This reminds me of negligence theory. In that field, you've got to account for risk and the amount of potential harm. For example, we are required to take bigger precautions to prevent a 1% risk of death compared to a 1% risk of a broken toe. So it's not enough to say that a person is responsible only for what they could've reasonably been expected to foresee. We blame people for things that they legitimately foresaw as unlikely if they were a big enough deal. At a certain point, when likelihood drops very close to zero, we stop blaming people at all.
There are also some cute cases where a person attempts to do something that they cannot reasonably foresee as succeeding, such as trying to murder someone by shooting a gun up in the air in the middle of Kansas.
If you're interested in the surrounding philosophical issues, I recommend Ripstein's book, Equality, responsibility, and the law.
Interesting! I'll look up the book. Meanwhile yes, the idea of maximizing expected value Vs minimising possible risks is helpful insofar as we're aware that this is well in the parameters of knowledge were operating within.
Perhaps this is why President Xi's keynote address to the civil service this year was "Five Categories of Risk”!
This reminds me of negligence theory. In that field, you've got to account for risk and the amount of potential harm. For example, we are required to take bigger precautions to prevent a 1% risk of death compared to a 1% risk of a broken toe. So it's not enough to say that a person is responsible only for what they could've reasonably been expected to foresee. We blame people for things that they legitimately foresaw as unlikely if they were a big enough deal. At a certain point, when likelihood drops very close to zero, we stop blaming people at all.
There are also some cute cases where a person attempts to do something that they cannot reasonably foresee as succeeding, such as trying to murder someone by shooting a gun up in the air in the middle of Kansas.
If you're interested in the surrounding philosophical issues, I recommend Ripstein's book, Equality, responsibility, and the law.
Interesting! I'll look up the book. Meanwhile yes, the idea of maximizing expected value Vs minimising possible risks is helpful insofar as we're aware that this is well in the parameters of knowledge were operating within.