From from time to time I ask my friends whether they would turn me in if I killed someone. And I always wonder, what is the correct (ideal?) answer to that sort of question? What about my family? We just got a case of a father turning his son in for the murder of Charlie Kirk
. And even prosaically, in much lower stakes, I am recently got tested on my stance, when a friend of mine started cheating on her husband. Should I stand by her side, condemn her, notify the husband?I came to a conclusion that it is not only permissible, but indeed, a duty, to be stricly loyal to the friend. I see a few reasons, in both utilitarian and less-utilitarian terms.
First, loyal social ties seem to help to prevent many would-be crimes. If a duty to denounce were to be enforced, this would make people counterfactually form weaker relationships, increasing the likelihood of serious offences on the margin.
Second, if we believe in rehabilitative justice, having close ties with friends and family helps resocialisation. Indeed, this doesn't only apply to murder; the friend who destroyed her family now needs support to somehow resolve the problem. A sinner who can now associate only with sinners is lost forever.
Third, loyalty being the norm is a policy insurance that protects the private sphere from the overreach of unjust laws. Even if a country is governed well now, there's always a danger of sliding into something less pleasant (even if not a literal totalitarian regime) later on and having strong cultural customs of not denouncing close ones helps to protect the society.
Fourth, even if the last point applies verbatim only to actual crimes, I am making a similar case for broader norms around heresy. Having unpopular but possibly true or even useful beliefs is much more difficult without a support group of close friends and family, similar to what Paul Graham argues in "what you can't say".
Fifth, denounciation of close ones is, I imagine in most cases, contrary to normal human emotions. A collateral damage is then innocent person, a prototypical mother who is forced to turn in her son. Even in the case of friends of the criminal, it'd still mean losing a relationship that is impossible to rebuild or replace.
Sixt, the duty to denounce or abandon does not align well with other laws around shared responsibility. Parents can liable for their young childrens actions. In that case, a duty to turn-in children would translate into self-incrimination. So the right (even if not duty) can be translated into the right to remain silen due to self-incrimination.
Seventh, even murderers have the right to love and friendship. This one, in my opinion, is weakened significantly by replacing the murderer with rapists, serial killers, Adolf Hitlers of the world, so I treat list it mostly out of obligation. Still, the best case I can make for it is that it is virtuous for us, the society and individuals within it, to believe in that sort of platitude.
In my preferred moral framework of domninantly-libertarian classical liberalism, there is no collective responsibility: bystranders did not violate NAP. But indeed, this is not as much as argument as an axiom: that moral responsibility is not transitive.
As for counterarguments, I see mainly three.
First, the mechanism of justice will - presumably - work less efficiently gien the lack of obligation to turn in people around you who commited crimes. We trade in systemic. For some reason, I can more vividly imagine myself persecuted and abandoned than being a victim of someone who the police doesn't caught because of his family accomplice - even though the odds heavily skew in the other direction. Reasons for this are complex, so I won't go into them here, except to note that social ostracism and unpopular opinions are a significant part of that.
How large is this effect? I don't know, but it should be possible to check given that laws around denunciation and excemptions vary widely across otherwise relatively uniform legal frameworks of states in the US and countries in Europe (I was actually surprised that my native Poland puts an almost-draconian duty on everyone around, no exceptions whatsoever). It should also be possible to observe the effect over time, once a change is made.
Second, there is a moral degradation of the accomplice. In my second point, I talked about a positive influence upstanding people have on their friends. But the spring of relationships works both ways. To be completely honest, I have no clue which effect is larger: this depending on the shape of non-linearity of interactions.
Third, the duty to denounce puts a stronger selective pressure to pick your friends and spouse wisely. It does not directly translate into parents-children relationship (though this is still, to some extent, mediated by the choice of the partner - see the famous case of the "prince" Marius Borg Høiby of Norway) and disappears completely in the opposite case of children-parents.
Finally, fourth, being aware of the fact that people around would instantly turn their back on you when you commit a serious crime would serve as a repellent - a strong disincentive to ever do this. That is I think more pronounced in shame-cultures than in guilt-cultures.
Overall, I'm moved most by arguments from virtue ethics, no surprise here. At the same time, I don't know, I'm lost with how to deal with contradictions this responsibility creates. I'm angry with my friend. I think what she does is shitty. How am I not to admit this? Navigating being honest and supportive is something I struggle with hard.