Sense one: A person who steals from another person deserves to pay restitution.
Roughly: When a person does something unethical/illegal, they incurr a debt or penalty or are owed a punishment.
Sense two: A person who extends their hand towards a strange, growling dog deserves to be bitten.
Roughly: When a person makes a foolish blunder, the consequences are their own fault and they are placed [i]to some degree[/i] beyond pity.
So, a couple questions: Do both senses actually exist as different things, or does one collapse into the other? If you think both senses do exist as different things, do both of them play a role in justice, or only one?
I think it’s one thing to make a stupid mistake, and another to do something stupid on purpose. Does the thief know he’s stealing? Does the dog bite victim know the dog bites?
Yeah, it seems like knowing in advance the nature and consequences of one’s actions affects both senses of the term. Though, to add another layer of complication, a person can be culpable for not knowing something. Maybe the person didn’t know the dog bites, but there were enough signs, and if they spent 30 seconds thinking about it before reaching for the dog, they would have figured it out. Maybe the thief didn’t know if he was stealing or not, but could have easily found out and didn’t bother. So even not knowing might have some deserts in there.
EDIT: I just realized the above relates closely to some stuff you said to me recently.
Well, there’s doing something dumb like jumping onto a matress that some idiot placed under your second story window because it just looks like it’ll work, and then there’s burning your crotch with hot coffee, assuming the coffee was way hotter than it’d ever been anywhere. You coulda looked at the coffee and seen, but I’m not sure a reasonable person would see a duty to do so, whereas any reasonable person should know immediately never to jump from windows onto mattresses.
You are to be responsible for restoring the prior balance (justice).
You are responsible for protecting yourself (anti-socialism).
The two then play together as the dog bites the man for stealing from him in the effort to regain what was stolen, as opposed to the dog calling the insurance and police companies in order to have his property restored and the police and insurance companies then usurp compensation from the man for both the property and the extra labor they spent to search him out and force restitution to all 3 parties (plus Christmas bonus money), unless he was of the chosen type of person, in which case he is never caught.
Your (2) prevents the mediators (insurance, police, media, doctors, lawyers, bankers,…) from becoming the dark lord instigating usury and manipulations. Thus the current world order (excessively socialist) much prefers, in fact demands, that (2) be strictly forbidden. Current social design is that the dog owner must pay for any damages done so as to ensure that the mediator gets used more often (job-security). Also a dog/man is never allowed to regain his restitution on his own or automatically, as your (1) would imply. All “justice” is to go through the mediators (else they lose they purpose and control).
Although the reasonable person argument is very quickly changing. Public policy seems to take a lot of wind out of characterizations such as what is reasonable, or who is a reasonable, or even unreasonable, and therefore chosen to be excused under certain situations.
Should or should not a reasonable person act in accordance to what he knows is indeed another layer of complexity, because how can a man like that be found to have such capacity to self evaluate,or,even be evaluated as such?
He should. I mean I think there’s some balance between it being my fault I didn’t see the wet floor in the grocery store, and it being their fault for not cleaning up the floor. They kinda knew that they were in a place where floors get wet and someone could fall, but I kinda knew that too. The question I think of is who’s duty is it to maintain the dryness of the floor?
Yeah, and there’s so many factors on a case by case basis there too. Add to the above equation that you’re running with a bag full of steak knives, and it changes things entirely. Or does it?
Well they’ve got the whole contributory negligence thing for that one. I mean, at some point if you slip and fall in my grocery store, if the floor is wet and there’s no sign, and I’ve failed in my duty to maintain safety standards, then I owe ya whatever it cost you to slip and fall, but if you’re running with a bag of steak knives, then the stab wounds you may have to pay for yourself. Then the math gets all tricky and weird because you’re involving insurance companies and anarcho capitalist doctors, and so in some cases you’d just call it a wash and everyone pays for their own shit. I mean if you were trying to sue me for the stab wound part, I’d counter and say you busted a bunch of my groceries up. I know in Alabama, I sued a woman once who hit me with a truck, and her insurance company’s attorney claimed I couldn’t have been so injured had I not been speeding. If he coulda convinced the jury I had been speeding, then it woulda been a case of me not getting shit because I would have played a contributing factor to the incident by negligently ignoring the speed limit and all that, and so the bitch who hit me ya know it wouldn’t have been all her fault and so no one gets paid.
Does this same sort of dynamic play out at the criminal level, and the legislative level (i.e., deciding what sorts of things ought to be illegal in the first place), or do you think it’s most clearly expressed on the negligence level of who owes what to whom?
The legislative sense of the first case considers what behaviours constitute an infringement upon communal rights of citizens (in the first case mentioned, the right to one’s own property, but such “rights” could be as diverse (btw I put rights in quotes because it is not clear whether the rights are by convention or by nature) as rights to one’s own person and self determination — the legislative could operate with the idea that one should not be forced to acts one disagrees with, for example — keeping in mind this is not univerally agreed on, and even in “free societies” it is not under certain coditions, for example if one has lost one’s rights through committing a crime.)
The second case you put up is related to responsibilities (or duties), as opposed to the first which had to do with infringement.
So you are asking what is the duty of the individual to keep their hand away from angry dogs’ mouths. It could easily be turned another way though, depending on the case. One could imagine a scenario for example where a small child, let’s say 6 years old, would run to go pet a dog that was growling or unfriendly. If that child becomes bitten there is one case, there is also another if the adult rushes to the child but he/she is already so near to the dog that when the adult reaches out to take the child, the dog takes the quick movement in its direction as a threat and bites.
Then we would ask, was the duty of the adult to keep their child from moving away? Is that duty absolute? What if the child suddenly darted away? Is the duty in the owner of the dog to keep their angry dog either muzzled or in some way restrained from biting others?
I am pretty sure that ever legal system, at least in the western world, has guidelines of which duties citizens are expected to know and follow, as well as a guide of what constitutes an infringement against communal rights, and then as cases are handled by the judiciary on individual bases, considering the details of the situation.
Also, rights and duties sometimes overlap so that certain rights could infringe on others, or duties may infringe on rights, or else rights might necessitate duties. It would be the work of a good legislator to iron all this out with an eye to the form of a good society (and no doubt have a notion of what a good society entails).
Skill is involved in the latter sense and not in the first. Unless you word sense one: when a person is caught doing something illegal. Focusing on the failure and leaving out the type of value judgment in ‘unethical’.
Personally I often have a lot of overlap between the senses. I am often angry at criminals for the risk they are taking in relation to themselves.
AS an example without overlap: I am pretty libertarian in my view on drug use, but I have little sympathy for drug smugglers - the ones who actually go through borders. It strikes me as such a spectacular lack of self-care.
But I am not truly comfortable with this since I benefit from people who have taken similar risks - say in the political sphere.
Focusing on sense 2: sometimes I react this way, especially in instances where poor choices were repeated despite near misses and bad consequences. My sympathy has a limit. But I have no rule. Also there can be a temporary quality to my lack of sympathy. If someone suffers long term consequences, my sympathy may come back after being dulled at first by their stupidity. And frankly, their attitudes can affect all this tremendously. Also the fit between the consequences and the mistake. Ending up raped in prison as part of the consequences of being arrested for a non-violent crime will elicit sympathy in me.
And, the learning curve in our short lives is very steep in many instances. I know this personally from some serious errors I made in the care of an elderly family member. I simply did not take the care I should have, but given the fast deterioration of the family member AND my lack of experience, I have some sympathy for my mistakes. I did not even ignore a warning. Though there were numerous warnings about all sorts of things, the issue in question was not brought up. Now I might have had the foresight and I am sure some people would have been able to shift their relation - it was my father - to fit better to the current state of that parent and override or at least struggle harder against his choices. So I can’t simply shrug in my self-evaluation.
(obviously not an organized response, but these are some of the things I thought of)
I was hoping somebody would go there. There is certainly overlap in my two senses of ‘desert’- the criminal who doesn’t spend adequate effort to keep himself from getting caught might deserve his punishment in both senses.
At the end of the day, no one knows who would be deserving what until some shit actually got played out. 2 people could take the same precautions in doing the same act and because there are factors outside their control and view in the world that can change the outcome, at a certain point you can’t just go around saying that everyone deserves what they get because it’d be hard to justify some of the shit people get. Like the only difference between bravery and stupidity is the outcome or something like that. So how should we establish a standard of whether or not someone has taken adequate care to avoid some harm? Where should the line be?
I don’t think the only difference between bravery and stupidity is the outcome. We call an act brave if we consider the good which the act seeks to procure greater than the ill which would arise from the act’s failure. We might also call an act brave if the ill which arises from an a failed act undertaken is less than the ill received from not acting at all. For an example of the latter, some might feel slavery is worse than death, so fighting for their freedom would be worth dying for. Another case might be losing a loved one is worse than risking harm to save them.
Generally in law it is true that the dividing lines are judged on a case by case basis with general rules of what merits being brought before some tribunal. Common law holds records of individual cases which are then used as aids for other individual cases.
It might also help to deeply investigate a number of cases revolving around the same issue (in this case whether an individual has avoided harm or not) and compare them to see if there is some common indicator of when proper care has been taken or neglected — in other words, try to gather general rules from the comparison of multiple instances. Still, at best this would probably only be a tool for judgement upon individual cases, and it would still be to the discretion of a judiciary to assess the factors of each case at hand to gauge its alignment on the measure between care and neglect.
Having written that out, it might not even be necessary to examine cases and compare them, it might only be necessary to be clear about what constitutes care and neglect to form an applicable measure. That is, if care and neglect are proper standards to judge questions of justice by.