Philosophy Now Forum

"HARRISBURG, Pa. - The Penn State football coach who told a grand jury that he saw another coach molest a child failed to meet "a moral obligation" to intervene, Pennsylvania's governor said Sunday, adding that he expects more victims to come forward.

The coach who testified, Mike McQueary, had said he saw retired Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky sexually assaulting a boy in a shower at a campus football facility almost a decade ago. Sandusky is accused of assaulting eight boys over 15 years and has maintained his innocence. The university has put McQueary on leave from his job."
http://www.startribune.com/sports/133769478.html

When I read this article in today's StarTribune, I wondered: what is a foundation for the alleged moral obligation to intervene under the circumstances in this case (child rape or sodomy)?

After some thought, I concluded that the best grounding for the obligation is the scholastic principle of synderesis. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14384a.htm Specifically, one begins to reason from this first principle "In the field of moral conduct there are similar first principles of action, such as: "evil must be avoided, good done" and after a chain of reasoning one concludes therefrom that through immediate action the child should be rescued from being sodomized.

I would be interested in considering other groundings for an obligation to rescue under the circumstances in this case.
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Unlike Minnesota's law https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/?id ... +samaritan , Pennsylvania's Good Samaritan law does not impose an obligation to render aid in an emergency. It only grants an immunity from liability if someone decides to act. http://www.heartsafeam.com/files/Pennsy ... an_Act.pdf

http://www.iep.utm.edu/aqui-pol/#H1 ( see the 'Natural Law' section)

The Grand Jury report. Sandusky will be convicted.
http://abclocal.go.com/wpvi/feature?sec ... id=8421115

Enlightened self interest.

The person who doesn't intervene will then suffer years of regret and shame, or they will have to deaden their soul to avoid the regret and shame. The person who does intervene will experience empowerment and pride. Not a complicated calculation.

The obligation is imposed by society, out of it's self interest. None of us want to live in a world where children and other innocents do not occupy a special status. It's in our interest to put social pressure upon those in a position to intervene.

I grew up in a football culture, played the game throughout my youth, and thus am familiar with the lessons in manhood the game tries to teach. The Penn State story clearly illustrates there is more to manhood than big muscles and public success. Hopefully this sad story will be used to better teach the next generation of young men about what manhood really is.

Finally, I feel we should be wary about over analyzing such topics. I know that philosophers are rightfully averse to taking anything on faith, but there really is a valid role for faith in some key aspects of human life. I don't mean religious faith, but moral clarity.

The appropriate response to child rape is not to sit back in the academic ivory tower arm chair, puff wisely upon our pipes, and use such events for our intellectual entertainment.

The appropriate response to child rape is instinctive gut level decisive action.

The Penn State coaches and University officials tried to use their clever heads to react to this situation, and it got them in a boat load of trouble.

If they had used their hearts instead, if they had acted instinctively with decisive unblinking unambiguous moral clarity, they'd still have their jobs, and a number of kids would still have their innocence.

Reflection, analysis and intellectual entertainment is the not solution to every problem.

The point about our moral decisions is that they are not "intellectual". One does not witness something like a child rape and have to consider it from the perspective of consequentialism or Kant's categorical imperative to know such a thing is 'wrong'. Trolleyology provides a framework for constructing many situations where one's moral instinct is at odds with what is 'objectively' better.

I think one reason why 'formal' theories of morality or ethics can seem unsatisfactory is that we are born (or develop) a 'moral sense', a 'good/bad discriminator module' in our brains that tells us (ie our conscious selves) what is good and what is bad, without us understanding or knowing the basis on which that 'brain module' makes such a discrimination.

One sees something that is morally bad and one immediately feels revulsion - only later would reasons for that revulsion come to mind - and those later thoughts will be rationalisations (not reasons) for our revulsion. Our 'moral sense' (presumably) evolved because it provided a Darwinian benefit, but as with anything that has evolved by natural selection we cannot expect it to be 'perfect' - we can tell 'good' from 'bad' well enough for us to survive as a species, but we can't rely on our moral sense to coincide precisely with some external, Platonic morality.

It is hard to square morality (the existence of good and bad) with naturalism. Many people go as far as saying that there is "no such thing" as good and bad, that good and bad are categories defined by convention. I find 'moral relativism' unsatisfactory as it implies that genocide (or child rape) are only bad because of convention or consensus! I think that it quite likely that good and evil have an external Platonic existence and our moral sense allow us limited access to a Platonic, "moral reality", just as our other (regular) senses allow us limited access to "physical reality".

We may need a formal theory of ethics to get an even better approximation to Platonic morality, but I think our moral sense is not seriously at variance with Platonic morality, at least for most 'normal' people!

Nice post!



If anything good can be said about Hitler, it might be that he was intellectually honest about his naturalist position. He was the predator, and everybody else the prey. Clear minded, forthright, consistent, and grounded in reality.

The problem of course is that his position, clear as it was, would have inevitably led to the destruction of human civilization. Such a purist naturalist view can not survive the technological era.

As you said, we get this at a deep fundamental level. Some part of our dog pack genetics understands that we sink or swim together, and thus morality of some kind is necessary to maintain the bonds between us.

It seems there should be some core elements of a common moral system that we can agree on without a lot of endless hand wringing. If the protection of children isn't such a thing, I don't know what would be.

Speaking of applied ethics, you people are convicting somebody without a trial, where all the evidence is presented to a jury. You are are convicting somebody based solely on sensationalized news stories from grand jury testimony provided by the prosecution. The man was investigated in 1998 by Penn State campus police, by the city police and by the county district attorney, and no charges were ever filed. The only people we know for a fact that were morally challenged are the myriad of people at the university and elsewhere who didn't follow through on their original suspicions.

I haven't actually paid much attention to the story. So I don't know who or what was involved, leave alone who is at fault and why. I am aware of the problem that we never get the full picture. Almost everything we are presented with is 'spun' to some degree, whether it is alleged child abuse in an American university or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

But what to do? One can avoid taking any stance at all or try to sift the facts from the spin. It's so easy to uncritically accept information that suits one's preferences - I think it's called confirmation bias - that nowadays while I try to avoid doing that, I am not sure I succeed very well. Getting the balance between skepticism and close-mindness is not as easy as it sounds.

keithprosser2 wrote:

Well said!

Fred Gohlke

On what aspect? Sandusky's actions or the attempted cover up? There really doesn't seem to be that much to debate about either. It could well be that the moral duty to intervene is down to 'synderesis', but I prefer Anglo-Saxon to Greek so I put it down to it being 'bloody obvious'.

No one comes out of that mess looking good. Why did 'synderesis' fail to operate in this case for so long? There were factors - at least in the mind of those attempting to cover-up or minimise Sandusky's immorality - that overrode what one would expect a normal 'moral agent' to do. Such is the effect of the rational mind - we evolved such a thing precisely so we could override our instinctive reactions. It is perhaps pertinent that in this case - and perhaps many others - our 'rationality' is almost as much of a curse as it is a blessing.

Well, that's my sermon over with for now. What is that you really want to talk about in this case?