Should the Austrian neighbours have interfered?

The horrifying discovery that an Austrian man has kept his daughter locked in a basement for more than two decades has led to the usual question - what have we come to?

How could the neighbours of Josef F not have known something fishy was going on? How could they have believed his story that his daughter had dumped her children on his doorstep?

There are two points worth making in reply to this.

The first concerns our instinct as a herd. Even if individuals had realised something was odd they might not have done anything about it. Why? Because of what social psychologists call pluralistic ignorance.

Being unsure what was happening each neighbour wouldn't have wanted to erroneously made accusations. Each person would have figured that the situation might be clearer to someone else and that, if it was, that other person would do something about it.

The Times leader makes this point this morning, drawing a parallel with the Stephen Wills case - the stricken cyclist left in the road as motorists swerved round him. I have written about this too, linking it with the Kitty Genovese case.

My second point is a little harder in the circumstances.

It is this - were the neighbours actually so wrong?

I hazard that instances of people imprisoning others in dungeons in their house are rare - even in Austria. Therefore if neighbours made a habit of interfering when the bloke next door behaved oddly they would generally be sticking their nose in when something entirely innocent was going on.

Given that such interference would almost never uncover a scandal and almost always involve unwelcome intrusion into someone else's business, isn't the case of Josef F, however shocking and disgraceful, a cost that has to be born to preserve a society with freedom and privacy?

I must say that encouraging Austrians to be more interfering and less respectful of other's individual freedom makes me nervous. On the whole, I don't think it would be a good thing.

Now, it may prove the case that the neighbours knew more than they were letting on and if this is so then condemnation is reasonable.

But hard cases make bad law. Terrible though this affair is, a general rule of intervening in one's neighbours' affairs might be worse overall.