The field of ethics often focuses on fictional scenarios to test moral intuitions. For example, the "trolley problem," developed by Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson is a classic. You're in charge of a switch on a trolley track as a train approaches; if you do nothing, the trolley will careen into a crowd, killing eight people. If you pull the switch, only one person will die, but he’ll die because of your intentional action. Intentionally killing people is first-degree murder and first-degree murder is wrong. Now, which should you do?
Or: you're the sheriff of a small town. A murder’s been committed and a vigilante mob has gathered outside your jail with torches and pitchforks. If you hang the suspect (who may be innocent) publicly right now, the crowd will disperse. If you don't, they will burn the town and start impaling one another with their pitchforks. What to do?
These are fictional scenarios, like Jack Bauer torturing the terrorism suspect to get the location of nuclear device. But they can drive real decision-making. However, here's one that turns out not to be fictional at all: a high-visibility political assassination takes place that rivets the nation's attention. Pictures of the suspect appear in the media. You recognize your child. How do you proceed?
Tyler Robinson's father urged him to turn himself in, contacted a youth pastor who also works with the US Marshals Service, and arranged for his surrender. "Many parents might have delayed, denied or helped conceal if confronted with evidence that their child might have committed such a monstrous crime," argued The Washington Post's editorial board. "This father's choice spared the country further agony by potentially accelerating justice in this case." But was it the right choice?
I think this is a scenario that many people are now contemplating. As a matter of fact, someone named “johnny” on X urged people to text their Dads the 'if i killed charlie kirk would you turn me in' challenge. My daughter Janie promptly forwarded it to me. I guess many parents and many children of parents might be contemplating such questions right now. My response, I admit, didn't particularly help: "oh hell, i have been thinking about that!"
It's a wickedly difficult moral dilemma, and an exemplary one in that it pits two perfectly plausible or fundamental commitments against one another: you have something like an absolute obligation to protect your child from suffering, and you have something like an absolute obligation not to collude in murder. We have various detailed moral obligations to members of our own families, and also general obligations to the society as a whole and perhaps also to the family of the murdered person. The private and the public seem to be in dramatic conflict here.
The scenario can be altered in various ways that might make a difference as to the right or principled course of action. As the Post points out, Tyler's dad could’ve "denied" or "delayed": tried with maximal self-delusion not to recognize his son in the images, or tortured himself about the outcome for a few days, weeks or years while not doing anything. And the scenario becomes different if, rather than persuading his son to turn himself in, Dad called the cops while the son barricaded himself somewhere with weapons, or ran. Each of these raises different problems, or might change the calculations of who would be harmed how badly by one's decision.
The “persuade him to turn himself in” scenario avoids the most excruciating possibilities, in which your son's life and the lives of others are at risk in the flight and apprehension. It was a decent parental outcome also in the sense that it could be thought of as a moment of moral teaching, like when you make your kid go back to the store and return the thing she stole, though in that case the kid gets a lecture, and in this one perhaps life in prison or execution. But even if she's in prison, you should be concerned for your child's moral well-being.
Perhaps the political nature is also relevant. For the Post, the idea that Tyler Robinson could escape put the nation in danger or jacked up the possibilities for increased political violence. I'm not sure about that one, but what if you agreed with your son's politics, even if not his specific method? Maybe you regarded Charlie Kirk as a fascist whose continued activities put the lives of immigrants or trans people at risk, for example. Could that make any difference in your deliberations? Well, perhaps it shouldn't. But if you had a narrative in which Kirk endangered the country and removing him saved lives, that would complicate your obligations, or move this situation toward the sheriff's office-type scenario.
And, johnny and Washington Post editorial board, as I write this I’m delaying my direct answer to the "if i killed charlie kirk would you turn me in?" challenge. First of all, I don’t know what I’d do. Maybe none of us really do in scenarios like this, until push comes to shove, trolley comes to switch, or lynch mob to sheriff's office. But this one’s harder than the trolley problem, where really you should pull the switch, or even the sheriff's office, where I think you shouldn’t turn the alleged murderer over though you suffer the consequences.
I can delay no longer. Janie, I think I might not turn you in! I think I might try to help you get a fake passport and head to Angola. But then I think I might spend the rest of my life torturing myself for having made the clearly wrong decision.
I admit that this is no solution, because it doesn’t accept the moral question on its own terms. It says that I’m going to help her escape knowing that is the wrong decision. But it might show something interesting: though the claims of morality (like “thou shalt not kill”) appear absolute, we also have non-moral or more-than-moral commitments. I think in this case I might do wrong knowing I was doing wrong, which is possible, though Plato, for one, denied it was.
I might think in this scenario that it was right to do wrong. I might stop making sense.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell