I don't think it's my week to post, but I really wanted there to be something about David Cash considering the magnitude of his particular story. After we learned about the ultimate bystander, I was kinda confused and pretty appalled, so I did a little research. I was disgusted to read about Cash and some remarks he made after the incident, including that the media attention helped him to "score with women" and that he would sell the movie rights to his story because, "I'm no idiot… I'll get my money out of this."
-Do you think Cash's social exclusion and the public shame is enough to punish him for choosing to not prevent the rape and murder of Sherrice Iverson?
-Do you think Good Samaritan laws should exist?
-Does Cash have the freedom and right to be a bystander in this incident?
-What can we do to prevent bystanders in not only crimes such as Sherrice Iverson's murder, but in genocide as well? How can the idea of being an upstander be promoted or more practiced?
-Do you think race had a role in this incident or the aftermath? Should it?
Here are a few articles I found:
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/fikes.html
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4785
http://www.pub.umich.edu/daily/1998/sep/09-30-98/edit/edit5.html
11 comments:
Yes I feel that public exclusion and critisiscm is enough to punish him and is probably all that anyone has the right to do. Cash clearly comes off to anyone with a pulse as being a selfish and heartless person. But, as the District Attorney said during the David Cash movie concerning Good Samaritan Laws, people do not want them and they are far too difficult to enforce for them to be practical. There is a certain level of moral oblgation we have to report violent crimes, and the fact that he failed to act is awful yes, but he committed no act himself and should not be punished by the hand of the courts.
Preventing witnesses from not reporting violent crimes is difficult. One would hope that all people would feel the responsibility to report violent crimes. Anyone who does not report one is someone of questionable moral character and is an exception to the norm. However, in the case of genocides when wholesale manipulation of the facts behind the genocide or dehumanization of the enemy has taken place because of the perpetrators, it is hard to say how to reverse this. Promoting people being upstanders is like telling people to donate to charity, or to do community service. There is a certain kind of person who finds these things rewarding, while other kinds of people see it as a waste of time. "Why put myself in danger to save people I don't even know?" To promote upstanding behavior, we must place a value on these things that is tangible. To create an absolute shift in thought is nearly impossible however.
Cash's public shame is pretty big as witnessed in the movie. Since there is no law that states what he did was wrong, I think that this is a pretty severe punishment. think about how many people openly oppose what he did?
I think that good Samaritan laws should exist, but it would be really hard to legislate morality. Everyone has a different definition of what "morality" is. There is no fine line between what is moral and what isn't. I think that this situation relates to what should or shouldn't be censored on the internet. Something like this would be really hard to enforce, but I think it should happen after seeing all the hateful messages people leave for anyone to see.
This is Thomas Mallon.
But public censoring is the same as state censoring: the public is the state. If the public feels it is justified then by definition the state must feel the same. If you think the state does not have a right to, you must think that the public does not have a right to. If the reverse, then the reverse. I think he should be punished in thsi case because he could have stopped it without placing himself in physical danger; all he had to do was stop his fried. I do not believe it is justified to punish people for not endangering themselves, however.
I'm not sure I agree with Thom's comment that the public is the state. The state deals with what is political and legal - in this case, allowing Cash to remain free. The public has very much to do with society and social norms and what is considered to be socially acceptable - in the case, not preventing a brutal murder is not socially acceptable.
I wanted to pose some questions about "legislating morality" because Tal, Coe, and I had an interesting discussion about this after class the other day. If our laws are not based on morals, then what are they based on? For example, why are there laws against murder, stealing, and rape? Don't these laws already legislate morality? What is the difference between the immoral nature of murder and the immoral nature of being a bystander?
the prosecutor in the video said that we can't "legislate morality," but obviously, as melanie pointed out, we do.
as wrong as this sounds, there is nothing wrong with murder... except when you think about it morally. if we were taught violence from the beginning (perhaps) we would all be killing each other right now. one of the only places i can think of where murder is defined as "wrong" is in the Bible... (or other religious works...)
i guess the difference between a perpetrator and a bystander is that the perpetrator (wow, this word is really hard to type...)actually DOES something to hurt someone while the bystander doesn't do anything to directly hurt people.
the question is... can we hold people responsible if they HAVEN'T done anything? and who has the right to judge? also, how is this kind of "legislating morality" different from legislating other moral issues, such as abortion?
-coe
Hi this is Casey.
I just watched the movie today and was also appalled at not only the actions of Cash, but also what he had to say in the aftermath of the incident.
In response to Melissa's question regarding Cash's freedom and right to be a bystander in the situation, I think that as much as it is disheartening to know that he saw what was happening to Sherrice and did nothing, there is no law or rule that states that he had to intervene. He had just as much of a right to be a bystander as he did to be an upstander in the situation. While I do not believe what he did was right, I also think that to demand "Good Samaritan" laws is not a practical solution because placing laws on people's morals is infringing on their freedom. Also, as we discussed in the end of class today, there is no way of knowing that if Cash had intervened that the outcome would have been any different. In that sense, "Good Samaritan" laws do not guarantee that every individual can be saved from situations like this.
This also made me think about the idea of applying the notion of helping others to the idea of one nation helping another, as we talked about at the end of class today. How does a nation decide to intervene in the affairs of another nation in the form of aid, as many nations are doing now is Sudan? Should some nations feel obliged to help other nations or is it ultimately the decision of each individual nation whether or not to help?
We briefly discussed the answer to Casey's questions in F block today. Once a nation claims that an act of mass violence (such as Darfur) is a genocide, that's when they start to give aid. (I hope I got this correct.....)The thing that bothered me the most was that if one person (in power of course) sees an attack as a genocide, then the whole country has to follow this claim up. As Rachel pointed out in class today, who decides when something's a genocide? As for Sudan, we are currently involved in trying to stop the genocide because our government has identified the problem as a genocide. Countries that deny that the genocide exists are going to remain uninvolved and not give any aid.
Labeling an event can be very powerful as Ms. Finn pointed out in class today. It was mentioned that currently, Turkey wants to join the European Union, but they will not be allowed to unless they label what they did to the Armenians back in 1915 as a genocide.
Since it's my blog week, I'm also going to post later tonight about what we did in class this week and my reflections.....
I thought that it was really interesting to learn about the steps that a country has to take once they have declared genocide. The interesting thing is, now that the US has declared genocide has it taken enough steps to help?
Ms. Finn also mentioned that since the Genocide convention there have been 17 declared genocides. if the purpose, according to the power text, was to stop genocides before they reached a large scale how have there been so many genocides fairly recently? Furthermore, since the UN is a group of nations who have all signed that genocide is bad and needs to be stopped, how come when one country declares a genocide don't all of the nations in the UN have to act at least on whatever level they can?
Just to go back to the original post about David Cash, I also think that public exclusion is enough punishment. I don't believe that he can be legally held responsible for being a bystander, because technically he did nothing wrong. I mentioned in class that I believe the laws are meant for punishing people who did something wrong, not people who didn't do something right. I don't think there should be a morality code or law, because as Aileen mentioned, it's really unrealistic. There are so many different views on morality and what is right and wrong. This also brought me to a similar place as Melanie, the fact that if our laws are not based on morality, what are they based on? Who decided that murder and stealing was wrong? It was clearly someones definition of morality, because I'm sure many theifs, rapists and murderers may not share the same ideas. Good question Melanie, I too would like to know that answer.
This is aaron hui. i agree i think with melanie, tal, and coe, in terms of bystanding, perpetrating, and the morality of it all. I think for me, in a sense that David Cash is really similar to nations today and from the past in relation to Genocides that were going on in foreign countries, and how that distance and lack of emotional connection (like a lot of people mentioned in the H block class) had to do with the neglect and lack of action from outside nations to stop the perpetrators. I think that if i were David Cash, i would have stopped my friend because even though it didn't look like murder,growing up in San Francisco, i would have known that an 19 year old and a 7 year old in a bathroom is a little gross... so even if i didn't think it was murder, i would have intervened anyway because the picture i think of with two poeple of completely differnet age groups is a little disturbing. Basically, in a sense i think that bystanding can be harmful to countries and in a sense, contributing to the genocide. In a sense, by bystanding in global crises we are allowing ourselves to be punsihed because by not stopping perpetrators because of distance or other factors, what are we telling the world? What are we telling to ourselves? What are we justifying by allowing genocides to occur?
sorry this is aaron hui again, i thought my post was a little vague, and so i wanted to clear it up and also to add to the end about how bystanding is almost telling others and future generations that it's OK to have genocides, and that it's justified because no one has opposed it.
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