rescues

The first potential implication of the Samaritan duty is straightforward: If I am in a

position to help someone in dire need or peril at no unreasonable cost to myself or

others, then I have a (putative) duty to do so, even if it requires breaking the law.

The breach of law may be incidental or direct, depending on the connection between

the law being broken and the Samaritan peril.

Law-breaking is incidental to the Samaritan rescue when the connection between

the law being broken and the endangerment of the person is accidental. For instance,

a hiker may break into a cabin in the mountains, thus trespassing on private

property, in order to find resources to take care of an injured companion hiker. Had

the particular circumstances been different (suppose someone was home) there

would not have been any need to violate the law to rescue the person. The law

recognizes that a technical breach of the law, in situations involving an emergency


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or a threat of death or serious injury, sometimes averts a great evil or furthers some

greater good, and that such advantageous result could not be achieved by strict

adherence to the law—this idea underlies the necessity defense.6 I shall not address

incidental Samaritan disobedience, as I am primarily interested in cases where the

peril that calls for a Samaritan rescue is causally connected to the law being broken.

Law-breaking is direct when the law explicitly prohibits the Samaritan rescue, so

that the rescuer must violate the law to assist the imperiled person. One infamous

example is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which prohibited aiding runaway slaves

and demanded that people assist officers in slaves’ capture. Arguably, citizens of

antebellum US were morally required to take care of wounded escaped slaves

knocking at their doors even though such assistance directly violated the law. For a

recent example, take Alabama’s HB 56, which criminalizes ‘certain behavior

relating to concealing, harboring, shielding, or attempting to conceal, harbor, or

shield unauthorized aliens’. US citizens who help undocumented immigrants, say,

by serving them food at a soup kitchen, or driving them to the hospital, are liable for

felony charges. Yet such Samaritan assistance may be morally required. The illegal

acts considered here are directly related to the Samaritan rescue insofar as the law

that is violated prohibits assisting a certain category of persons. Laws banning

Samaritan rescues appear inherently unjust: they prohibit the exercise of basic moral

duties and violate the fundamental dignity of individuals as agents capable to

engage in practical deliberation, pursue moral ends, and take responsibility for their

actions.

One may object one of two things: (a) that in those and many similar cases, the

duty to obey the law or some other consideration would outweigh the Samaritan

duty; or (b) that the Good Samaritan would assist the person in need and then report

him or her to the authorities, as the law demands (thereby satisfying both the

Samaritan duty and the duty to obey the law). Regarding (a): the duty to obey the

law being pro tanto, i.e., defeasible, it is unlikely that it would often or generally

outweigh the Samaritan duty, though other considerations might. To take just two:

one will not be bound by the Samaritan duty if the costs of providing assistance risk

jeopardizing one’s prospects for a flourishing life. So, prudential considerations may

well override the Samaritan duty at certain times, or indeed prevent it from arising.

Further, one might weigh the justification of the law (e.g., the purported protection

of state interests behind HB 56) against the Samaritan duty and find the balance tips

in favor of compliance with the law. But these considerations do not refute my

point. On the contrary, they assume that practical deliberation in those cases

involves a balancing of reasons for or against accomplishing the Samaritan rescue.

If this is the correct framework, then it is just as possible that the Samaritan duty

will sometimes outweigh the reasons for complying and thus demand disobeying the

law.

Point (b) raises a more serious objection: the Good Samaritan being a law-

abiding citizen, as Dudley Knowles (2012) has recently argued, she would always

6 The defense is recognized in the U.S. as part of common law and most states’ statutory law. For an

overview of the necessity defense, see, e.g., Levenson (1999). For a discussion of the rationales behind

the necessity defense, see Brownlee (2012, pp. 181–4).

C. Delmas

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seek legal ways to assist persons in peril. For instance, a law-abiding Samaritan in

Alabama could rescue an undocumented immigrant from a grave peril by driving

him to the hospital, and then report him to the authorities. In this way she would

fulfill her Samaritan duty without flouting the law (assuming that one who reports

after helping cannot be charged with a felony).

However, no one would press this objection in the Fugitive Slave Law case,

where reporting the runaway slave to the authorities would clearly amount to

throwing him back into a terrible Samaritan peril (viz. brutal punishment or death

for his attempted escape).7 In this case at least, the Samaritan duty excludes abiding

by the law. This point is sufficient for my present claim—that the Good Samaritan

may be morally required to directly violate laws that ban Samaritan rescues.

Samaritan Civil Disobedience

If one agrees that the Samaritan duty may demand breaking the law in the course of

a rescue, one ought to accept that the Samaritan duty may also support engaging in

civil disobedience in some cases, as I shall now argue. The case for ‘Samaritan civil

disobedience’ simply extends the reasoning applied to cases of illegal Samaritan

rescues examined above to more complex situations, in the following four steps:

i. Persistent Samaritan Perils: The argument applies where an injustice (unjust

law, policy, or institution) generates, enables, or aggravates Samaritan perils,

leading to their frequent occurrence.

ii. Citizens as Passersby: Citizens are passersby to persistent Samaritan perils

occurring in their society.

iii. The Rescue-through-Reform Argument: Rescuing people from persistent

Samaritan perils involves eliminating or righting the injustice at the root of

the peril, i.e., reforming the unjust law, policy, or institution.

iv. The Civil Disobedience Argument: Civil disobedience may be an effective

means of highlighting the persistent Samaritan peril and the need for rescue-

through-reform.

Persistent Samaritan Perils

My argument for Samaritan civil disobedience applies to cases of Samaritan perils

that are induced, enabled, or aggravated by injustice (viz. unjust laws, policies,

institutions, or practices). They are ‘persistent’ because they arise again and again,

given the interrelated system of social norms, practices, and institutions in which they

occur.

Take Jim Crow, the racial caste system that was in place in the US South from

the 1880s to the 1970s. It consisted in the legally and socially enforced segregation

of facilities, services, opportunities, and roles along racial lines. It excluded African

7 I leave open the question whether the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants might

amount to perilous situations.


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Americans from political participation and kept them in a condition of extreme

material deprivation. The system was maintained through coercion, intimidation,

and terror, including brutal police treatment, bombings of homes and churches,

killing, and lynching.

This violence was enabled and aggravated by southern state police and officials’

own active involvement in lynching and killing and systematic failure to apply laws

to arrest and prosecute white-on-black offenders. Thus, not only were African

Americans frequent victims of physical assault, including murder, but they knew

that whites were not deterred from attacking them. In this way, Jim Crow induced

and enabled the emergence of countless Samaritan perils, as it tolerated—even

encouraged—grave and widespread violence against African Americans (see, e.g.,

Woodward 2001; Klarman 2004).

Citizens as Passersby

Citizens may be viewed as passersby to persistent Samaritan perils; and they

constitute potential rescuers insofar as they are able to help. The parties to be

rescued are the current and potential future victims of Samaritan perils. Not every

single citizen is properly described as a passerby, for some people might not be

aware of the peril or might be unable to help. So the generic ‘citizens’ does not refer

to all, but rather to many or most citizens, including the potential victims themselves

(e.g., African Americans under Jim Crow).

One may deny that many or most citizens are passersby to persistent Samaritan

perils on three distinct grounds: (a) passersby must be in close proximity with the

peril; (b) they must be aware of the peril; and (c) they must be able to help the

imperiled. Yet many citizens are (a) not in close proximity with the injustice-

induced Samaritan perils, (b) unaware of their existence or persistence, and/or

(c) unable to help. Contra the third objection, (c), I explain in the Civil Disobedience

Argument below why it is reasonable to hold that many citizens are able to help in

the Samaritan rescue effort in one way or another, through legal processes, political

channels, or civil disobedience. For now, let me address the two other objections.

Proximity?

First, potential rescuers are typically innocent bystanders, who happen to be in

spatial proximity with the imperiled person—they ‘stumble’ into Samaritan

situations, in Feinberg’s phrase (1984, p. 171). One may therefore deny that

citizens are Samaritan ‘material’, as Simmons did in his critique of Wellman (to

which I return below).

Spatial proximity is often critical in standard cases of rescue. It makes plain the

perilous situation and further allows immediate rescue. But Simmons himself

acknowledges that awareness and ability to help may come without proximity, as he

notes that ‘the moral burdens of the rescue fall… on those who happen to be present

at the emergencies… or have the knowledge that allows them to make themselves

present’ (Simmons 2005, p. 184).

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Consider, too, transnational cases of aid and rescue, such as disaster relief

operations. They involve long distances between those in need and the potential

rescuers, thereby indicating that spatial proximity is not a prerequisite of Samaritan

assistance. Perhaps this is because television and digital media have short-circuited

the connection between spatial proximity and knowledge of the need for rescue, by

making us bystanders of people’s perilous circumstances worldwide. What matters

here is the ability to help, and some people may be in a position to provide

Samaritan assistance to others who are not geographically close to them. This, in

any case, is the gist of Singer’s case for transnational Samaritan duties in ‘Famine,

Affluence, and Morality’ (Singer 1972).

Citizens fall somewhere in between the ‘literal’ passerby and Singer’s distant

bystanders. Because Samaritan perils that are enabled by injustice arise frequently,

people (be they privileged persons or potential victims) are likely to have witnessed

first-hand the incidence of some of them, and to be aware of their common

occurrence, for instance, through acquaintances’ testimonies or in the news. Citizens

are also in relative spatial proximity with those persistently imperiled, since they

live under, and partake in, the same social structures (though some factors such as

residential segregation may affect this ‘co-dwelling’). Many citizens are further

well-positioned to contribute to the Samaritan rescue, in virtue of their membership

and standing in the community. The ability to help is thus crucial and explains why

citizens may aptly be viewed as passersby.

Awareness?

Second, one may object that many citizens are in fact unaware of the persistent

Samaritan perils that surround them, so that they cannot be potential rescuers. In the

case of Jim Crow, it is sadly plausible to argue that many white southerners might

not have been aware of the persistent, structural endangerment of African

Americans. They may have failed to recognize the injustice of racial segregation,

as a result of self-deception, indifference, or moral blindness—all of which would

have been facilitated by the prevailing ideas of the time.8 And if they did not

perceive the racial caste system as unjust, then they were unlikely to see how it

enabled widespread violence against African Americans.

This is a serious worry. The blind person who walks by the shallow pond without

realizing that a toddler is drowning in it does not have a moral duty to rescue her,

even though he could if he were aware of the Samaritan peril. Insofar as awareness

of the peril is crucial to one’s ability to help, citizens who do not know about the

persistent Samaritan perils are not bound to contribute to the Samaritan rescue. One

difference between the blind person passing by the shallow pond and the morally

blind southerners, however, is that the latter are ultimately responsible for their

ignorance. Moral theorists have argued for the existence of various ‘second-order’

duties, i.e., duties regarding what to do to understand and implement one’s primary

moral obligations, which are especially salient in contexts of oppression. These

8 Self-deception, indifference, and moral blindness are common effects of privilege under systems of

oppression. See, e.g., Frye (1983, chap. 1), and Bailey (1998).


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include, for instance, duties to seek information, respond to evidence, show due care

in moral deliberation (see Hill 2010), exercise self-scrutiny, resist self-deception

(see Garrett 2010), and develop empathetic understanding (see Spelman 1988, chap.

7; Thomas 1998; Harvey 2007). Many citizens under Jim Crow could thus have

been blamed for failing to satisfy at least some of these duties, say, insofar as they

lacked basic information about the harms of racial segregation, and the motivation

to learn about it. In short, I do not believe that ignorance automatically gets one off

the ‘duty-hook’, especially if this ignorance is blameworthy.

Furthermore, once people engage in protest to draw attention to the injustice, as I

will argue they ought to, awareness can spread through society. In this way,

Samaritan duties may gradually bind more and more people, as people’s

consciousness about the persistence of Samaritan perils also grows, and denial

becomes increasingly blameworthy. All in all, the Samaritan burdens do not fall

equally on everyone, because people are differently situated relative to the persistent

Samaritan perils: some are in a better position than others, based on their knowledge

and ability to help (viz. resources and influence). But as I shall argue next, many

citizens are well-positioned and able to assist in the rescue at no unreasonable cost

to themselves and others.

The Rescue-Through-Reform Argument

Samaritan perils generate duties of rescue. The Rescue-through-Reform Argument

suggests that the principal way of rescuing people from persistent Samaritan perils

is through reform. Standard one-off rescues are insufficient in the face of such

perils, which endure past specific rescues. For instance, even if people habitually

assisted victims of physical assault under Jim Crow, the system’s white supremacist

norms and southern states’ systematic failure to enforce the equal protection of the

law would still ensure the frequent incidence of Samaritan perils. One needs to

correct or impede the systematic endangerment; that is, reform the unjust law,

statute, or institution that enables the perils.

One may object that the Samaritan duty demands physical assistance, not

structural reform, and that the Samaritan in the biblical parable, for instance, does

not have to find the wounded man’s assailant and bring him to justice in order to

discharge his duty. Yet in cases of humanitarian intervention, we are used to

associating Samaritan rescue with serious, sometimes prolonged, interventions. If

one accepts that the Samaritan duty sometimes requires rescuing groups of people

from extremely dangerous situations through military or peaceful intervention, then

one can reasonably accept that the Samaritan duty may also entail reforming the law

or institution that entrenches persistent Samaritan perils.

The Civil Disobedience Argument

There are many ways of bringing about reform in our societies; and the etiology of

political change is too complex to allow us to ascertain the necessary and sufficient

conditions for reform. Here I want to focus on the first step toward reform: namely,

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the call for reform. Calling for reform in the face of persistent Samaritan perils

involves highlighting the peril and the injustice it is rooted in and sustained by.

The account of civil disobedience I favor emphasizes its conscientious nature and

communicative function. William Smith (2013) has recently put forth an attractive

‘deliberative democratic’ theory, which defines civil disobedience as ‘a public,

nonviolent, conscientious yet political act, contrary to law, carried out to

communicate opposition to laws and policies of government’ (see, e.g., Milligan

2013 for an alternative account). Civil disobedience, thus conceived as an address to

the community, may be an effective means of calling for reform. Some individuals

may be well situated to contribute to the reform effort through other courses of

action than civil disobedience. For instance, public officials, journalists, and

lawyers, because of their access to the political arena or to legal processes, are well

positioned to address the community and highlight the need for reform in the face of

persistent Samaritan perils, without engaging in illegal protest. But for most

citizens, who lack such access, civil disobedience may be an effective way to reach

the political forum.

Historical evidence suggests that campaigns of civil disobedience have been

crucial to draw attention to injustices. In the US, the Civil Rights movement’s

marches, boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, and registration campaigns, for instance,

exposed the persistent Samaritan perils that African Americans faced under Jim

Crow (widespread racist violence was manifest in the brutal repression of these

campaigns), and thus highlighted the need for reform. Assuming the methods of

protest are permissible; and assuming the principle that if one wills the end—

reform—one also wills the (permissible) means to that end, then one may infer that

civil disobedience is an effective means and important part of the rescue effort.

It is reasonable to submit that legal measures such as boycotts should be

attempted first, unless it is obvious that they would be pointless.9 Note, however,

that in the examples above, the black voter registration campaigns and the 1961

Freedom Rides, though legal, were often met with brute force; and peaceful

marches, such as the one that led Martin Luther King, Jr. to a Birmingham jail, were

often declared unlawful by court injunction. This suggests that the line between civil

disobedience and legal protest is not a stable one, and may be of little significance in

practical deliberation.

The available and appropriate courses of Samaritan action under Jim Crow were

by and large determined by the particular time and place in which one lived. Given

the systemic nature of racist violence under Jim Crow, it is reasonable to think that

the rescue mission should be accomplished through collective action. Erica

Chenoweth and Maria Stephan (2011) argue, on the basis of their statistical analysis

of 323 violent and nonviolent civil resistance campaigns that took place in the last

century, that mass participation is a critical source of the success of nonviolent

resistance: ‘as membership increases, the probability of success also increases’

(Chenoweth and Stephan 2011, p. 39). This is true not only in contexts of

9 This presumption in favor of legal means accords with both the principle of proportionality and the

principle of parsimony, though neither principle excludes a priori illegal means or requires illegality only

be a last resort.


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‘concentration’, where large numbers of people gather in public (or private) spaces,

but also in contexts of ‘dispersion’, where acts are coordinated and widespread, as in

cases of consumer boycotts (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011, p. 56). So if an

organized movement was already in place, joining it may well have reasonably

seemed the best method of action. Where no organized movement existed, perhaps

some individuals with talent (e.g., organization skills) and influence were able and

bound to launch one. In any case, a number of actions were available to frustrate or

alleviate the persistent perils of life under Jim Crow, such as reporting violence and

engaging in everyday resistance against racist stereotypes.

Let me now consider several objections against my Samaritan arguments for

disobeying the law and engaging in civil disobedience.

Unreasonable Costs

First, one might argue that there could never be all-things-considered requirements

to disobey the law or engage in civil disobedience, insofar as the costs of law

breaking are always unreasonable. In particular, one may agree that laws that

criminalize the exercise of moral duties or enable persistent Samaritan perils are

unjust, while stressing that the costs associated with legal disobedience jeopardize

or risk jeopardizing one’s prospects for a flourishing life. To take an earlier

example, if in aiding an undocumented immigrant in Alabama, under HB 56, one

risks a felony conviction, and if a felony conviction jeopardizes one’s prospects for

a flourishing life (say, given the stigmatization of convicted felons), then one might

never be morally bound to come to the rescue of an undocumented immigrant.

Two general worries further arise. One: the worse the state, the costlier it makes

legal disobedience. Two: because the oppressed have less to lose than the

privileged—they don’t have a flourishing life to jeopardize—they might be unfairly

burdened by Samaritan duties of resistance. Let me explain and address each worry

in turn.

First, a state that harshly and systematically punishes disobedience appears to

ensure that Samaritan rescues and civil disobedience never come at a reasonable

cost. Tyrannical states do just that: they deter all law-breaking (including civil

disobedience) by attaching very heavy costs to disobedience. At the limit, there may

not be any Samaritan duty to rescue people from standard or persistent Samaritan

perils through illegal means in tyrannical regimes, given the costs of noncompli-

ance. This is paradoxical, if not even tragic, since Samaritan perils are presumably

the most frequent—and Samaritan rescues the most urgently needed—in tyrannical

states. Polish subjects under Nazi occupation were routinely executed for

‘Judenbeherbergung’ (sheltering Jews). In such a situation, where Samaritan

assistance carried such a high risk—death—one could not be morally bound.

In response, note that there is no reason to think that there could never have been

a Samaritan duty to break the law under Nazi-occupied Poland or in antebellum US;

indeed hundreds of Polish rescuers, interviewed after the war, reported simply

fulfilling their Samaritan duty (Oliner and Oliner 1988). After all, the risk of getting

caught may sometimes be very low, even under a tyrannical regime. Furthermore,

the Samaritan duty’s weight is proportional to the gravity and urgency of the peril.

C. Delmas

123

Recall that, according to Fabre, individuals can be held under a duty to incur some

life-threatening risk. Hence one may assume that Samaritan duties to rescue people

from peril in tyrannical states carry heavy weight.

Second, the requirement that the costs of disobedience be reasonable appears to

yield the unpalatable implication that the worst-off in society, who do not have a

flourishing life to jeopardize, are more bound by the Samaritan duty than their

better-off counterparts. And this would be unfair. However, it isn’t the case that the

Samaritan duty weighs more heavily on those already burdened by oppression.

Simply put, being able to help—which is crucial to Samaritan standing—is not the

same as having nothing to lose. One’s ability to help is a function of one’s position

in society and opportunities; and the greater the ability to help, the weightier the

duty. This suggests weightier duties on the part of the privileged than on the

oppressed.

No Difference

A second objection one might press rests on the notion that in cases of civil

disobedience, where the rescue mission is a collective undertaking, no individual act

appears to make any difference to the outcome. The fate of racial segregation does

not hinge on whether I join the sit-in or not. As we saw, the Samaritan intervention

must be reasonably calculated to protect the interest under threat. Yet no particular

person’s engaging in civil disobedience appears necessary or sufficient for the

campaign’s or rescue’s success. If there is no reason to think that one’s efforts can

make a difference to the outcome, then it is not clear why one ought to undertake

such efforts. The No Difference problem, as one may call it, is a serious worry for

my account.

Note that although it seems not to make any difference whether or not particular

citizens take action to eliminate persistent Samaritan perils, it makes a difference

that enough people do (Nefsky 2013). In any case, I do think that particular acts of

protest can make a difference for the better, for instance by showing the example (so

that others might follow), and by increasing the number of participants, which, as

noted above, matters a great deal to the success of the campaign.

One might further solve the No Difference problem by appealing to fairness, as

Wellman does in his account of political obligation.10 The fact that the rescue

mission can be accomplished without everyone’s participation (either because such

individual participation is not necessary or because it won’t make any difference)

makes free riding possible, and the costs of Samaritan assistance make it tempting.

Appealing to considerations of fairness, one would simply argue that everyone

ought to do their fair share of the Samaritan rescue, when they can do so at no

unreasonable cost to themselves or others. In this way, fairness preempts free riding

on other people’s Samaritan efforts. Everyone’s fair share of the rescue is not the

10 I am grateful to an anonymous referee at Res Publica for suggesting this response. Note that Wellman

does it in order to fend off the objection that not everyone’s compliance with the law is necessary for the

state to rescue everyone from the perils of the state of nature. But the point is that past a certain threshold

of general compliance, particular persons’ obedience to the law does not make any difference to the

state’s overall stability.


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same, as citizens have different talents and opportunities. But every citizen may

have a prima facie duty to contribute to the Samaritan mission.

Stretching the Samaritan Duty

Rescue, Charity, or Justice?

Third, one might object that my account stretches the Samaritan duty beyond

recognition. This is one of John Simmons’s main objections to Wellman’s theory: to

wit, that his Samaritan argument rests on a conflation of the duty of rescue with a

duty of charity. Duties of rescue, Simmons insists, are addressed to one-off

emergencies that occur in close proximity, typically in face-to-face situations.

However, he writes, ‘the moral task to which Wellman thinks the [Samaritan] duty

is addressed is an ongoing problem (of providing security for all), not the kind of

local, occasional task to which duties of rescue seem to be addressed’ (Simmons

2005, p. 184). This objection appears to apply to my account of Samaritan civil

disobedience too, since I propose that the Samaritan duty is addressed to an

‘ongoing problem’ of eliminating the injustice at the root of persistent Samaritan

perils. The moral task of reforming the system, for Simmons, would be a matter of

charity or beneficence, not of rescue.

My response is twofold. First, I am inclined to agree that Simmons’s objection

threatens Wellman’s theory, insofar as the perils of the state of nature constitute

hypothetical or potential, rather than imminent, threats. Even Knowles, who

recently defended Wellman’s Samaritan account against its critics, recognizes that

‘Wellman’s talk of rescue [from the dangers of lawlessness] is hyperbolic’

(Knowles 2012, p. 168). However, I would insist that the persistent Samaritan perils

that I believe Samaritan duties are addressed to are aptly and non-metaphorically

described as emergencies. They consist in situations in which some fundamental

human interest or non-contingent basic need, including minimally the interests in

life, security, and bodily integrity is threatened, and the threat is immediate,

imminent, or probable.

Second, I fail to see how eliminating the injustice that sustains widespread

violence would be a matter of charity, though I see how it could be deemed a matter

of justice. Insofar as Samaritan concerns and concerns of justice are not mutually

exclusive, claiming that eliminating persistent Samaritan perils through structural

reform is a matter of justice does not undermine my account. At the outset of this

paper, I set aside the question whether Samaritan rights exist, i.e., whether the

imperiled have a right to be rescued. An affirmative answer to this question would

entail that Samaritan assistance is a matter of protecting people’s rights—hence a

duty of justice. According to Fabre (2002), the duty to rescue is a duty of justice

which is owed to the imperiled and can be enforced by the state.

Perfect or Imperfect?

Another way of understanding the objection that Wellman conflates rescue and

charity rests on the distinction between perfect and imperfect duties. Whereas the

C. Delmas

123

duty of rescue as standardly conceived is a perfect duty, owed by those who can

help to those in danger, and demanding an immediate rescue, the content of the duty

I describe in cases of Samaritan civil disobedience looks like the content of

imperfect duties such as the duty of charity. If I am in a position to step in the

shallow pond to lift the drowning child out of the water, then I cannot satisfy the

Samaritan duty and refrain from saving the child—the duty is perfect. In contrast, I

may refrain from participating in a particular demonstration or sit-in and still satisfy

the Samaritan duty in other ways—here, the duty is imperfect.

This is a fair point. A variety of courses of action counts as discharging the

Samaritan duty to engage in civil disobedience; and one has discretion as to which

one to choose, and whether to take action at all. In this sense, the duty to engage in

civil disobedience to rescue people from persistent Samaritan perils is imperfect.

But it does not follow that it is thereby less weighty.

Identified v. Potential Victims

Finally, one might point to the following major difference between standard

Samaritan cases and persistent Samaritan perils. In standard cases, the party in peril

is an actual identifiable person—this brown-haired girl drowning in the pond—

whereas persistent Samaritan perils concern future potential victims, or ‘statistical

people’. Though this is an important difference, I do not think that it is morally

relevant for determining our obligations. Note first that persistent Samaritan perils

engender a feeling of insecurity in all members of the targeted group (e.g., African

Americans living under Jim Crow). From this perspective, the situation of oppressed

people, much like that of individuals in the state of nature, is characterized by a

climate of fear and insecurity, which thwarts the possibility for a meaningful human

life (Delmas 2014).

In any case, let us assume that when it comes to intervention, the Good Samaritan

is concerned only with whoever will predictably be assaulted, i.e., statistical people.

Research shows that people will pay an amount much greater to save an identified

victim who faces a high risk of death than they would pay to save an equivalent

number of statistical lives spread over a broader population (Small and Loewenstein

2003). For many philosophers (e.g., Daniels 2012), this disposition to favor the

interests of identified victims is a bias, not a justified moral judgment.

Some philosophers (e.g., Narveson 1976; Broome 1999) have defended moral

actualism, the view that only the interests of actual people are relevant for

determining the moral status of an action, while those of merely possible people are

morally irrelevant. It is beyond the scope of this paper to take part in this vexed

scholarly debate. But I shall mention Caspar Hare’s (2007) decisive arguments

against moral actualism. Hare (2012) has also recently scrutinized the problem of

statistical people, arguing that the fact that we cannot identify the particular people

who will be harmed or benefited by our actions is not particularly relevant to

determining the strength of our obligations. Hare (2012, p. 379) suggests that ‘if it

does matter, it does not matter very much. Our moral obligations are not

significantly weakened by the absence of a person to whom we are obliged’. Careful


123

thinking about the issue therefore doesn’t support favoring the interests of actual

people in peril over those of statistical people.

Particularity

Fourth, Simmons criticizes Wellman for his failure to account for the ‘particularity’ of

the link between citizens and their society. If there is a duty to obey the law,

philosophers agree that it must bind us specially to our state. But as Simmons shows,

theories based on natural duties, such as the Samaritan duty or the duty of justice,

cannot explain this special connection, since they bind people equally, regardless of

their voluntary undertakings or relationships (Simmons 2005, chap. 7). This objection

applies to my account to the extent that standard or persistent Samaritan perils can arise

anywhere, thus potentially binding us to help everywhere, not especially at home.

I agree that the Samaritan duty does not bind citizens specially to their society.

But this isn’t a problem for my account, because the particularity requirement is a

desideratum of theories of political obligation, not of an investigation into citizens’

obligations in the face of injustice, for which there is no reason to exclude

transnational duties. So there may well be numerous Samaritan duties binding us at

home and abroad. The interesting question, I think, is whether there may be any

transnational duties to engage in civil disobedience—a question which philosophers

have not systematically entertained, as far as I am aware.

The answer is ‘yes’. There may be situations in which one ought to engage in

civil disobedience at home in order to highlight persistent Samaritan perils abroad,

assuming this will help draw attention to the issue. For instance, solidarity protests

were organized around the world in the aftermath of the April 24, 2013 factory

collapse in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 people. The goal of the

protests was to denounce the dangerous and unfair labor conditions in Bangladesh’s

booming garment sector, which, arguably, engender persistent Samaritan perils.

Though most solidarity protests were legal, some of them involved acts of civil

disobedience, for instance when protesters refused to comply with police orders to

disperse, or when activists violated restraining orders. These protests may be viewed

as instances of transnational Samaritan civil disobedience.

In conclusion, while Wellman uses the Samaritan duty to defend the moral duty

to obey the law, I argued that the Samaritan duty sometimes requires disobeying

laws that ban Samaritan rescues, and engaging in civil disobedience to protest

injustices that contribute to putting people in peril. Although I illustrated my

argument for Samaritan civil disobedience with the case of Jim Crow, the argument

is meant to apply to other cases of persistent Samaritan perils, such as hazardous

labor conditions in factories. For another example, think of patriarchal and sexist

societies that enable sexual violence against women or commit ‘gendercide’ (i.e.,

gender-selective mass killing). Samaritan duties arise, demanding to rescue girls and

women from persistent Samaritan perils in such societies.

Samaritan duties constitute important allies in moral and political theorizing,

insofar as they are deemed very stringent, intuitively compelling, and widely

C. Delmas

123

embraced. At the same time, however, they equip us with blunt tools of analysis:

their appeal is paradoxically also what limits them. Samaritan duties’ exclusive

application to situations in which fundamental interests such as life and bodily

integrity are under threat drastically reduces the scope of political action in the face

of injustice. Only dangerous circumstances are concerned, while a number of rights

violations may not imperil the persons concerned in the way required for Samaritan

duties to arise. So there is a Samaritan duty, for instance, to rescue undocumented

immigrants in peril, but not to afford them the protection of the law in cases of

exploitation and abuse. This is not a defect of the Samaritan duty of course—but it

indicates the need to go beyond the Samaritan duty to articulate a complete account

of our obligations in the face of injustice.

Acknowledgments I have benefited from discussions with friends and audiences at Boston University,

Clemson University, the Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Conference at St Anne’s College,

Oxford, the International Social Philosophy Conference at Northeastern University, the Mentoring Project

for Pre-Tenure Women Faculty in Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the Rocky

Mountains Ethics Congress at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Workshop on the Duty to

Resist Oppression at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Special thanks are owed to David Lyons, Ann

Cudd, Jill Delston, Meena Krishnamurthy, Kristina Meshelski, Melissa Yates, Samuel Huang, Julia

Nefsky, Erich Hatala Matthes, Kimberley Brownlee, Carol Hay, Daniel Star, and Gabriel O’Malley for

their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

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Documents

Samaritanism and Civil Disobedience