THE University of Cambridge has defended its mental-health support for Dr Jason Arday, whose death has led to questions about who was providing a duty of care to the beleaguered academic. He was the subject of what the Principal of Homerton College, Lord Woolley, referred to as a “vicious media onslaught.”
Besides the questions for Cambridge, Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, a friend and former colleague of Dr Arday’s, recently questioned whether the media had failed in its duty of care towards Dr Arday as a vulnerable person with disabilities.
The legal concept of duty of care is barely a century old, and has its foundation in the judgment of the 1932 case Donoghue v. Stevenson, once described as “probably the most famous case in the whole Commonwealth world of the Common Law”. The case centred on whether it was possible for an individual to claim damages against someone with whom they did not have a direct contractual relationship.
In their majority decision, three of the five Lord Justices ruled that Mr Stevenson did indeed owe a duty of care to Mrs Donoghue, even without a direct legal contact existing between them. In so doing, they established the modern law of negligence, and introduced the “neighbour principle” into common law.
In his leading judgment, Lord Justice Atkin said: “The rule that you are to love your neighbour becomes in law you must not injure your neighbour. . . You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonably foresee would be likely to injure your neighbour.
“Who then in law is my neighbour? The answer seems to be persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably to have them in contemplation as being so affected when I am directing my mind to the acts or omissions which are called in question.”
IN ESTABLISHING the legal concept of the neighbour principle, Lord Justice Atkin made direct reference to the New Testament, in particular to the parable of the Good Samaritan, which begins when a lawyer comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asks him in return what he understands the law to be. The lawyer answers, “To love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and all your strength and to love your neighbour as yourself.”
Correct, Jesus says. But the lawyer is not finished. St Luke’s Gospel ascribes, perhaps rather harshly, a motive of self-justification to the lawyer for his follow-up question: “And who is my neighbour?”
And, in response to the lawyer’s question, Jesus tells a parable — perhaps one of his best-known ones — about a man who is attacked and left for dead on the side of the road. Those whose duty it was to care for him — two different religious leaders — pass by on the other side of the road.
But it is a Samaritan, a stranger, who stops, who is moved with pity, who bandages the man’s wounds and cares for him; who pays from his own pocket for the man’s recovery, despite having no relationship with him at all — indeed, despite being someone from a community that despised Jews and was despised by them.
Having told his parable, Jesus returns to the question at hand and asks the lawyer: Which of these three was a neighbour to the man? And, in his reply, the lawyer provides an answer that goes beyond the words of and composition of that of Lord Justice Atkin. “The one who showed him mercy,” replies the lawyer. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus replies.
In the Greek of the New Testament, the word translated as mercy is eleos, which means this: “a feeling of sympathy with misery, active compassion, the desire of relieving the miserable — suffering with another”.
It is often related to the Hebrew word used in the Old Testament, hesed, which, alongside “mercy”, is also translated as “loving kindness”, “steadfast love”, “covenant loyalty”. It signifies a deep, action-orientated, and faithful commitment — a relentless, gracious, and unconditional love that goes beyond duty.
IN THE Christian tradition, the parable of the Good Samaritan is the foundation for the kind of action which is now criticised regularly by some as being “woke”. Such critics fail to understand that showing mercy and loving one’s neighbour give birth to imperatives that require us to show love to those in need, to the despised, to those who fear, and to the injured; to go to those who are despised and show them mercy.
The question who owed a duty of care to Dr Arday goes beyond the legal duty of his employer and the editorial judgements of the media outlets that pursued his case relentlessly.
In a digital, social-media age, it is the ancient questions that need to be considered anew if we are to build a society that takes seriously what our moral duties are to one another; to go beyond the law and to reach justice; to consider afresh how we as a nation might travel in the footsteps of the Good Samaritan, to be those who show mercy, to be those who do likewise, and to consider, again, whom it is we have in mind when we answer the lawyer’s question “Who, then, is my neighbour?”
The Rt Revd Arun Arora is the Bishop of Kirkstall, in the diocese of Leeds, and a co-lead bishop for racial justice.