Studies in Arts and Humanities VOL06/ISSUE01/2020 EDITORIAL | sahjournal.com Why We Respond and Why We Turn Away: A Special Issue. Patricia Frazer Department of Psychology, Dublin Business School, Dublin, Ireland Lucie Corcoran Department of Psychology, Dublin Business School, Dublin, Ireland © Patricia Frazer, Lucie Corcoran. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. On the 6th of September 2019 a group of thinkers and educators from fields as diverse as psychiatry, law, psychoanalysis and politics gathered in Dublin Business School to share ideas about how as a society and as individuals we respond to human rights violations. Called "Why we respond and why we turn away: Human rights abuses in a changing world" 1 the daylong event provided an opportunity to explore not just what human rights abuses are occurring, and what we might do about it, but also to ask why. Why do some humans risk their lives, enduring pain, suffering and humiliation to bring an end to the suffering of others when at other times we turn away from doing even very little to help those sitting next to us? It may be that in our hyper- connected modern world we are overwhelmed with the number and variety of calls for help we are now exposed to. The complexity of our globalised economic system combined with unprecedented access to information about it mean that every choice we make from what to spread on our toast in the morning 2 , to where and for whom we expend our labours 3 , to what we consume as entertainment 4 has the potential to have an impact on lives around the world. Maybe this complexity and challenge is not new, and would-be philanthropists have always been beset by risk of getting it wrong and the din of competing demands. As Thoreau comments in his 1854 book ‘Walden’ 5 “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, 1 ‘Why We Respond and Why We Turn Away:Human Rights Abuses in a Changing World’, Fri, Sep 6, 2019 at 10:00 AM | Eventbrite link. 2 May-Tobin, Calen. “Palm Oil: From Plantation to Peanut Butter.” Union of Concerned Scientists, February 25, 2014. https://blog.ucsusa.org/calen-may-tobin/palm-oil-from-plantation-to-peanut-butter-420. 3 Monshipouri, Mahmood, Claude Emerson Welch, and Evan T. Kennedy. ‘Multinational Corporations and the Ethics of Global Responsibility: Problems and Possibilities’. Human Rights Quarterly 25, no. 4 (3 November 2003): 965–89. https://doi.org/10.1353/hrq.2003.0048.. 4 Sinnreich, Aram, Mark Latonero, and Marissa Gluck. “Ethics Reconfigured.” Information, Communication & Society 12, no. 8 (2009): 1242–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180902890117. 5 Thoreau, Henry David. “WALDEN.” Walden, by Henry David Thoreau, 1995. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm.