A wife asks her husband to change the batteries in the smoke alarm.
He forgets.
2 weeks later there is a fire, and the wife and 2 children dies.
Is it right that the man is blamed?
If a person doesn’t have control over what they remember are they in fault?
DALE
I think it’s the wife’s fault for not nagging the husband enough so he would do it just to shut her up.
pends if you think intention behind or the consequences of an action are more important.
im sorry to twist your analogy, but it still the same situation, just more extreme.
the man, if he was so inclined could deliberately kill his family and then his behaviour could be blamed on his genetics or upbringing. This is entirely sound IMO. How can something be anyones fault if there is always a reason for it beyond your control?
The answer to this lies in modifying the nature of blame. People are always manipulated in all things in ways we dont even register, also, they come to the world with a predisposition they did not choose.
Thus, the measure of someones responsibility in an incident lies in how they processed the information they were given, not how the action turned out or purely what they intended.
Thus the man in your example is to blame insofar as he cannot remember lifesaving information. Thus, he needs to fix himself by learning to remember important things. If guilt does the job, thats fine.
The man in my example is a completely broken individual who needs to have his behaviour corrected through incarceration or therapy or whatever is deemed most effective.
Theres my take.
Cheers!
only if he set the fire
my client didn’t murder him… if he (the dead guy) didn’t step in front of the gun, he wouldn’t have been shot…
besides, my client did not remember if he had fired 6 shots or only 5, and the punk felt lucky… it was his own fault for having false feelings…
-Imp
Oreso wrote:
That’s right, Oreso. The old saying, “Understanding everything, we could forgive everything” comes first to mind. I’ve gotten over the initial discomfort stemming from my realization that the concept of personal responsibility is a useful illusion - a glue necessary for the existence of society itself; for the simple reason that we haven’t yet conjured up a more useful glue that more accurately reflects the actual situation.
As for Askwed’s question: The local district attorney might well charge the unfortunate man with neglect for the death of his children. A deeper reflection, however, tells me only that the man was unlucky. There’s a chapter, “Moral Luck,” in Thomas Nagel’s wonderful book, Mortal Questions, in which he discusses this issue. I began a thread here some time ago on this very question. To requote Nagel:
“If one negligently leaves the bath running with the baby in it, one will realise, as one bounds up the stairs toward the bathroom, that if the baby has drowned one has done something awful, whereas if it has not one has merely been careless.”
Simple pragmatics requires that we maintain the chimera of personal responsibility until such time as we might create a more just adhesive for human society. As a case-in-point, George W. Bush, has, in my view, committed mass-murder. As such, I believe that we ought to build a cage around him. And yet I understand that in a deeper analysis no man is guilty for having become the person they are. To quote myself from the above-mentioned thread:
“It was purely a matter of luck which chimney the stork dropped me down. If I had instead been dropped down the chimney of Herr und Frau Himmler, then I might have gone on to oversee the construction and maintenance of a vast system of death-camps. If I had been dropped down the chimney of Herr und Frau Schweitzer, I might have gone on to oversee the construction and operation of a number of charitable hospitals in Africa. Was it possible that Henrich Himmler and Albert Schweitzer could have reversed their moral lives? Yes, of course. But what small chance event would have sufficed to steer little Heinrich towards a life of charity and little Albert towards a life of wickedness? It might have required nothing more than a fleeting benevolent thought or a kind word at a critical moment in Heinrich’s childhood to place him on the so-called “path of righteousness.” It was his awful luck that the benevolent thought never occurred to him and that no one was there to offer the kind word of encouragement.”
I’ll close by repeating my quote of Simon Blackburn:
â€Luck can do more to sway the ways our lives go than virtue. Yet people are curiously unwilling to acknowledge this; we relentlessly take responsibility, as the myth of original sin shows. It seems we would prefer to be guilty than unlucky… If we are good, it may be because we were never tempted enough, or frightened enough, or put in a desperate enough need.â€
Again, we need to create a more just adhesive in order to replace our current, primitive concept of personal responsibility. Unfortunately, it seems that we’re stuck with this flawed concept until such time as we have a better one in-place. This ought to be a front-burner issue for moral philosophers. Ideas…anyone?
Best wishes,
Michael
without the possibility of personal responsibility there can be no freewill…
yes, we need to get past this “freedom” problem…
without freedom to act there can be no moral consequence…
guilty because you were born that way…
Jews, Blacks, and Indians agree…
choice is so primitive…
what happens when the moral mob decides you were born guilty?
-Imp
oreso & Polemarchus, thank you. I obviously had my own thoughts about this subject before I posted but was interested to see what it brought up, I think you have hit some nails on the head and it has made me realise how ignorant our race is, if only we could look a little deeper, have a little more understanding, we could solve most of the worlds problems. People don’t seem to want to look deeper, they enjoy blame, they enjoy guilt… it’s like they don’t want to see things for how they really are, and the ironic thing is - I can’t blame them for that! I can only accept how it is and concentrate on my own life.
That is why the only thing we can do (imo), is make sure that the choices we make, and the actions we take, are made from that part of us which most high and wise.
We can’t stop murders murdering people by putting them in prison, new murderers will be born to replace them. We can only look deeper to the underlying cause and change things at that level… And do you know what I think we see when we trace it back? We will see OURSELVES. No wonder people are happier to blame 
“Understanding everything, we could forgive everything”
Indeed.
DALE
opps, Impenitent, thank you too 
you sneaked that one in there before mine.
Scary isn’t it. 
DALE
shouldnt we be able to figure that out?
im pretty sure the main two reasons why i am a devoted follower of the golden rule is because my whole life is one big gift and that gift gives me the ability to give to others. i never earned anything or did anything good to deserve all the good ive received, and i am now in a position to do so. so i help and give at every opportunity without thinking twice.
what is the opposite of that? if an evil murderous crack lord went back to when he was 10 years old and he realized that instead of the world being an awful harsh place full of people who want to rob him every chance they get and instead of him being another faceless victim of the worlds harshness, he instead was showered with cash and opportunities and his brain capacity tripled, making him literally superior to everybody he ever met without having to try. would he be the happiest lovingest ghetto victim youve ever seen or what.
as soon as people are treated equally, i think evil will be gone. all it seems to be is an urge, created in childhood, to become equal or superior to your neighbors. if you already are, or such an idea doesnt exist or doesnt help your life, then clearly the thought of hurting others to accomplish it doesnt make sense and will only bring badness.
if anybody has ever had a life like mine, ie all the unfair goodness you can imagine, and they are still evil, then shit i dont know about this species.
Hello Future Man,
Thank you kindly for your reply. It does my heart good to hear of your outlook on life. You also wrote:
Don’t we generally treat prisoners the same? They each have the same size cell, they eat the same food, etc., and yet my guess is that if evil exists, it does so in our prisons. When everyone is treated roughly the same, people generally reach for their microscope. Even if we could treat everyone the same I suspect that people will never perceive that they are treated the same. Try as we may to level the playing field - out come the microscopes. The resolution of perceived injustice very likely surpasses the resolution of any dead-level system of social equality.
Hmm…I can’t help but think of an old Gary Larson card in which a prisoner on a slave-galley is pointing to another oarsman and complaining to a disbelieving burly overseer (who is dressed in leather with whip in-hand); “When I went to the bathroom he took my window seat.”
Oh yes, and there’s the other Larson card where an elf sitting at a long table of toymaking elves whispers with a grin to his neighbor, “Hey, Santa says that I’m his little helper!” 
Consider also the guy who receives an unexpected raise in his paycheck on Friday. He feels wonderful about it all weekend. However, on Monday morning he’s crushed to learn that not only did everyone else in his office receive a raise, but he had the smallest raise of all. I think it was Gore Vidal who quipped;
“It’s not enough to succeed. Other must fail.”
As long as everyone has a humane safety net beneath them I don’t much mind (in an Orwellian sense) that “some pigs are more equal than others.” I have in mind the typically Scandanavian socio-economic model where some people are prevented from falling too low by preventing others from rising too high. The limited remaining economic disparity helps provide a minimal standard of decency for all, and yet it hasn’t, to my knowledge, eliminated evil.
Best wishes,
Michael
i need to rewrite that quote. what i meant was that if all people are treated equally, then nobody would want to make their own life better. that is obviously wrong unless all people are in my position of ultimate superiority.
what ill change that to is that once humans dont have any way of making their life better, once all resources are equally distributed and everybody has the things that they want, then there will be no evil. obviously. and obviously this is a few technological revolutions away.
the key to eliminating it is analyzing why it happens. the only reason i can possibly see is that there is some gain to be had at the expense of others. i dont see sadism as evil, i see it as a psychosis, which is what it is.
when i see an evil person, i see a guy who sees an opportunity to help himself and he doesnt care if it hurts people. he doesnt want it to hurt somebody, unless the gain requires that he hurt them, ie he sees an opportunity to make himself look tough.
so if all resources are distributed to everybody, and the list of human needs is all checked off for everybody, then that guy who doesnt care if he hurts people will actually continue to not care, but he will never have a chance to act on it.
and the fact that he was never taken advantage of while he was an impressionable child may actually let the idea of communal existence sink all the way in. perhaps all children who grow up in this utopia will not understand what evil is. how could they have ever observed it?
Future Man,
You present a logical social utopianist argument, but I’m not convinced than the human species is capable of ever functioning in such an environment.
Consider: the most primitive and pervasive learning tool of man is comparison/ contrast. A day-old infant has already begun to discriminate between warm/cold, wet/dry, hunger/satiation. This pattern of learning and making ‘judgements’ about the world is inescapable. No matter how equal the distribution of whatever is necessary to satisfy human needs, it just doesn’t seem likely than humans will ever accept being ‘equal’.
JT
tentative is completely right. Futureman, i put it to you, dont you think early humans thought:
“we’d all get along if there was just enough to eat”
and later
“we’d all get along if everyone had the right to elect leaders”
or
“we’d all get along if anyone could make a living”
The above is true of 99% of the people in the developed world. In fact, we have an excess and yet the developing world is barely acknowledged by governments except as a threat and to exploit stupid imposed trade rules.
As long as humans identify with a level of society other than the species as a whole (be that a country, race or religion), then these divides will cause friction because they will compete for resources, and this will still happen regardless of how equally everything is spread or how much people actually have.
On a related note, I propose to mirror my three genetic drives model of human behaviour with the corresponding memetic version. This isnt really a seperate drive of course, rather a distinct manifestation of it. Memetics is a dodgy idea, but useful in this methinks.
Thus: Your ideas (your memetic self), your community (your memetic family), your ideals (your memetic species).
As long as people have different ideas and live in distinct communities, even if ideals are the same there will be violent competition to decide who is right and wrong.
To make your utopia you would have to ban expression of different ideas or at least any form of competition of them. A pretty mean and thankless task.
Sorry if im incoherant; its a tad late/early. Cheers!