I’m Teaching My Son To Be A Tattletale

Our culture doesn’t approve of tattletales, which I suspect is why we’re so quick to demonize whistleblowers. But I’m bucking that trend in my house and I suggest you do the same.

I have a three year old boy and I’m teaching him to be a tattletale.

A few months ago, he came home and complained to me that some of the “big boys” at daycare were running up and “roaring” in his face on the playground. He talked about it a lot; it upset him and made him anxious rather than excited about his afternoons on the playground. Not long after that, he started roaring at his baby sister sometimes. It took me several days, but I connected the two things. Then I told him to tell a teacher the next time the big kids roared at him and I explained to him that he shouldn’t roar at his sister because then he was acting like those big kids and his sister was like him, a little kid who was upset and anxious. We talked about it a few times a day for a few days because he would bring up the topic of the “big kids” whenever we went to daycare, left daycare, or talked about daycare.

I don’t know if he ever told a teacher about their behavior, but I hope he did. I do know that he stopped roaring at his sister almost immediately.

Why did I encourage him to tell a teacher? Because the big kids were bullying him and other littler kids like him … and then he was learning their bullying behavior and bringing it home. He had the power not to be a bully himself and he made the right choice once he recognized that his sister was in the same position he was in at daycare. But he didn’t have the power to stop the big kids from bullying the littler kids on the playground and he didn’t even have the language to confront them; what he could do was to make their bullying behavior known to someone with more power.

You might think that this is a small example and that the stakes are very low. I agree. But trust me when I say it didn’t seem small to someone as small as him. And it’s obviously a much bigger issue than a friend who isn’t sharing or who spilled some milk on the floor at snacktime; those are times when I’m teaching my son not to be a tattletale. He has to learn to pick and choose the times when the problem really isn’t a big deal, like someone spilling a little milk, when he can resolve a problem with his words, like someone not sharing with him, and when the issue is important enough to appeal to someone else.

I want my son to be able to make these decisions for himself when he gets older, to know how to handle the various big and small problems that come his way. And I want him to have learned that sometimes we need to take bad behavior to an authority figure or make it public in order to make it stop.

I want him to know that there’s nothing wrong with standing up to bullies if you can or appealing to others for help if you’re not strong enough. I never want him to join in with the big kids to pick on the little kids and I never want him to think that keeping quiet in the face of nasty behavior is acceptable.

It’s well past time that we stop demonizing people who tell the truth about abusive, illegal, or unethical behavior. So I’m teaching my son to be a tattletale and I suggest you do the same.

Those Narcissistic, Irresponsible Whistle-Blowers

I’m struck by how closely the criticisms of Edward Snowden mirror those launched against Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. I can only assume that we’ll see these same critiques launched against each leaker or whistle-blower from now on.

Pretty much immedately upon learning of Snowden’s identity, he was labeled “a grandiose narcissist” by Jeffery Toobin in the New Yorker. Toobin also suggests that Snowden is disingenuous when he claimed he needed to do the right thing upon learning of what he considered to be governmental abuses:

What, one wonders, did Snowden think the N.S.A. did? Any marginally attentive citizen, much less N.S.A. employee or contractor, knows that the entire mission of the agency is to intercept electronic communications. Perhaps he thought that the N.S.A. operated only outside the United States; in that case, he hadn’t been paying very close attention.

Also mirroring the Wikileaks discussion, Toobin argues that Snowden’s leak was reckless and irresponsible. Rather than being selective about the information he would release, he leaked indiscriminately. Someone who really cared about the good of the nation, Toobin implies, would only leak the really terrible stuff that also wouldn’t do any damage to our security or prestige.

And my good colleague Richard Moberly writes in the New York Times that Snowden shouldn’t be protected by our whistle-blower laws because he subverted the democratic process. Moberly, like Toobin, argues that Snowden blew the whistle on programs that were legal, that were sanctioned by all three branches of our government (including the democratically-elected ones), and — what’s more — that our government has legal avenues available for people like Snowden to blow the whistle on wrongdoing. He concludes:

Although we may not like the decisions that our leaders made regarding the N.S.A. program, the choice before us is whether we would rather live with their judgment or encourage unelected, unaccountable people to decide instead.

I’m not convinced that Moberly is right about the choice. It seems to me, instead, that the choice is between knowing exactly what our government is doing, on the one hand, and relying on the government to tell us, on the other. While our fear or our complacency might have allowed for the creation and expansion of programs like this over the past decade, Snowden’s actions have, I hope, brought home to us exactly what we’ve allowed.

For some people, there won’t ever be anything noble or heroic about someone who leaks information. I suppose that’s why they turn to the same lines about narcissism and recklessness, because the whistle-blowers aren’t simply falling in line. But blowing the whistle on governmental overreach or outright abuse, saying “no” when everyone else seems to be saying “yes,” doing the right thing in the face of tremendous risk and cost, standing up to the powerful when you believe their actions are harmful to us all … well, those are the kinds of actions we ought to celebrate when we see them.

Syria and the Bystander Effect

About a week ago, as people were writing about the use of chemical weapons in Syria, I read a blog post in which the author argued against American intervention and in favor, more broadly, of a moral responsibility not to intervene when others are suffering:

Let us suppose that I see a person being physically assaulted on the sidewalk.  The aggressor appears to be using their fists, but no weapons are visible.  If I see that person being assaulted, and I fail to intervene, am I morally at fault?

This was a question faced early on by common law judges, and the answer they gave was almost universally no.  At common law, there was no duty to rescue, and there are good reasons for this.  First consider that in most cases, I will be ignorant as to the motivation for the assault I’m witnessing.  The person being assaulted may actually be the more “culpable” of the two based on some prior bad act, and I’m simply witnessing some sort of aggression in-kind.  But I have no way of knowing in the moment of initial apprehension.  Second, Intervening may require me to place myself or someone I love in harm’s way, as the aggressor may see fit to visit retribution upon me or my loved ones at a later date for becoming involved in his or her dispute.  It is selfish and reckless of me to place an uninvolved third party potentially at risk based on my desire to rescue the person in front of me from the apparent violent predations of another.  While we can agree that I may place myself at risk to rescue another, I have no moral claim on placing others at risk through my actions.   these considerations mitigate any moral responsibility to intervene I might otherwise have.

But let us suppose that I do intervene to try to save the person being assaulted, but in the process, I only make matters worse.  Perhaps the aggressor, realizing he or she is outnumbered, draws a weapon that he was not using before.  Now, what began as a fistfight has been escalated into a more lethal situation for both the victim and myself.  An aggressor who may have merely seen fit to “beat up” the victim is now rearing to kill them.  Am I morally responsible for that escalation?  Absolutely.

It is certainly possible that my intervention will only be helpful to the victim.  But the difference between our example and official state military intervention is that, as you add more human beings and political interests to the example, the potential for unintended consequences increases.  Furthermore, imagine that the last four or five times I intervened in a sidewalk assault, I ended up doing as much and more harm as I prevented.  That would certainly make non-intervention seem to be a more morally responsible action, even if there’s still a chance that I’m watching a genuinely innocent person get assaulted without just cause.

In other words, because it’s possible that intervention won’t help and might even cause harm, we ought to feel either a) unconcerned or b) good about not attempting to assist those who are suffering.

This is an elaborate defense of being a bystander.

It’s the sort of argument one constructs in order to excuse the sort of non-action that, in other circumstances, most people wouldn’t want to admit. You see someone being assaulted but you don’t want to get involved … so you tell yourself that, if you did get involved, things would probably just end up worse than if you’d left well enough alone. “If I try to stop a simple assault, the victim — who would just be badly beaten — will probably end up being shot. And, hey, maybe the victim in this situation isn’t really even a victim; maybe she’s done something to deserve the assault. I shouldn’t get involved.”

Of course, the author of the blog post wants to suggest that it’s a very different equation because we’re dealing with the American military and we have knowledge that previous interventions were carried out badly. This should, apparently, change the moral calculus … just as it did for the U.S. when extremist Hutus were massacring Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994. We’d intervened badly in Somalia, of course, so we decided that we ought not to intervene in Rwanda. If we’re being honest with ourselves, I’m not so sure the Rwandans are grateful that President Clinton recognized the possibility of unintended consequences and decided we weren’t morally required to provide any assistance.

Now I’m equating Rwanda with Syria in this post and I’m not writing some sort of full-throated call for intervention either. I’m just trying to make clear two things:

1. Past actions don’t actually give us any indication of what will happen in the future. It’s quite possible to do something badly nine times and then to do it perfectly the tenth time;

2. We need to stop giving ourselves so many excuses for our desire to turn our backs on people in need. We have a hard enough time pushing ourselves to act on behalf of others as it is.

And, indeed, the blogger knows this. Here’s how he attempts to mitigate what he’s said:

Note that this is not an argument for never intervening to stop a perceived injustice.  This is an argument for not intervening in a perceived injustice when you have prior knowledge and experience which suggests that your intervention will cause at least as much damage as it alleviates.  This is why, say,Oskar Schindler’s interventions on behalf of Jewish victims of the Third Reich, for example, are different than U.S. military intervention in the Middle East.  The moral calculus of humanitarian intervention changes when you have prior knowledge which suggests that your intervention will cause affirmative injuries elsewhere or in the future, even if it appears to alleviate the suffering that is in front of one’s face.

On what basis should Schindler have believed that he would succeed in saving the lives of Jews during the Holocaust? Indeed, on what basis should any of the Righteous Among the Nations have taken action? They didn’t really have any reason to believe that they would succeed in their efforts to rescue Jews and they had every reason to believe that they would be killed if they were discovered. I suppose the blogger’s argument would be that they couldn’t possibly make things worse for the Jews by attempting to rescue them, since they were almost certainly going to be killed by the Nazis one way or the other. This puts the threshold for intervention at cases where things couldn’t possibly get any worse for the victim … which means, happily for us, that we will almost never have to take any risk or exert ourselves in any way for others since we can almost always say to ourselves, “I could conceivably make things worse so, for everyone’s sake (and especially for my own sake), I’d better just stay put.”

Plain and simple, this is nothing more than an excuse to remain a safe, secure, happy, and healthy bystander while others are suffering. It’s not some sort of moral high ground.

The Big News!

I’ve just learned that my second book, which is on the topic of heroism, has been accepted for publication! Like my first book, it will be part of the excellent Routledge Innovations in Political Theory series.

Here’s a brief description of the book:

The idea of heroism has become thoroughly muddled today. I turn to classical conceptions of the hero in order to explain the confusion and highlight the ways in which different heroic categories can be useful at different times. I make an argument for three distinct categories of heroism that can be traced back to the earliest Western literature – the epic poetry of Homer and the dialogues of Plato – and that are complex enough to resonate with us and assist us in thinking about heroism today. In contemporary society, any behavior that seems distinctly difficult or unusually impressive is classified as heroic: everyone from firefighters to foster fathers and from quadriplegics to freedom fighters are our heroes. But what motivates these people to act heroically and what prevents other people from being heroes? And, in our culture today, what makes one sort of hero appear more heroic than another sort? In order to answer these questions, we must untangle one kind of heroic behavior from another, examine the motivations of particular heroes, compare very different heroic behaviors, and finally make clear how and why it is that the other-regarding hero, Socrates, supplanted the battlefield hero, Achilles, and the suffering hero, Odysseus.

You’ll be able to purchase your very own copy some time in the Fall; rest assured you’ll hear more about the book as we get closer to its publication. I might even run some sort of giveaway here at the blog so a devoted reader or two can score an autographed copy.

In the meantime, of course, you can grab a copy of my first book, on the philosophical origins of the idea of human rights … now available for the Kindle.

As for me, I’m going to go celebrate!