On the Obligation to Keep Informed about Distant Atrocities

Abstract

One must know about far away moral atrocities if one is to attempt to remedy them. Ignorance of these atrocities is at times a legitimate excuse for failure to make such attempts but not generally. It certainly is not a legitimate excuse when one deliberately keeps oneself uninformed of major atrocities; an example of such a person would be the well-educated, refined hedonist whose world revolves, by conscious choice, around private pleasure. On the other hand, it is a legitimate excuse in many cases when one simply lacks the means for being informed; an example of such would be the seriously underprivileged, culturally deprived, illiterate person. But what about the cases of those people who fall somewhere between these two extremes? What about the single mother, working full-time as a nurse, who takes care of her children's needs most of the remainder of her hours? What about the young businessman almost wholly preoccupied with his struggle to make it in the business world? What about the medical student whose workload saps her of all desire to look at additional printed pages? What about the secretary whose after-work life is dedicated to cultivating her interest in French literature? What about the real estate agent in constant pursuit of new listings and loan agreements, who finds barely enough time to spend with her family? What about the small farmer in whose circle of friends and relatives questions about what might be happening in China, Brazil, or Mozambique do not come up? Is their relative ignorance of major moral atrocities excusable? Is their consequent inaction excusable? This is the issue I would like to explore in this essay. My claim will be that this type of ignorance is not excusable in most cases of average Westerners and of average US citizens in particular. Consequently this ignorance does not excuse their doing nothing about large-scale abuses. Consider the events in East Timor during the last fifteen years. They constitute a typical major moral atrocity. The choice of this example is recommended by a number of factors: (1) the relative magnitude of the evil;