It is a warm summer day at the beach. Still, as it is early in the day, there are only half a dozen people within a hundred yards, and several of them are small children. The adults are sunning themselves on blankets, one child is playing in the sand and another in the surf. A bright sun, a gentle breeze, clear water, white sand, a boat on the horizon, terns looking for crustaceans. You’ve been here many times. But something seems to be missing. You glance around. Then it occurs to you what it is. There has always been a sign warning people of a dangerous rip current not far from the waters edge at low tide — in fact, just feet away from where the child is playing alone in the surf. And even if the sign were in place, would the adults have noticed it? Could the child even read and understand it?
Now, you are a good swimmer, but you are not a lifeguard. Watching other people’s children is not why you come to the beach. The adults are thirty yards or so away, distracted as they rub lotion on each other. What do you do? Nothing? Something? Do you approach a small child — you, a stranger?
This post deals with the topic of a duty to warn and how this subject relates to everything from potentially dangerous situations to pertinent points of law to personal evangelism.
The reason I write this
I subscribe to a discussion group for college and university professors. I’m retired, but as a former professor and department chair, I sometimes offer advice to inexperienced professors on issues dealing with FERPA or Title IX, plagiarism and cheating, or personality conflicts among faculty. Most recently the Learning Management Systems (LMS) platform Canvas has been hijacked by some cyber-criminals, so I’m curious to see how that is playing out behind the scenes. Sometimes I offer informal and very general advice to college students who are failing to thrive academically or have questions about higher ed.
A young professor recently mentioned how, after the final exam in his class this spring, a student who had finished her final earlier walked into the classroom after the last student turned in his exam and approached the professor, telling him how much she enjoyed the class. She also mentioned something about Jesus. He didn’t quote her, but it was to the effect that Jesus loves him or that God has a plan for his life, and she wanted him to know that. Then she left. He confessed that he was taken completely by surprise (wouldn’t you be?) and didn’t know quite what to say. His post gathered seventy or eighty responses, and I wasn’t prepared for the intolerance, even viciousness, of some of the replies.
Many said it was unusual or inappropriate, and that point may be well taken, though the class was technically over and he might never run into her on campus again. Others said she sounded like a bigot or a religious fanatic and obviously doesn’t possess critical thinking skills. Another person wrote that it seemed to him as if she actually believed Jesus wanted her to talk to people about her faith. In fact, Jesus does. A few more wanted her reported to the administration for religious intolerance and disciplinary action if she had suggested her faith was superior to another’s or if she was pressuring him.
I’ve been in situations like this myself many times. All that was required here was a polite, albeit dismissive, remark from the professor. If a student invites me to visit their church, sign a petition, watch a revisionist history video, look at a treasure map they found in the bathroom of their dorm, or join Green Peace (whatever) I would give them the courtesy of a minute or two to hear what they had to say, then leave off with a benign remark like “You’ve certainly given me something to think about. Thank you.” If a sweet, studious co-ed wishes me “Hare Krishna” as she walks out the door for the last time and I find myself incensed, then I need to explore my feelings. Specifically, why am I offended?
About those rip currents . . .
While approximately 100 swimmers a year in the U.S. are killed by rip currents, survival is quite possible if you swim perpendicular to the current — that is, laterally to the shoreline. Before long you will break free of the current and be able to swim to shore uneventfully. But if you panic, you may perish.
Duty to Warn and the law
The term “duty to warn” has become law as it applies to an increasing number of hazardous situations. These include product liability (e.g., does a certain toy present a choking hazard to a toddler?); environmental science (for example, have any toxic chemicals been deposited on the land where you plan to build your home?); and personal and professional relationships (viz., does a parent have a responsibility to warn authorities if she finds notes indicating her son plans to harm his classmates?), among other circumstances. The law was originally codified in a landmark court case known as Tarasoff v. Regents of the University of California (1976). In this instance, the court held that when a patient threatened harm to a third person, the therapist’s duty to warn that possibly endangered person outweighed the protected confidentiality of the therapeutic relationship. In Tarasoff, the therapist was not instructed to take assertive action, but rather to refrain from concealing a credible threat against another person.
I was once in a somewhat similar situation. I had a part-time instructor who worked for me but who apparently had a bad temper, occasionally displayed in the classroom according to student complaints. Shortly after this he dropped off the map. Several years later I received a phone call from a public school superintendent in another state who was vetting this person for a full-time position. After a perfunctory exchange of information — dates of employment and the like — I was asked for a recommendation. I asked the superintendent what grade he would be teaching and was told second grade. I replied, “Let me tell you why you should hire this person,” and followed this with a long moment of silence. The superintendent replied, “Thank you, I understand,” and hung up.
Perhaps if my former employee had been applying to teach eleventh grade I would not have been as concerned. But I saw this as a duty-to-warn situation, though I was not certain it applied in academia, having heard of lawsuits filed by applicants over less than stellar recommendations on reference checks. I could say nothing negative, and so instead said nothing positive. On the one hand, my concern was for the safety of children I would never meet; on the other, I did not want to deny someone a job who might not be the same person I had known several years earlier.
Who has a legal duty to warn?
Physicians do, as do pharmacists, mental health professionals, financial planners, attorneys, and accountants. Manufacturers of food products have a duty to disclose exactly what ingredients go into their products, lest anyone with a peanut allergy unknowingly consume peanut products in trail mix and go into anaphylactic shock. Schools and universities must make their campus crime statistics public. Other individuals in our society may or may not fall under the law in this regard. But this deals with criminal and civil law requirements, not the moral requirements I will discuss shortly.
Put succinctly, as Tarasoff and related cases note, contemporary law in the U.S. creates a responsibility for companies and individuals with special knowledge of threats — such as extensive research by tobacco companies linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer — to make the public aware of these dangers when the public cannot ascertain the risk on their own. Tobacco executives might understand the moral responsibility to warn citizens, but if the scientists who ascertain the risk of cancer work for or are funded by the tobacco industry, then there is a conflict of interest between an industry that needs to sell cigarettes to continue operating while at the same time discouraging people from smoking. It takes the powers of government to compel compliance. Typically, penalties for failing to comply with a duty to warn are civil, such as fines. However, in egregious cases (such as an HIV-positive individual who repeatedly infects unsuspecting partners with the virus) the penalties can be criminal. Elder abuse and repeated incidents of child abuse can carry criminal penalties as well.
The argument from philosophy and ethics: Peter Singer
Peter Singer is one of the most prominent philosophers of the past half century. An atheist whose Jewish grandparents were murdered by the Nazis (presumably in the Łódź Ghetto during World War II), Singer’s parents fled to Australia. During his career he taught at several universities, including Oxford, New York University, the University of Melbourne, and Princeton. Singer introduced a nearly identical scenario to the one I presented — in his case, a drowning child in a shallow pond. In his own words he writes:
To challenge my students to think about the ethics of what we owe to people in need, I ask them to imagine that their route to the university takes them past a shallow pond. One morning, I say to them, you notice a child has fallen in and appears to be drowning. To wade in and pull the child out would be easy but . . . do you have any obligation to rescue the child? Unanimously, the students say they do. . . Does it make a difference, I ask, that there are other people walking past the pond who would equally be able to rescue the child but are not doing so? No, the students reply, the fact that others are not doing what they ought to do is no reason why I should not do what I ought to do.
This interventionist course of action should be intuitive to people of faith (e.g., Christians). What Singer is saying in the absence of any personal theistic notion is that if all things are equal, we should help the child whether others do or not, when or where it is convenient to us or not, whether the child is family or not family, even if we are not aquainted with the child or not. This is not something “above and beyond” our responsibility to others. Singer says that it is our responsibility to others.
Singer would note that the perile is real, whether there is a warning sign or not. And absent any sign, the observer has knowledge of the danger that other adults on the beach do not have. There is no personal cost for someone to help assuming they do not get caught up in the current themselves, and to do nothing could very well result in the dearth of the child.
But what if you are in an apartment and you hear a woman scream for help from the street or the aparrtment next door to you? Here the calculus is a bit different, because you cannot know whether there is any personal danger to you. Certainly if you intervene in that scenario you may face personal injury or death to yourself. But you can and should call 911.
The student likely saw danger to her professor
The danger is that because of sin and the angels who rebelled millennia ago, we have a spiritual reality attached to our physical reality that includes Hell — a place of torment for any entities (i.e., rational agents) that refuse God’s love and the sacrifice of His Son Jesus as atonement for their sins. The Watchers refused. The demons refused. And so did perhaps millions of humans over the ages. It was never God’s intention or desire to see mortals such as us winding up alongside mutinous angels and depraved demons in a place of torment. Instead, God has created Heaven for those who care enough to embrace the True Faith. Beyond that, I will postpone the curious or heated questions and objections people often raise for another post. But the unvarnished truth is this: if you read these words and do not respond to God in your heart of hearts — in the privacy and secrecy of your own inner self — your soul’s well-being is in jeopardy. Heaven may be beyond your reach when you die, no matter how many good things you have done in this life, because good works are not the criteria. This is simply how the universe is. Good people die as they lose their balance on a balcony and gravity pulls them to their death at 55 mph (88 kph). Benevolent lives are lost to stray bullets in mass shootings. Well-intentioned individuals die trusting in some obscure deity or political point of view to grant them access to Nirvana. Christians die as well — but if they truly love God and trust in Jesus, there is ultimately a different destination that they arrive at. An alternate outcome. God wants you to choose this destination, and so do I. In a moral sense, I have a duty to warn even as the student did. Consider this my warning that I offer in gentleness and respect.
What can we say about the co-ed mentioning Jesus to her professor?
Jesus places a responsibility over all of his followers to share God’s love and salvation with others. How we do this is left to our circumstances and abilities, but it is folly for a Christian to ask God whether to approach someone about this when He already has laid it down in His so-called “great Commission” (Matthew 28:19) “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations . . .” And when we do this, it should be “with gentleness and respect” per I Peter 3:15. But lest anyone think we can completely ignore this, they should read Ezekiel 3:17-19. Here, the people in Israel are in mortal danger, and God tells Ezekiel that his responsibility is to warn the people of their peril. Whether they listen or not is a different story and has nothing to do with Ezekiel. But if Ezekiel does not do so and the people do not realize their predicament, then Ezekiel is in some sense culperable. So this is a typology. The threat to the city does not come from Persian or Syrian armies, but from a cultural drift, a philosophy or politik that is hostile to God. And this is why the student received so much “shade” from faculty members who weighed in.
This responsibility, this message is not always welcome. Many of God’s prophets and all of the apostles except one met violent deaths. Are we to fear then hurting someone’s feelings or spoiling their meal for asking to say grace at the table? You probably won’t come to any physical harm in the U.S. for taking a stand, but there are Christians in countries abroad who are marked for death by terrorist groups.
Afterword
The student above approached her professor with “gentleness and respect.” She probably wasn’t a Bible scholar, but even a five-year old can tell people that “God loves them” or “Jesus wnts to meet them in Heaven”. The Holy Spirit takes it from there. While some might see the student as cowardly, she did an incredibly brave thing. Her faith led her to understand that things of the spirit are not commonly known to others that are unaware of spiritual principles. And the fact that some of the professors who responded to the thread were disproportionately angry suggests that they are the ones who are intolerant and would suppress her freedom of speech. Her professor’s autonomy was not violated which could only mean that the distress of commenting faculty was directed at her message and not singularly the messenger. I’ll leave it up to the Holy Spirit and the reader’s conscience on how to apply this verse to their own lives. But there should be no doubt, because In extremis even the stones would cry out (Luke 19:40).
If you enter your comments or questions at the bottom of the page, I will be most happy to address them.
