Omitting and responsibility

People are responsible for what they do but are they also responsible for what they omit to do? That’s what I want to discuss in this blog.
Omitting is not acting in a situation where you could have acted. Omitting can also be described as allowing that something happens. A man beats his wife and nobody interferes. A child has fallen in a canal and a passer-by who sees it refrains from jumping after her or looking for help. There can be good reasons for doing nothing but if someone refrains from acting where s/he could and should, we call it “omission” and s/he can be blamed for it. If that’s right, we can ask the question of responsibility also in cases of omitting, and not only when someone actively performs an action.
Take now these cases:
Case 1: Victim is drowning and Agent is the only person around. The sea is infested with sharks and Agent just had seen one swimming by. Agent decides not to spring in the water and help Victim, and Victim dies. Since it would have been almost certain that the sharks would have attacked Agent and would have prevented Agent from saving Victim, I think that nobody will blame Agent for omitting to act and hold him responsible for the death of Victim.
Case 2: Same situation but agent does not know that the sea is infested with sharks and he hasn’t seen one. Again Agent decides to do nothing and Victim dies. Is Victim to be blamed for that and to be hold responsible for Victim’s death? Some philosophers say “no”, for the death of Victim couldn’t have been prevented, anyhow. As Willemsen (2020), p. 233 (who doesn’t endorse this view as such) explains: “In order to be morally responsible for the consequences of an omission … the agent needs to be able to perform a relevant action that would have prevented the outcome”, and that’s not the case. Although this sounds reasonable, nevertheless it’s a bit counterintuitive and I think that many readers of this blog will not agree.
What’s the problem then? Why are we hesitating to say that in Case 2 Agent is not responsible for Victim’s death? In order to make this clear, let’s look a bit closer at the cases. Then we see that they are different in an important way. In Case 1 Agent refrained from acting because it would have made no sense to do so and he knew it. If he had tried to save Victim and had sprung in the sea, sharks would have attacked him and might have killed him. Therefore, his omitting to act was involuntarily. Case 2 says nothing about the reasons why Agent didn’t act, but given the description of the case as it is, it would have been reasonable for Agent to spring in the water, for he didn’t know about the sharks. At least he could have tried to save Victim. The sharks would have attacked him and let’s hope that he would have escaped, but Agent in Case 2 didn’t know that this could happen. So, it’s true that Agent in Case 2 cannot be held responsible – at least morally responsible – for the death of Victim, but we can hold him (morally) responsible for not having tried to safe Victim. In Case 1, however, Agent knew already in advance that trying to save Victim would have no sense, and so for him trying was no option. Therefore Agent cannot be held (morally) responsible for not having given it a try in Case 1.
In an important sense we cannot hold Agent responsible for Victim’s death in both cases: He didn’t bring him in his perilous situation. Nonetheless, we can ask whether Agent was morally responsible for Victim’s death in the sense that Agent could have prevented it. When doing so we must realize that “moral responsibility” can be understood in two ways. It can refer to the results or consequences of an action (consequential moral responsibility) or it can refer to the action as such (actional responsibility). In the former sense Agent is not responsible for Victim’s death, neither in Case 1, nor in Case 2. In Case 2, however, we can hold Agent responsible in the latter sense, while in Case 1 nothing can be held against Agent that way. 

Source and inspiration
- Pascale Willemsen, “The Relevance of Alternate Possibilities for Moral Responsibility for Actions and Omissions”, in Tania Lombrozo, Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (eds.), Oxford Studies in Experimental Philosophy. Volume Three. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; pp. 232-274.