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In practical terms I absolutely do agree with you. People collectively respond to whatever incentives they're allowed to, you _do_ get riskier behavior when you

In practical terms I absolutely do agree with you. People collectively respond to whatever incentives they're allowed to, you _do_ get riskier behavior when you reduce individual responsibility for actions. If you'll forgive me for going on a wide ranting tangent though, consider the following: >Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths. I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will" actually exists, I think it's just a convenient moral abstraction we've developed to grease the wheels of the world. Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society? One that recognizes my hypothesis regarding the illlegitimacy of absolute individual responsibility while also resulting in equal or better collective behavior? Going back towards the car example, I don't think hammer manufacturers should bear responsibility for the apocryphal homicidal misuse of their tools since removing a hammer from a toolbox just means the crime would be committed with a knife or rocks in a sock. This argument gets blurrier when you consider firearms manufacturers where the explicit intent of the tool is often to kill. You can make a solid argument either way there. So what about cars? They are involved in roughly 100 fatalities a day in the united states. Were cars designed to kill? No (although we do have the case where a manufacturer decided it was cheaper to keep selling unsafe cars and just pay out lawsuits rather than fix their screwup). Manufacturers generally do what they can to make them safer with each passing year. Despite that though, society still has to bear the cost of tens of thousands of deaths per year and two orders of magnitude more injuries. Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars. A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool. It's convenient, sure, to place absolute blame on the people who don't think just watch cool car go zoom in tv then buy cool car on credit and go zoom into building. Doing what we do now and removing those people from society at that point is a viable solution, but what if we put more effort into not letting industrial psychologists develop good little consumers like that in the first place? The US is the "land of the free" with high levels of individual responsibility and we've got astronomical household debt and the world's highest proportion of our population incarcerated to show for it. I think we can do better.

jfk13 6y ago
> Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we can decide to do anything to make things other than they are?
- katmannthree 6y ago
  >Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we can decide to do anything to make things other than they are? For the exact same reason as people who do believe in free will, some combination of our inherent traits and environment made us want to change things. Not having free will doesn't mean people immediately turn into dust, it just means the reason you decided to get a Big Whopper Breakfast Bucket™ from McWendallKingFC© has more to do with explicit and intentional psychological manipulation on their part than it does on you as the individual making a totally intentional, rational, and well thought out choice that definitely doesn't have anything to do with their highly optimized (to their benefit of course, not the benefit of your health) food and very realistic commercials of smiling happy people and great vibes. There's really no immediate practical application of free will (or the lack thereof), human behavior is what it is whether we have it or not. If we all believe in it then it's very easy to say "the buck stops here at the individual" in regards to antisocial behavior. If we don't have it then the causal chain is a lot messier and one reasonably could assign shared responsibility towards institutions that encourage suboptimal behavior (such as the advertising industry).
cgriswald 6y ago
> Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars. This isn't true. If you require auto manufacturers to be responsible for auto deaths and they decide to get out of business, then what? Trains? But won't the train manufacturers be held responsible for train-related deaths? Then you have the same problem, just with trains rather than autos. At that point, you either keep whittling things down until some mode of transportation is cheap and safe enough (but potentially very sub-optimal along other vectors) or everyone walks and goods don't get anywhere, which has its own cost in lives. > A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool. I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths and a tiny influence. Despite this advertisement and culture, the vast majority of people are responsible/reasonable (if unskilled and/or ignorant) drivers. I think governments could reduce the number of deaths far more greatly by having more stringent licensing guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads, saner zoning policies, better public transit options, etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a correlation between speed and fun. > I think we can do better. Certainly. However, I'm not convinced removing agency from individuals and ascribing fault to entities with no direct (and at best marginal indirect) control over specific or aggregated situations will get us there.

jfk13 6y ago

> Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we can decide to do anything to make things other than they are?

katmannthree 6y ago
>Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we can decide to do anything to make things other than they are? For the exact same reason as people who do believe in free will, some combination of our inherent traits and environment made us want to change things. Not having free will doesn't mean people immediately turn into dust, it just means the reason you decided to get a Big Whopper Breakfast Bucket™ from McWendallKingFC© has more to do with explicit and intentional psychological manipulation on their part than it does on you as the individual making a totally intentional, rational, and well thought out choice that definitely doesn't have anything to do with their highly optimized (to their benefit of course, not the benefit of your health) food and very realistic commercials of smiling happy people and great vibes. There's really no immediate practical application of free will (or the lack thereof), human behavior is what it is whether we have it or not. If we all believe in it then it's very easy to say "the buck stops here at the individual" in regards to antisocial behavior. If we don't have it then the causal chain is a lot messier and one reasonably could assign shared responsibility towards institutions that encourage suboptimal behavior (such as the advertising industry).

cgriswald 6y ago

> Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars. This isn't true. If you require auto manufacturers to be responsible for auto deaths and they decide to get out of business, then what? Trains? But won't the train manufacturers be held responsible for train-related deaths? Then you have the same problem, just with trains rather than autos. At that point, you either keep whittling things down until some mode of transportation is cheap and safe enough (but potentially very sub-optimal along other vectors) or everyone walks and goods don't get anywhere, which has its own cost in lives. > A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool. I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths and a tiny influence. Despite this advertisement and culture, the vast majority of people are responsible/reasonable (if unskilled and/or ignorant) drivers. I think governments could reduce the number of deaths far more greatly by having more stringent licensing guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads, saner zoning policies, better public transit options, etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a correlation between speed and fun. > I think we can do better. Certainly. However, I'm not convinced removing agency from individuals and ascribing fault to entities with no direct (and at best marginal indirect) control over specific or aggregated situations will get us there.