““Consider the case of two young men—Jeremy Strohmeyer and David Cash Jr.—who walked into a Nevada casino in 1988. Strohmeyer followed a seven-year-old girl into the women’s restroom and molested and murdered her. The wrongness of Strohmeyer’s act is obvious from both a moral and a legal perspective. But what about Cash, who was with Strohmeyer in the restroom, halfheartedly tried to get him to stop, and then gave up and went for a walk? As he later said, he wasn’t going “to lose sleep over somebody else’s problems.” Strohmeyer went to prison, but Cash didn’t, since it was not illegal in Nevada to fail to stop a crime from happening. Still, there was a sense on the part of many that he had done something wrong. There were demonstrations against him at his university and demands that he be expelled. (Indeed, legislators changed the law in Nevada in response to this very case, bringing it more in line with public sentiment.) Cash is now being stalked on the Internet; people report on his whereabouts, hoping to ruin his prospects for getting a job and finding friends, wishing to destroy his life, even though they were personally unaffected by his failure to act. This illustrates how much moral transgressions matter to us. We don’t merely observe that Cash is a bad guy; some of us are motivated to make him suffer.””
