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From the article: “Ella lived near a busy street where pollution levels were consistently recorded at above the legal limit between 2010 and her death in 2013.”

• just_a_dev 7y ago
  Still it doesn't change anything about the underlying disease she had. If you are going to blame pollution, what's to stop the cause of death from being something like "ignorant parents" for keeping her in the heavily polluted area (yes, I realize most people cant just move on a whim)? Or what's to stop blaming that exact diesel truck that drove by the second before she had the asthma attack that caused her pulmonary failure?
  • basilgohar 7y ago
    The negligence was due to the pollution being higher than legally permitted in that area. These regulations are there to protect people, and someone either did not enforce those, or someone blatantly violated them. If someone illegally dumped radioactive waste next to your home, and you don't move either due to inability or some other reason, the crime does not magically fall on your shoulders.
  • smallnamespace 7y ago
    All events have an infinite number of causes - when we pick just one of them, we're doing some combination of assigning blame and responsibility and calling others to action. So that's precisely why blaming pollution might be sensible. Can you actually force all parents to move away from a polluted area? Or can you punish a diesel truck driver for driving in a legally designated area? Taken to the extreme, can you change the laws of the universe, or its initial boundary conditions? Probably not, but you can certainly change pollution limits and enforce them.
  • klodolph 7y ago
    This is least sound argument I’ve read all week. Pollution exacerbates asthma, this is well-studied and well-understood, we even know which kinds of pollution do this (ozone and particulates). Deaths generally have multiple causes and complex chains of events leading to them, and we have a rich history studying the relationship between how an actual event happened (a girl dying) and where we assign the blame (pollution). If you think that the slippery slope will lead us to blame ignorant parents or a random diesel truck, well, that way to assign blame isn’t supported by theory or precedent. The parents wouldn't be blamed because they didn’t have any particular duty to move somewhere with less pollution, just like you don’t have a legal duty to avoid getting murdered by moving to a lower crime area (the idea that you would assign blame here to the parents is legally ridiculous). The diesel truck wouldn’t be blamed because it did not contribute significantly to the death, you wouldn’t reasonably suppose that whether a particular truck drove down a street would make the difference between someone dying from asthma or not—after all, if that particular truck didn’t, then another truck will, later. Blaming pollution is well-founded—there are legal limits on pollution which were violated (there existed a legal duty to keep pollution below these limits), the pollution was a significant contribution to the death (without the pollution, the death would be much less likely), and the contribution of pollution to the death was natural and foreseeable. These three things together are key elements in fault. There are a number of hypothetical (and real) cases which you can use to illustrate all of these factors working together. For example, Alice breaks into Bob’s house to murder Bob, she waits in the closet with a gun ready to jump out and shoot him. When she closes the closet door, it knocks over an umbrella. Bob comes home, trips on the umbrella, hits his head on the floor, and dies. Alice acted with intent to kill Bob, and has in fact succeeded (her actions caused Bob to die), but the chain of causality between her actual actions (knocking over the umbrella, which Bob trips over) is not something that someone would reasonably expect to cause someone to die, so Alice is not in fact guilty of murder (again, even though she acted with intent to kill Bob, and did in fact cause Bob to die).
  • trickstra 7y ago
    If pollution was above the legal limits, yes, that changes a lot about the cause of death.
• martamorena 7y ago
  So you are saying that this particular child's death was not of her own doing? What about the other hundreds of thousands of child deaths? Did the other children all sit down and think "Hey, how am I going to kill myself quickly and miserably"? Obviously a child (except in rare cases) doesn't intent to kill itself or wittingly pursues actions that lead them to death. Even adults don't do that. An alcoholic doesn't necessarily assume he will die. A person who eats junk food every day doesn't do so with the realization that it is bad for them and will lead to early death. They (and we as humanity) are mostly ignorant of the consequences of their actions. Their parents are the only ones who could be responsible for her death. Plain and simple. If I know my kid is allergic to shellfish, I am not feeding her shellfish every day. Not every street has high pollution. On top of that, asthma is not a disease, it is a symptom. While sadly most people and even doctors don't care to root cause symptoms, the fault would primarily lie there. And consequentially with the doctors, who didn't care to fix her asthma or prevent this child from getting polluted further.