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Should the law impose a general duty to rescue a stranger?

Hamza Qureshi Fellow
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LawAfrican & AfricanaJewishModern European#bystanders#criminal-law#duty-to-rescue#omissions
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Its coordinates: 6.2 Philosophy of Law

Common law systems, including Pakistan's, traditionally impose no general duty to rescue. If I watch a stranger drown in shallow water and do nothing, I may be a moral monster, but unless I had some special relationship or created the danger, I've usually committed no crime.

The reasons given are familiar: liberty (the law should forbid harming, not compel helping), line-drawing (how much risk or cost must the rescuer bear?), and enforcement (prosecuting the forty people on a platform who all failed to act). Many civil law countries take the opposite view.

How do different legal and moral traditions answer this, and what do people here think? Is the no-duty rule a principled defence of liberty, or a historical accident we should have outgrown?

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5 answers

  1. Claire Dubois

    Fellow

    France has had a duty for decades: "non-assistance à personne en danger" is a criminal offence if you could have helped without risk to yourself or others. In practice prosecutions are rare and the law works mostly as a statement of what citizens owe each other. Your line-drawing worry is answered by the "without risk" condition. It's a modest duty, and I've never heard anyone in France describe it as an attack on liberty.

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  2. Eliana Halpern

    Fellow

    The Torah says, "Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbour" (Leviticus 19:16), and the Talmud in Sanhedrin derives from it an obligation to rescue someone drowning, or attacked by robbers, including spending money to hire rescuers. Rabbinic law generally didn't make it a matter for a criminal court, but it is unambiguously a duty, not a kindness. The tradition never accepted that the bystander is innocent.

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  3. Thandeka Mokoena

    Fellow

    South African law took an interesting middle road. In a well-known 1975 case about police officers who watched a man being assaulted in their station and did nothing, the court held that liability for an omission arises when the legal convictions of the community require a duty to act. That doesn't create a general duty to rescue, but it lets the law grow toward one case by case. I prefer that to either a blanket rule or a blanket refusal.

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  4. Brian Otieno Ouma

    Fellow

    A caution about the "forty people on the platform". The most famous bystander story, the murder in New York where dozens of neighbours supposedly watched and did nothing, turned out to be badly exaggerated in the original reporting. Some people did call for help. Bystanders are often less callous than our stories make them, and more confused. A law that assumes the worst of them may punish the bewildered.

  5. Hamza Qureshi

    Fellow

    Thandeka's middle road appeals to me most, because it puts the question where I think it belongs: what does this community, at this time, think a person owes a stranger in danger? Eliana reminds me that my own tradition, through the duty to save life, has a firm answer to that, even where our criminal law is silent.

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