Good men don't do nothing

Someone posted this picture on facebook today and it reminded me of this post that I wrote a while back and never got round to posting.

I was going to build this post out of the Isaac Asimov short story - Little Lost Robot. The risk of using the fiction, and the abstraction of Asimov’s laws of robotics representing idealised human behaviour detract too much from the theme. It left me feeling there was slightly too much risk of the point I am trying to make also seeming equally fictional. So instead I am going to stick with a common quote that most people would recognise and many of those would consider to be accurate:

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." 

As with the Abe Lincoln picture above, the quote itself probably deserves a thread just on it's origins. It regularly wins polls as the most popular quote of modern times. It is often heard in the famous voice of JFK, who in turn attributed it to Edmund Burke, probably incorrectly if you believe Wikipedia. But the source doesn't really matter as much as the idea. My own opinion is that regardless of the source of the quote, and the general opinion that it is a great quote, it is actually fundamentally stupid.

But in order to get to why it is so stupid, I need to take a bit of a detour first:

I work in an industry where they have very clearly defined rights and responsibilities. Within that is the idea that they insist on terming a “no blame” culture. It isn’t quite as cut and dried as that, and should probably be more a “no blame, unless you purposefully do something outside the procedures, guidance and good engineering practice; or that you can’t justify was a good decision based on the information you had available at the time" culture. That doesn't make for quite such a snappy soundbite though and the closest I have heard to reality is a "Just Culture" but that one is discouraged as it implies the hammer of managerial justice is waiting for you to make a mistake so they can blame you for it.

Anyway, more important to me is the flip-side of the no-blame coin. You never get into trouble for highlighting a problem, because that is the first step required in correcting it.  My current workplace’s version of this is the soundbite friendly: “You see it, you own it”.  To give an extreme example, if you find a hole in the floor it is up to you to report it an make sure someone does something to make it safe. And if don’t report it, then when the next person comes along and falls through the hole then his harm is your fault just as much as if you pushed him in the hole yourself. Turning a blind eye makes you complicit. To steal one last time from the HSE soundbites at work, you gave “silent consent” to that situation and that puts you in the wrong.

Which brings me back to the reason for this post and to what I believe is the fundamental error in the original quote. If you know something is wrong, and you actively choose to do nothing, then surely by the very definition you are not a “good man”.

If you walk past that hole and do nothing, you are not a good man.

But this doesn't just apply at work, it applies to life. If you don't stand up when you see something wrong it is your fault.