No.
In our next class, we will cover a
case involving Loomis, a company with armed guards that picks up money at
banks. One guard goes into the bank. The other guard must remain always in the
truck.
The facts? A guard goes into a bank. The
branch manager runs out with a knife-wielding man chasing her. She screams at
the guard in the truck: “Help me!” He does. The situation is resolved with no
harm done. The guard is fired, however, for breaking a cardinal rule.
Sure, Loomis looks like a bad guy
here. But they argued that whenever the second guard abandons the truck, a
worse situation can arise. And anyway, they are the employer—they can set
policies.
In Gardner v. Loomis, the Washington
Supreme Court ruled that the employer could not fire this guard for trying to
save a life. (The case is here:
All that is interesting. But there is
more we will discuss. The law of torts generally dos not compel people to save
anyone’s life.
I am reprinting here a summary from Prosser, The Law of Torts.
Duty to Aid One in Peril
The law has persistently refused to
recognize a duty to the moral obligation of common decency and common humanity
to come to the aid of another human being who is danger….
Some of the decisions have been shocking
in the extreme. The expert swimmer, with a boat and a rope at hand, who sees
another drowning before his eyes, is not required to do anything at all about
it, but may sit on the dock, smoke his cigarette, and watch the man drown.”
He cites more cases like this, including three awful ones. He concludes: "It would be hard to find a more unappetizing trio of cases." (One case involved a bystander who incited a person to jump in a lake [person drowned]; another was standing by a pool while a child drowned; a third involved a man who rented a canoe to a drunk person and watched as he downed.]
Prof. Prosser concluded: “Such
decisions are revolting to any moral sense.”
“The remedy in such cases is left to
the ‘higher law’ and the “voice of conscience, which, in a wicked world, would
seem to be singularly ineffective to
prevent the harm or compensate the victim.”
PHOTO CREDIT: UDEMY
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