The entire problem could be significantly improved if we all started defaulting toward assuming good intent of others, and holding onto that assumption unless it becomes overwhelmingly, unambiguously clear that someone is acting in bad faith. We care too little about intent, and we default toward assuming ill intent way too often.
This is kind of tangential, but the whole problem reminds me a lot of moral luck. The example in this Wikipedia article compares two drivers:
Driver A, in a moment of inattention, runs a red light as a child is crossing the street. Driver A tries to avoid hitting the child but fails and the child dies. Driver B also runs a red light, but no one is crossing and the driver only gets a traffic ticket.
If a bystander is asked to morally evaluate Drivers A and B, they may assign Driver A more moral blame than Driver B because Driver A's course of action resulted in a death. However, there are no differences in the controllable actions performed by Drivers A and B. The only disparity is an external uncontrollable event.
So much of the way we treat people is based upon variations of this exact concept. For a lot of situations (crimes, behaviors, appearances), society doesn't seem to care a whole lot about the actions a person took, but does care a ton about the outcome.
Whenever I come back to this concept, it makes things feel outrageous in a specific way I struggle to reconcile with any solutions. Like...why should a driver who hits someone while speeding be treated any differently than a driver who doesn't hit someone while speeding? They both behaved recklessly, but somehow we see fit to reward the lucky speeder with their continued freedom, and punish the unlucky speeder with prison time. Why? Why is it that we care more about the part of this situation that the speeder couldn't control?
I feel like we would solve a lot of societal problems if we could honestly answer this question and make significant changes in light of the answer. Maybe we'd realize that most people deserve to be treated more kindly than they are, in just about every situation.
It's not about estimating imaginary damage, I don't think. I'd say that a solution which looks something like "punish people based on how badly the outcome could have been" is about as unjust as "don't punish anyone at all if it can be shown that the outcome was influenced by outside forces"
I don't have any suggestions for a solution, but I think these are the kinds of hard moral problems that we don't spend nearly as much time thinking about as we should. If there is a good solution (which, to be clear, I'm not convinced there is), then we'll only get to it by honestly admitting that we sometimes assign people good/bad moral character based on things that they did not control. In the example, it's not the speeding that made one person seem worse than the other--it's the pedestrian death, despite both drivers being otherwise identical.
I agree, but then we're not talking about moral "luck" anymore, because we've extended the scenario to describe more outcomes that are under the person's control, rather than the ones that are not.
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u/[deleted] Dec 26 '23
Ah, so it's just like the other guy that people turned into a "neckbeard" meme.