All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
Usually credited to Edmund Burke, the sentence has not been found in his writings. Burke wrote in 1770 that when bad men combine, the good must associate, and John Stuart Mill said in an 1867 address that bad men need nothing more to achieve their ends than that good men should look on and do nothing. The familiar wording appears only in the twentieth century.
In practice
- A professional body that knew of a colleague's misconduct and said nothing is named in the inquiry's report.
- Passengers watch a fellow passenger being harassed, and each waits for someone else to speak.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation for inaction is diffusion of responsibility, the mechanism behind the bystander effect. Another is cost: speaking up carries risk while silence seems safe.
- In its favour
- Consistent with research on bystander inaction and pluralistic ignorance, and used across the spectrum as a call to civic courage.
- Against it
- The attribution is false, and as a precept it ignores both the cost of acting and the risk of good people acting wrongly on poor information.
- Standing
- Misattributed to Burke; the nearest genuine sources are Burke in 1770 and Mill in 1867. Compare first they came.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- The paradoxes of democracy and the quips of partisans