Responsibility & Suicide
Tyler Clementi, a student at Rutgers, committed suicide after his roommate Dharun Ravi and another student, Molly Wei, allegedly posted a video of Clementi’s sexual encounter with another male.
Ravi and Lei have been charged with invasion of privacy and not with Clementi’s death. From a legal standpoint, this is to be expected. After all, establishing a legal causal link between the release of the video and his death would be rather difficult.
My main interest in the matter is not the legal aspect of the case, but rather the moral aspect. That is, the degree to which Ravi and Lei might be morally responsible for Clementi’s death. I am qualifying this because Ravi and Lei have not been convicted and hence they are merely accused of the crime at this point.
While the matter of legal responsibility is distinct from that of ethical responsibility, the legal theory of causation does have some use here. I am, obviously enough, availing myself of the notion of conditio sine qua non (“a condition without which nothing”) as developed by H.L.A. Hart and A.M. Honore.
Roughly put, this is the “but for” view of causation. X can be seen as the cause of Y if Y would not have happened but for X. This seems like a reasonable place to begin for moral responsibility. After all, if someone would not have died but for my actions (that is, if I had not done X, then the person would still be alive) then there seems to be an intuitive plausible reason that I am responsible for the person’s death.
If Wei and Ravi did, in fact, post the video in question and Clementi did, in fact, kill himself because of the video being posted, then it seems likely that Cleminiti would be alive today but for the posting. As such, Wei and Ravi would thus seem to be (potentially) responsible for his death and thus morally culpable.
However, there are clearly degrees of culpability. While the video being posted might have been a causal factor in the suicide, the causal link is far weaker than it would have been if, say, the accused had pushed Clementi off the bridge.
One obvious reason is that suicide is a matter of choice. While this choice was probably influenced by the release of the video, Clementi would not be dead if he had not decided to kill himself(assuming he did so). This would certainly seem to reduce the moral responsibility of the the two people who allegedly posted the video. In contrast, if the two people had pushed him from the bridge against his will, then he would have no morally significant causal role in his own death and the moral responsibility would be fully upon them.
It might be argued that the two people who allegedly posted the video should have known what was going to happen and hence this makes them more responsible for the death. However, this seems implausible. It is reasonable to expect that a person would be outraged by such a posting or perhaps even horribly embarrassed. As such, they can be accused of invading his privacy and even with acting with an intent to create emotional harm. However, since suicide is not a likely reaction to such an action, those who posted it cannot be reasonably expected to have believed that Clementi would kill himself.
To use an analogy, while people should not throw snowballs at other people, a person who throws one generally cannot be taken as throwing the snowball with an intent to kill. After all, snowballs generally do not do that. Naturally, the snowball analogy is not a perfect fit-if someone is killed by a thrown snowball, then the causal connection in the death is much stronger than in the case of a video that allegedly contributed to a suicide.
Of course, if the accused did know that Clementi was likely to respond by committing suicide, then the matter changes. To use the snowball analogy, if someone throws a snowball at someone who is likely to die from being hit by one, then they can be reasonably regarded as intending to cause the person’s death-or at least not being overly concerned with that possibility. Of course, this analogy breaks at a certain point-after all, suicide is a chosen behavior and dying when hit with a snowball is not. As such, even if the accused did know that Clementi was likely to kill himself, his death would still be ultimately a matter of his own choice. This factor of choice seems to be rather morally significant in the matter at hand.
Overall, it seems clear that creating and posting such a video was wrong. However, it also seems clear that the moral culpability of the accused is very limited in regards to the suicide. At most, the actions of the accused could be seen as a contributory cause in regards to the motivation to commit suicide.
A Philosopher's Blog 
Clementi hadn’t come out before this inciden had he. How damn dense did Wei and RAvi have to be to not foresee some of the direst possible consequences from outing a young person on “the internets”. What’s your responsibility if you fire a gun into the air, the bullets ricochet and kill some people.
Wei and Ravi, assuming they did it, could reasonably infer that such a posting would cause anger and embarrassment. Now, as per your analogy, it could be argued that there is an extremely low probability that a posted video can play a causal role in someone’s decision to commit suicide. However, the question is whether that possibility is enough to ground a claim that they should have known about that outcome. To use another analogy, if I get angry an throw a frisbee at someone, it is reasonable for me to think it might sting a bit. True, it could hit them just right so that they stumble and crack their head open on the sidewalk. However, it would seem odd to say that I should foresee that sort of thing, given the incredibly low possibility. In the case of video postings leading to suicides, that seems to be extremely uncommon-especially given the volume of such postings.
This is not to say that the accused would be morally blameless. Violating a person’s privacy and causing such emotional harm are serious matters and they should, if found guilty, be punished. But, even if they did what they are accused of doing, they did not kill him. At most, they provided a motivating factor in his decision to kill himself.
“even if the accused did know that Clementi was likely to kill himself, his death would still be ultimately a matter of his own choice.” I agree, but what if they knew that if he didn’t kill himself, his father would disown him or beat him to death or send him away to work in a radioactive fire?
“Roughly put, this is the “but for” view of causation. X can be seen as the cause of Y if Y would not have happened but for X. This seems like a reasonable place to begin for moral responsibility. After all, if someone would not have died but for my actions (that is, if I had not done X, then the person would still be alive) then there seems to be an intuitive plausible reason that I am responsible for the person’s death.”
Maybe I don’t understand the concept, this is the first time I hear of it, but doesn’t that mean that if a cashier in a supermarket sells a melon to a person who gets hit by a car while eating the melon instead of paying attention to traffic then the cashier is held responsible because without his/her action the accident would not have happened.
You have the concept right. As you point out, one rather important matter is sorting out the extent of responsibility. From a legal standpoint, the answer is (as always) what the side with the better lawyer says. More seriously, the correct process would be to hash out the degree of blame. In the case of the melon, the person eating it is responsible for paying attention and being distracted by a melon is not the fault of the clerk. However, some states do have laws that hold bars accountable when their customers drive drunk.
No, that’s not what it means. The cashier didn’t have any reason to believe that the driver would eat the melon while driving, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with selling melons in the first place.
What this incident shows is that our society is losing its understanding of privacy. The right to privacy is fundamental to individual liberty, and too many governments, corporations, and social networking participants are destroying this right. We need to hold on to the idea that some things are not our business and that each person has the right to boundaries.
The only person to know what Tyler Clementi was thinking is dead now.
We don’t know what his problems were. It is assumed that his video performance was the reason, but who knows what else was wrong? Were drugs involved? Maybe the performance was the straw that broke the camels back, and who knows what the bricks were?
This is getting a lot of attention because of the sensational circumstances. It seems like everyone who read an article about it online is an expert. The truth is that we know next to nothing.
We know
Clementi was a homosexual.
He hadn’t outed himself.
He’s dead. Cause-suicide.
Cause of suicide as yet unknown though sequence of events immediately leading to it seem pretty clear and might become clearer as evidence is gathered-if this goes to court.
Wei and Ravi filmed the homosexual event.
They put it on the inernet.
They are to be presumed not guilty at this time. Are they to be presumed not stupid?
They’re alive.
Their intent can be questioned and should be.
This is the facebook generation. Who isn’t aware of the speed and breadth of the spread of true and false information on the web and within and without social circles Two current movies Easy A and the Social Network deal with the subject directly and indirectly.
Most people who aren’t complete fools are aware of the possible effects of being labeled a homosexual in a culture where homosexuals are still occasionally being dragged behind trucks.
We know
Enough to pursue this further.
It seems unlikely that the accused intended the death of Clementi. However, I do not know them and only have the information in the media to go by.
Yes, those who made and released the video should have been aware that such a video would probably hurt Clementi. After all, almost no one would want a sex video of themselves posted to the internet (straight or gay). If found guilty, they should be punished for their crime-invasion of privacy.
True, unless he left a detailed not behind, it will be rather difficult to reconstruct his complete motivations.
The “but for” test in tort law generally refers to a series of events with one contributing factor that turns the series from the innocuous to the disastrous. The point is that the tortfeasor need only be responsible for the one event that “but for” its occurrence would not have lead the chain of events to a harmful conclusion.
A corollary test is proximity. It works like this: say I need to get to a business meeting to close a big deal. I get a taxi driver who is an unusually careful driver, and because of this I miss the meeting and lose millions. The driver is not responsible because there is no proximal connection between his laudable conduct (safe driving) and my missing the meeting. The proximal cause is my failure to allow enough time to get to the meeting and to be careful to ensure I have plenty of time.
So the question is, did the two students perform an action that “but for” its happening the third student would not kill himself? Perhaps, but you would need to show proximity between the act and the result, without other more proximal factors intervening, like for example depression, suicidal thoughts, strong taunts by other students, or similar things.
Tort law also applies a third corollary of the “but for” test, and that is something called the thin-skull rule. Let’s say you throw the hypothetical snowball, and it hits someone who has a thin skull, brittle bones or whatever. The same snowball that would annoy an average person, would kill or injure a vulnerable one. The law is clear in that regard: You take your victim where you find him (or her). If your snowball kills the vulnerable pedestrian, you are liable for wrongful death.
In summary, there is no easy answer here. Quite apart from moral culpability, it is often difficult to quantify the amount of fault (blameful cause) in the objective sense because the relation between a particular causal event or series of events and the ultimate effect is often uncertain.
There is no question that Ravi and Wei are morally responsible for Clementi’s death.
I would agree that if they posted the video, then they acted as a contributory cause. As such, they are morally culpable to the degree that they contributed to his death.
As chamblee54 and others point out, there are potentially a number of other factors that could have contributed to TC deciding to kill himself. The society’s attitude toward homosexuality being one, but also the society’s attitude toward suicide itself could be a factor. In a society that is willing to spread the blame to other people for the actions of the only person who could have realistically prevented TC taking his life, couldn’t that have been the straw? Would it not be possible that if TC lived in a society that viewed suicide more negatively, he would still be alive today?
I am not arguing that Ravi and Wei are not responsible for their actions, I would regard them as being similar to a drunk driver who kills someone standing in the middle of a busy street. I understand the differences are significant in regard to the crime of DUI, I’m just arguing the moral, not legal, weight.
Drunk drivers are by definition impaired. Ravi and Wei’s impairment?
And why choose to describe Clementis role as standing in the middle of the street? That’s more irresponsibility than any news reports so far would attribute to him. News reports Ive read said the filming was done without his knowledge. W/o his permission. Using your comparision R and W would have had to “swerve” drunkenly in his direction as he moved among the crowd. My opinion, drunk drivers get alot more compassion than they deserve. Seems like you’re aiming for the same for R&W
Drunk drivers choose to be impaired. R&W chose to be a-holes, combined with possessing an impairment of insensitivity.
And as I said “I understand the differences are significant in regard to the crime of DUI, I’m just arguing the moral, not legal, weight”
But just to be clearer, one could be in the middle of a busy street and not be acting irresponsibly. My point is that even in DUI cases, sometimes the accident would have happened regardless of the driver’s impairment.
Also, as I said “I am not arguing that Ravi and Wei are not responsible for their actions”, that goes for (not) deserving compassion as well. I was only speaking of the moral “weight”…as I said.
I also defer to Greg Camp’s comment above concerning their invasion of TC’s privacy, something done with willful intent with the full knowledge of how and why this was wrong. To me, that is a lesson from this tragedy that needs to be amplified.
An interesting side-note/grenade to this whole issue is the cultural backgrounds of R & W and what influence that may have had on their attitudes and perceptions of what they were doing. Of course it could also be nil. Again, I AM NOT seeking to make excuses. They themselves are responsible for their actions. I am a strong believer in that the people who take action are responsible for their actions.
Wei’s lawyers are now claiming she is innocent and that there is a considerable amount of misinformation surrounding this case. Of course such a claim is not surprising, but let’s consider this hypothetical…suppose she is innocent and suppose the pressure and hate that she is being subjected to were to push her to do something drastic. Who would be responsible then? Us?
Are the pressure and hate and ridicule Clementi as a homosexual might have been exposed to as a result of universal exposure of his (wonder if rev Fred Phelps would protest at Clementi’s funeral) equatable to whatever Wei might experience?
I wouldn’t pretend to know this. Would you? On the one hand TC’s burden would be personally intense but localized to those who knew him, but that would have been tempered by some degree of support. W’s is world-wide rage, death wishes, and I would guess death threats, though I haven’t explicity heard of such, just the “implied” kind.
Of course my point is, in the HYPOTHETICAL, yet possibly real, situation described, neither deserve what they have to put up with.
I answer your questions, any interest in discussing mine or is your mind already made up?
I see wei’s experience more akin to that of a heterosexual woman filmed during sex, having the vid spread worldwide, and her being embarrassed because she’s got visible cellulite than it is akin to anything Clementi might have felt. More speculation: if they hadn’t outed C on the worldwide web, would he have committed suicide that day?
You’re right no one can guess reasons for a suicide. Maybe C had been molested by a priest. As per Wei, let’s wait til she commits suicide to speculate what the cause may have been.
The video seems to be a likely causal factor and probably a strong one. I suspect that he would probably not be dead now but for the video being released. But, his suicide was also a matter of choice-the video was not a sufficient causal factor in his death, since he could have done otherwise (that is, not jumped).
Brings up an impt. parallel question. Was his homosexuality a matter of choice?
Excellent question.
I’ve written on this before, but a simple version of my view is that sexual behavior is chosen (that is, what a person does) and sexual orientation is largely not chosen. So, if “being a homosexual” is taken as a predisposition, then it is most likely not primarily a matter of choice (although our preferences can be affected by what we chose in life). If “being a homosexual” is taken as engaging in the relevant sexual acts, then it is a matter of choice. The same applies to being a heterosexual.
While I am not a psychologist, the most plausible hypothesis is that sexual preference seems to be innate, although environmental factors can influence people. I am inclined to go with the spectrum view, that sexuality is not a pure dichotomy. So, a person might be inclined to be straight, but elect to favor partners of the same sex. These choices might eventually condition the person to regard himself/herself as being homosexual rather than bi-sexual or straight. In such cases, choice would thus be a contributing factor.
While we can (and should) control our behavior (of whatever sort), our control over our actual sexual preferences seems very limited. For example, I have preferences for certain types of women and do not recall making such a choice (I always seem to have had these preferences) and my experiences do not seem to have changed them. I have not, I must admit, actively tried to shift my preference from one type of woman to another as an experiment. I suspect that with diligent effort I could do so (basically through psychological conditioning), but I do not think that my core preference for women could be shifted as a matter of conscious choice. No, I’m not interested in trying it-I’m fine with who I am in this regard. How other people are is also generally fine with me, too.
Are female gulls that exhibit homosexual behaviour choosing to do so/or not? Are they just gullible?
Psychologist 🙂 Erik here–Maybe you’re attracted to women who are attracted to you. Maybe you hesitate to test that attraction, fearing quite rightly that you’d meet rejection from women who aren’t by nature attracted to you. My advice is go for the good looking women anyway. You might hit it lucky.
The gulls are just being seagullible.
“and her being embarrassed because she’s got visible cellulite ”
Ever notice that there is never a feminist around on those rare occasions when you actually need one?
Again, I was speaking HYPOTHETCIALLY. Or perhaps I need to clarify my original point about her possibly being INNOCENT. By that I mean that the information in regard to her involvement in this whole situation is all hear-say. Consider that she has nothing to do with this except that she knows both of the other parties involved.
Sorry. I’m wrong in assuming Wei’s complicity. I hearby remove Wei’s name from all my previous posts. Assuming Wei’s innocence, what’s the HYPOTHETICAL explanation for Ravis actions? Perhaps an imp videoed Clementi and broadcast the vid on the web. Or the Devil himself
Depends on how choice works. I’m inclined to favor the notion of free choice, but accept that choices are influenced by various factors. Those that push, take some blame for misdeeds they push towards. However, unless we are willing to abandon agency, the person taking the action must be the primary bearer of blame (or praise).