“Every day, people witness preventable crimes or tragedies and do nothing. A bystander may be willing to call 911, yet often allows that single action to be the extent of his or her responsibility. There are at least two assumptions present in the bystander effect. The first is that if there are many people who could do something, I don’t have to. The second is that if I am not the one committing the crime, I don’t carry any guilt for the crime’s occurrence. If we do the minimum we think is required of us, we can believe we have done enough. If we avoid doing something bad, we can believe we are good people. If the ‘moral arc of the universe bends toward justice’, as Martin Luther King Jr. so eloquently expressed, then why does our moral arc bend toward apathy?”

Ken Wytsma, from his book Pursuing Justice