when are you responsible?

Discussion in 'Braaaaiiiinnnns...' started by anon person, Oct 10, 2016.

  1. anon person

    anon person actually a cat

    1. if you bake a cake and it turns out terribly and there was nothing wrong with the instructions you followed or the ingredients or equipment you used, you just messed it up completely on your own, you're responsible for the way the cake turned out.

    2. if your neighbor bakes a cake and it turns out terribly and you were not involved in the cooking of it, nor did you do anything to effect your neighbor or their environment while they were cooking, you're not responsible for the way the cake turned out.

    but there's kind of a lot in-between 1 and 2.

    what if there was a mistake in the recipe you chose? what if it was a mistake that you could have caught but you didn't because you were in a hurry? what if you misread the recipe because you were exhausted? what if your neighbor was helping you by reading the recipe out loud and they misread it? what if you were helping your neighbor by reading the recipe out loud and they misheard you?

    what if you were in the middle of baking the cake when your neighbor crashed their car into your living room and you forgot about the cake and it burned? what if your neighbor's car crashed into your living room because you had messed up the steering system when you were helping them repair it? what if you had recommended them to a garage that messed up the steering?

    what if you were helping your neighbor by picking up ingredients for them but you picked the wrong one by mistake and they didn't notice? what if you picked the right ingredient but there was something wrong with it? what if you would have known there was something wrong if you had checked but you didn't check?

    what if your neighbor wanted you to help them make a cake but you were busy and said you couldn't, and they accidentally put rat poison in it? what if your neighbor said they would put rat poison in the cake if you didn't help them with it and you thought they were joking but they weren't? what if you didn't think they were joking and you called 911, but they had finished the cake and eaten it before anyone came? what if you didn't think they were joking and you managed to talk them down from rat poison to vinegar?

    what if you were part of a cake-baking committee and you suggested a recipe that you had tried before, but the person who made the cake hadn't and messed up the intstructions? what if you suggested a recipe you hadn't tried out before and it turned out to be a bad recipe? what if someone else suggested the bad recipe and you supported their choice because you didn't know it was bad? what if you did know and you didn't say anything?

    everything you do affects the world around you. how do you decide when you are responsible for something that results from something you did? how do you decide when somebody else is?

    does it matter?
     
  2. wixbloom

    wixbloom artcute

    That's one of the reasons pretty much every legal system has trials for supposed criminals: there isn't a single set of guidelines that is universally aplicable.

    That said, you seem to be overlapping "responsible" and "guilty/at fault". They're really not the same thing. Responsible means... well, it means having responsibility! To fix an issue, to make it better, to atone, to make reparitions, to salvage a bad situation. For example, while I'm not guilty of being abused or at fault for it (OBVIOUSLY), I am responsible for it in the sense that I'm the one who, as an adult, has to make it better for myself. That's what people mean when they say that putting your recovery in the hands of your abuser is a terrible idea - clearly they're not able to handle such a delicate responsibility, so it falls to you! Oh well! If something outside of my control happens, sometimes, what do you know, I'm the one who has to fix it! And likewise, not everything I do wrong is something I, or anyone, have a responsibility to fix - sometimes, bad cakes just happen! You shrug, acknowledge that this could have gone better, and move on.
     
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2016
    • Like x 3
  3. anon person

    anon person actually a cat

    hmm, you're right, i think i am mixing them up a bit.

    to clarify, when i ask "when are you responsible" i am asking "when must you accept blame for something and, if applicable, 'fix an issue, to make it better, to atone, to make reparitions, to salvage a bad situation,' due to your involvement in that something coming to pass?"

    so if i understand correctly, you're saying that in a case of abuse, you're not obligated to take the blame for it, but you are obligated to do any fixing that needs to be done? or rather, that no one else but you is obligated to do that fixing?
     
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  4. wixbloom

    wixbloom artcute

    @anon person More like... in practice, nobody else but you CAN do that fixing. Maybe they should, but in practice they can't. They're guilty, and depending on how your moral code goes you might think that means they deserve punishment, or not, but they definitely can't fix it (this is an argument that is also used, for example, against the death penalty or against revenge in general: killing a killer or hurting an abuser won't revive their victims or make them better...)
     
    • Like x 2
  5. wixbloom

    wixbloom artcute

    And that leads to another distinction, of obligation versus ability. For example, in principle, someone who breaks something should pay for it, but in practice, sometimes they literally don't have the money to do that. How can that be solved then? Certainly not by yelling louder and louder at them that they HAVE to pay because they DID break the thing.

    That said, is there something specific you have in mind when asking these questions? Because it seems to me like, if you do, it would be easier to discuss them without so much metaphor :P
     
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  6. wixbloom

    wixbloom artcute

    For reference, and because it was fun to compile, here is a small list of some alternatives that different legal and moral systems have come up with for someone is guilty, and obliged to fix a thing, but can't do it:
    • make them fix a different thing (via community service for example)
    • just ignore them forever (by expelling them from a group or exiling them from a country, or cutting them off)
    • kill them
    • forgive them without inflicting any further consequences
    • let their guilty conscience, or their shame, or the fact that they're going to hell, be their only punishment
    • enslave them
    • beat them
    • straight up give them money or education or therapy or other means to fix the thing, and THEN hold them to the task of fixing it
     
    • Like x 3
  7. anon person

    anon person actually a cat

    so, the fact that someone cannot do something removes any obligation to do so? or in different terms, people are not responsible for things that they cannot control? i think i agree with that.

    i had a couple of specific things in mind when i started thinking about this, but i'm more interested in the general principle than those specific ideas. the cake metaphor is because it's easier for me to talk about things with metaphors than to use more abstract, philosophical language. (i can usually read and understand that sort of thing well enough, but it's harder for me to word things that way.)

    but i don't mind if it's talked about in terms of specific circumstances, because i'm interested in hearing what people think and opinions can vary depending on the circumstances.

    i've heard the argument that the death penalty exists as a deterrent to future crime, but it seems to me that that might be like punishing someone for something that somebody else might do because of them, which is ... confusing. then again i've heard that it exists to remove evil from a community, but you could do that with exile as well, except exile doesn't prevent people from coming back later with an army. then again, neither does the death sentence, if you believe in ghosts.

    legal and moral systems usually also take motive into consideration. so like, put poison in a cake on purpose to kill someone? you're responsible for their death. didn't know someone was deathly allergic to the smell of frosting and brought a cake to their next-door-neighbor's potluck? you may have killed them with your cake, but it wasn't on purpose so, afaik, you wouldn't be help responsible, legally or morally.

    so there's also ... something about how much you know, and how much you can be expected to know, that ties in with motive.
     
    • Like x 2
  8. anon person

    anon person actually a cat

    i thought of another thing. whether someone is held responsible depends on whether there's something to be held responsible for. (this seems obvious, but it literally just occurred to me so i had to come back to talk about it.) so, make a cake that tastes bad, feed it to 20 people: nothing happens but some people go "ugh" and no one takes a second slice. but no one would say "who is responsible for this?" unless they were joking. or unless a visiting dignitary had eaten the cake and decided to end trade relations with your country because your cake was so bad. but if you make a cake so bad that all 20 people die, of course everyone wants to know who to blame.

    ...hmm. is wanting someone to blame in a situation where something bad has happened a self-preservation thing? (we want someone to blame so that we don't get blamed.) or is it a ... wanting to feel safe thing? (we want someone evil to have poisoned them, because a world where things only happen on purpose is safer than one where things are completely random.)
     
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  9. wixbloom

    wixbloom artcute

    Yes! And there's other factors too. For example, as far as Brazilian legislation goes, hospitals, for instance, are responsible for all damage done to a patient's health which is not SPECIFICALLY the patient's fault - even if said damage is inflicted unknowingly or through lack of action rather than action. The same principle does not apply to civilians in the street: if someone dies of a heart attack next to me and I don't do anything, I may FEEL guilty, but judicially nobody would think of suing me for being responsible for the death. It was a heart attack, I didn't cause it! But if the same thing happens in a hospital, the hospital is responsible despite not having caused the heart attack.

    An example of this: when I was a child, had leukemia. I did tons of blood transfusions during treatment, and at the time there was no way to test blood for hepatitis. I got Hepatitis C, which has no cure, from a blood transfusion in a hospital. That same year, all children in the cancer ward who did blood transfusions got Hepatitis C. Many parents filed a lawsuit against the hospital, and they won. My parents, however, didn't want to sue because there was literally nothing the hospital could have done to prevent that, since they could not know. In other words... they knew the hospital was legally responsible, but also didn't think that demanding reparition from them would be moral.
     
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  10. wixbloom

    wixbloom artcute

    Both, I think. And probably more. We want a world in which injustice doesn't happen, or only happens when something went wrong. But in some cases, a certain level of injustice is inevitable...
     
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  11. anon person

    anon person actually a cat

    because a hospital has insurance and can better bear the financial weight of a lawsuit? or because a hospital is a place where people know about illnesses and there's the expectation that they "ought to" have known about and been able to prevent any health problems?

    ...but the other parents won, meaning the law held the hospital responsible for something it didn't have the ability to prevent. unless there was some other way they could have made sure they weren't putting hepatitis-blood in their patients. or ... suggesting that if the bad outcome is bad enough, we'll find someone to punish regardless of whether they can actually be blamed for the result? or, since it's probably less about punishing and more about making reparations to people who were harmed, that we'll make morally innocent people or institutions take legal responsibility for things in order to have somewhere to draw reparations from.
     
  12. wixbloom

    wixbloom artcute

    @anon person there wasn't anything they could have done, but under this system a hospital's guilt is defined by the other thing you mentioned - WHETHER OR NOT THERE WAS AN INCIDENT. If there WAS an incident, that is enough for the hospital to be guilty unless it can prove that SOMEBODY ELSE IS GUILTY (i.e. that I got Hepatitis C from a DIFFERENT hospital, or at home)
     
  13. wixbloom

    wixbloom artcute

    To use yet another example: if I'm walking down the sidewalk in the rain and slip on the wet floor, fall on my butt and twist my ankle, nobody's at fault. But if I'm visiting a sick relative in the hospital and the floor is being waxed and I slip, fall on my butt and twist my ankle, I can sue the hospital. The only way I'll lose that lawsuit is if they can prove, for example, that I slipped because my heel broke, or that I deliberately faked a fall in order to try to make money off of suing. They're responsible for the entire PREMISE of the hospital.
     
  14. wixbloom

    wixbloom artcute

    That's a kind of legal generalization that is very common, with the intent to protect the weaker party on principle (because otherwise there's too many easily exploited loopholes to facilitate medical neglect or unsafe construction, for example...) but leads to its own set of moral dilemmas
     
  15. anon person

    anon person actually a cat

    huh, wow. that's ... interesting, and i guess i can understand the protecting-the-weaker-party reasoning.
     
    • Like x 1
  16. anon person

    anon person actually a cat

    something else! i've been looking at responsibility (as in obligation-to-do-something) as stemming, at least generally, from responsibility for (as in causing) whatever problem needs fixing, but there are two pretty major situations where people are said to have an obligation-to-do-something about a situation they had no hand in causing. the first is privilege ( as in white privilege, male privilege), and the second is chivalry.

    with privilege, no one is saying that each individual privileged person has caused the situation where, for example, some people have the privilege of not being randomly shot by cops, and others don't. but the argument is that if you benefit from privilege, you have an obligation to use your privilege to benefit people who don't.

    chivalry's more or less the same thing. some people are granted power or wealth by god, and those people have an obligation to use their power and wealth to benefit people who weren't. so you have champions and noblesse oblige.

    ...i don't have a point, it's just something that occurred to me.
     
    • Like x 2
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