But to throw out the whole concept of dividing up blame is rather hard-line, isn't it?
Depends on exactly what you mean. If you mean throwing out the concept that two people who are equally to blame must each individually be less to blame than a single person who is wholly to blame, then no, I don't think that's hard-line at all, but merely good sense. Responsibility and blame don't get diluted when you spread them around.
I don't know... what about in situations where people do have different amounts of blame? Do you have a method of stating that that doesn't reduce to percentages? Or do you believe those situations don't exist?
Certainly those situations exist. I don't know exactly what method to use. A sensible way to do it might be to define an amount, 100%, which corresponds to the maximum possible blame an individual can have for any event, then assign percentages based on that. So you might have two people who both get 100%, or who both get 20%, or one gets 20% and one gets 50%. Of course these numbers become extremely arbitrary and I'm not really sure how it would all work out.
The role it plays is one of learning from other people's experience. If she was not at fault in any way it implies that there was no reasonable action she could have taken to avoid being scammed. That she carries fault for her loss means that we can examine the nature of that fault so as to avoid it in our lives, thereby not falling victim to the same scam.
Think of it as getting hit by lightning. One guy gets hit by lightning while standing outside on a perfectly calm blue day. Certainly not his fault. The other guy gets hit by lightning while holding on to a metal pole under a tree in the middle of a fierce thunderstorm. Absolutely his fault. If you try to learn from the first guy and decide that the only answer is never to go outside, you have learned the wrong lesson. But if you try to learn from the second guy and decide that the answer is to avoid being exposed while holding onto metal near trees in a thunderstorm, you've learned from his experience.
In this case, saying that it's her fault means that we can learn how the scammers tricked her so as to lessen their ability to trick us.
It's true, but the effect I have personally is so small that it is basically irrelevant. It's the same reason why I believe that it is irrational to vote. (The expected return from voting is far smaller than the cost of doing so. However I still go vote, but I acknowledge that I am irrational in doing so.) Whereas my own personal welfare is much more greatly affected by my actions in avoiding scams and other crimes (and non-criminal losses, for that matter), so that's where I concentrate my thinking.
One cannot grow to be her age without coming to know that there are scammers in the world, that a deal which is too good to be true almost certainly is, and that taking money which isn't yours is wrong. That she chose to ignore all of these in her reckless pursuit of Twenty! Million! Dollars! is sufficient to place blame on her head.
So there was a total of 200% of blame to be distributed? That makes 0% of sense.
I'm glad you agree. Blame doesn't get distributed at all. Blame is merely assigned.
You're probably thinking that I should say that 50% of the blame goes to each. But I don't like that terminology, because it implies that each one gets less of the blame than if one were 100% at fault and the other were 0%. It's possible to have a scenario where nobody gets any blame (a pure accident), or a scenario where both people get the full blame, or a scenario where one person gets full blame and one gets none.
It's not a situation where you sit down with X blame to portion out, and then you figure out how large of the pie each person gets, where one person getting more means another person gets less. Each person's blame can be fixed without looking at the others.
It takes two to tango. If there were no scammers, or no victims, then there would be none of these crimes.
Fault is not binary. If you leave the door to your house open with a sign that says, "please come inside and steal all of my shit", then you are deeply at fault for any resulting theft. If you have three different locks and a security system and a large, mean dog then your fault in any theft is pretty minimal. In between, your fault is in between.
I have been an idiot many times. I have made stupid mistakes which cost me a great deal of time and money. I blame myself as much as is appropriate for those mistakes.
One time my wallet was stolen by a pickpocket. Of course the pickpocket gets the blame for this. But so do I. I was stupid. I stood in a crowded area known for pickpocketing and did nothing to protect my wallet. Logical consequence of these actions: my wallet was no longer there. Because this was my fault (AND the pickpocket's fault) I knew that there were things I could do to protect myself in the future. I learned my lesson, and have not been a victim of pickpocketing since.
I'm not enabling anyone. You seem to continually ignore the fact that in the class of crimes under discussion, I am blaming both the victim and the criminal. If the victim took knowing steps which resulted in the crime, then they absolutely deserve blame. This is a separate issue from the question of whether or not to blame the criminal.
Blame is not a zero-sum game. It does not get divided in half when you spread it to two people.
Sometimes something bad happens and nobody is at fault.
Sometimes something bad happens and everybody involved is at fault.
Sometimes something bad happens and only some of the people involved are at fault.
By examining cases in which I could potentially be involved, looking at who is at fault, and seeing what those people could have done to avoid the situation, I am able to learn from other people's mistakes.
Saying that you must never blame the victim puts you in a situation where you can never take any action to reduce your chance of being a victim. Which is simply not how the world works. You can absolutely take actions which reduce your chances of being a victim of crime, and you should.
Again, I don't understand what you're getting at. I do blame the criminal. But when the victim has brought it upon themselves, I also blame the victim.
If I ever get sucked into an e-mail scam (which I don't ever plan on doing) then you can bet that I will blame the scammer who ripped me off. But I will also blame myself for being an idiot.
If I am the victim of a crime and it really is my fault, then it's only logical to blame myself. It seems to me that it would be far more damaging to my psyche to have an attitude that the victim is never at fault and therefore that I can never do anything to avoid being a victim of another crime in the future.
I don't see why good people should automatically be held blameless simply because they are good.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, after all.
If good people cause bad things to happen then they should receive blame proportionate to their role, not their motivation. That they caused bad things to happen to themselves shouldn't change matters at all. This doesn't make them bad people, but neither does being a good person make them fault-free.
I don't see what's disturbing about assigning fault if you carry out an action which has obvious consequences.
The rest of your post is all completely irrelevant because it addresses points that I simply did not make. At no point did I ever state that the criminal should not be held responsible. He should. But if the victim did something that obviously leads to the crime being committed, then the victim is also at fault.
Blame is not something that needs to be portioned out so that it can add up to 100%. If you leave a stack of money out in plain view, and your neighbor takes it, then your neighbor is 100% guilty of theft as you say. However you are also 100% at fault for that theft, because you either knew or should have known the consequences of that action when you carried it out.
And the simple fact is that people like this woman do cause crime. Maybe you don't like it, but it's a fact. If everybody were smart enough to avoid these scams, then the scammers would not longer carry them out. Obviously this is not actually something that can be accomplished, so it's kind of a useless thing to know, but it's still true.
Your approach is a reasonable one. However I don't like it because there is essentially nothing that I can personally do to reduce the number of scammers in the world.
This is why I talk about "fault" the way I do. While I cannot personally reduce the number of scammers in the world, I can reduce my likelihood of being scammed.
The best way to do this is to watch other people get scammed and learn from their experience. "Fault" is basically a pithy way of saying that this woman had the opportunity to avoid her fate but chose not to take it. If I am in a similar situation, I can learn from her experience and avoid the scam.
Consider a hypothetical situation where a person got scammed and was not at fault in any way. In that case the lack of fault has a very different meaning for how I can learn from his experience.
If you want to look at things differently then be my guest. But please don't go off talking about nonexistent "logical contradictions" in my thinking just because you can't seem to grasp what I'm talking about.
As they say, you cannot cheat an honest man (or woman in this case).
Now, I don't believe that to be true 100% of the time. But in this case it certainly is true. The scammer got her involved by selling her a criminal scheme. It was of course not exactly the same criminal scheme as the one that he was actually carrying out, but the fact of the matter is that this woman thought she was involved in a criminal enterprise, and willingly participated.
There are three utterly separate concepts at play here, and you seem insistent for reasons I cannot comprehend to squish them all into a single idea:
Moral rightness
Legal rightness
Fault
Any combination of these three ideas can be found in real life. As there are eight different combinations I'm not going to bother coming up with examples of all of them, but it should be pretty clear that they can happen.
Note that I am not talking about punishment, or anything of the sort. The scammers should be punished, end of story. But that doesn't change the fact that it was this woman's own damned fault for being such an idiot that she got scammed. That doesn't mean I think that she deserves it or that she should be punished or anything like that. Please, if you are going to argue, argue based on what I actually say and not these crazy ideas you imagine I believe.
Please argue against what I said, not what you imagine I said.
If you took reasonable precautions to secure your house or your car then you are not at fault.
If you left your car unlocked, parked in a bad neighborhood, with a big sign on it saying "valuable stuff inside, car unlocked, please steal what you want" then you are absolutely at fault.
I did not ever say that all victims are to blame for the crime they suffer from. Only that if the victim does something which will obviously lead to a crime, they are at fault.
Should be obvious when you consider that there are events for for which nobody is to blame, but alas, rational thinking is not most people's strong point.
I'm not talking about how much people should be punished. As far as I'm aware that was not even brought up in the thread. I am talking about whose fault a particular outcome is.
If I carry out an action with well-known consequences then I am at fault for those consequences. This is true whether I'm parking illegally and getting a ticket, climbing a tree in a thunderstorm and getting struck by lightning, or giving a scammer money and getting ripped off.
Certainly, what the scammer did was morally and legally wrong and what this woman did was not. But that is orthogonal to the fact that it is this woman's fault that she got ripped off. (And it is also the scammer's fault for ripping her off.)
There are certain actions which you can take which, while not in any sense illegal, are virtually guaranteed to cause harm to yourself.
Leaving a stack of money out for anyone to take is one of these. Playing along to an internet scam is another. And although I'm sure I'll get flamed for saying so, teasingly parading past men in a bad neighborhood while wearing a revealing outfit is another.
Your fallacy is essentially in assuming that blame is a percentage which must be portioned out among the actors involved in the event. It is true that if I leave a stack of money out in plain view it is 100% the fault of the criminal for taking it. It is also 100% my fault for being a complete idiot.
If I take an action which I know, or should have very good reason to know, will cause me harm even if that harm is illegal, then it is my fault for taking that action and I bear the blame for the consequences. It is also the fault of whoever actually does it to me, but that doesn't change the first part.
People like this woman cause crime by making it pay off for the criminals. She deserves a whole heap of blame, just as much as the scammers do.
The average person does have better common sense than that. Probably less than one in one thousand people falls victim to these scams (number pulled out of my ass, but I'd bet that it's far less than that), meaning that the vast majority of people have the basic smarts to avoid them.
Just wanted to remind people that stealing money from people and then giving it back to them is not actually a net gain, even if it's better than stealing it and not giving it back.
Slashdot Mirror
But to throw out the whole concept of dividing up blame is rather hard-line, isn't it?
Depends on exactly what you mean. If you mean throwing out the concept that two people who are equally to blame must each individually be less to blame than a single person who is wholly to blame, then no, I don't think that's hard-line at all, but merely good sense. Responsibility and blame don't get diluted when you spread them around.
I don't know... what about in situations where people do have different amounts of blame? Do you have a method of stating that that doesn't reduce to percentages? Or do you believe those situations don't exist?
Certainly those situations exist. I don't know exactly what method to use. A sensible way to do it might be to define an amount, 100%, which corresponds to the maximum possible blame an individual can have for any event, then assign percentages based on that. So you might have two people who both get 100%, or who both get 20%, or one gets 20% and one gets 50%. Of course these numbers become extremely arbitrary and I'm not really sure how it would all work out.
Not enough to be significant.
I'm assuming that her greed overrode whatever small amount of sense she had managed to acquire.
The role it plays is one of learning from other people's experience. If she was not at fault in any way it implies that there was no reasonable action she could have taken to avoid being scammed. That she carries fault for her loss means that we can examine the nature of that fault so as to avoid it in our lives, thereby not falling victim to the same scam.
Think of it as getting hit by lightning. One guy gets hit by lightning while standing outside on a perfectly calm blue day. Certainly not his fault. The other guy gets hit by lightning while holding on to a metal pole under a tree in the middle of a fierce thunderstorm. Absolutely his fault. If you try to learn from the first guy and decide that the only answer is never to go outside, you have learned the wrong lesson. But if you try to learn from the second guy and decide that the answer is to avoid being exposed while holding onto metal near trees in a thunderstorm, you've learned from his experience.
In this case, saying that it's her fault means that we can learn how the scammers tricked her so as to lessen their ability to trick us.
It's true, but the effect I have personally is so small that it is basically irrelevant. It's the same reason why I believe that it is irrational to vote. (The expected return from voting is far smaller than the cost of doing so. However I still go vote, but I acknowledge that I am irrational in doing so.) Whereas my own personal welfare is much more greatly affected by my actions in avoiding scams and other crimes (and non-criminal losses, for that matter), so that's where I concentrate my thinking.
One cannot grow to be her age without coming to know that there are scammers in the world, that a deal which is too good to be true almost certainly is, and that taking money which isn't yours is wrong. That she chose to ignore all of these in her reckless pursuit of Twenty! Million! Dollars! is sufficient to place blame on her head.
So there was a total of 200% of blame to be distributed? That makes 0% of sense.
I'm glad you agree. Blame doesn't get distributed at all. Blame is merely assigned.
You're probably thinking that I should say that 50% of the blame goes to each. But I don't like that terminology, because it implies that each one gets less of the blame than if one were 100% at fault and the other were 0%. It's possible to have a scenario where nobody gets any blame (a pure accident), or a scenario where both people get the full blame, or a scenario where one person gets full blame and one gets none.
It's not a situation where you sit down with X blame to portion out, and then you figure out how large of the pie each person gets, where one person getting more means another person gets less. Each person's blame can be fixed without looking at the others.
It takes two to tango. If there were no scammers, or no victims, then there would be none of these crimes.
Fault is not binary. If you leave the door to your house open with a sign that says, "please come inside and steal all of my shit", then you are deeply at fault for any resulting theft. If you have three different locks and a security system and a large, mean dog then your fault in any theft is pretty minimal. In between, your fault is in between.
I have been an idiot many times. I have made stupid mistakes which cost me a great deal of time and money. I blame myself as much as is appropriate for those mistakes.
One time my wallet was stolen by a pickpocket. Of course the pickpocket gets the blame for this. But so do I. I was stupid. I stood in a crowded area known for pickpocketing and did nothing to protect my wallet. Logical consequence of these actions: my wallet was no longer there. Because this was my fault (AND the pickpocket's fault) I knew that there were things I could do to protect myself in the future. I learned my lesson, and have not been a victim of pickpocketing since.
I'm not enabling anyone. You seem to continually ignore the fact that in the class of crimes under discussion, I am blaming both the victim and the criminal. If the victim took knowing steps which resulted in the crime, then they absolutely deserve blame. This is a separate issue from the question of whether or not to blame the criminal.
Blame is not a zero-sum game. It does not get divided in half when you spread it to two people.
Sometimes something bad happens and nobody is at fault.
Sometimes something bad happens and everybody involved is at fault.
Sometimes something bad happens and only some of the people involved are at fault.
By examining cases in which I could potentially be involved, looking at who is at fault, and seeing what those people could have done to avoid the situation, I am able to learn from other people's mistakes.
Saying that you must never blame the victim puts you in a situation where you can never take any action to reduce your chance of being a victim. Which is simply not how the world works. You can absolutely take actions which reduce your chances of being a victim of crime, and you should.
Again, I don't understand what you're getting at. I do blame the criminal. But when the victim has brought it upon themselves, I also blame the victim.
If I ever get sucked into an e-mail scam (which I don't ever plan on doing) then you can bet that I will blame the scammer who ripped me off. But I will also blame myself for being an idiot.
If I am the victim of a crime and it really is my fault, then it's only logical to blame myself. It seems to me that it would be far more damaging to my psyche to have an attitude that the victim is never at fault and therefore that I can never do anything to avoid being a victim of another crime in the future.
I don't see why good people should automatically be held blameless simply because they are good.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, after all.
If good people cause bad things to happen then they should receive blame proportionate to their role, not their motivation. That they caused bad things to happen to themselves shouldn't change matters at all. This doesn't make them bad people, but neither does being a good person make them fault-free.
I don't see what's disturbing about assigning fault if you carry out an action which has obvious consequences.
The rest of your post is all completely irrelevant because it addresses points that I simply did not make. At no point did I ever state that the criminal should not be held responsible. He should. But if the victim did something that obviously leads to the crime being committed, then the victim is also at fault.
Blame is not something that needs to be portioned out so that it can add up to 100%. If you leave a stack of money out in plain view, and your neighbor takes it, then your neighbor is 100% guilty of theft as you say. However you are also 100% at fault for that theft, because you either knew or should have known the consequences of that action when you carried it out.
And the simple fact is that people like this woman do cause crime. Maybe you don't like it, but it's a fact. If everybody were smart enough to avoid these scams, then the scammers would not longer carry them out. Obviously this is not actually something that can be accomplished, so it's kind of a useless thing to know, but it's still true.
Your approach is a reasonable one. However I don't like it because there is essentially nothing that I can personally do to reduce the number of scammers in the world.
This is why I talk about "fault" the way I do. While I cannot personally reduce the number of scammers in the world, I can reduce my likelihood of being scammed.
The best way to do this is to watch other people get scammed and learn from their experience. "Fault" is basically a pithy way of saying that this woman had the opportunity to avoid her fate but chose not to take it. If I am in a similar situation, I can learn from her experience and avoid the scam.
Consider a hypothetical situation where a person got scammed and was not at fault in any way. In that case the lack of fault has a very different meaning for how I can learn from his experience.
If you want to look at things differently then be my guest. But please don't go off talking about nonexistent "logical contradictions" in my thinking just because you can't seem to grasp what I'm talking about.
Excellent point there!
As they say, you cannot cheat an honest man (or woman in this case).
Now, I don't believe that to be true 100% of the time. But in this case it certainly is true. The scammer got her involved by selling her a criminal scheme. It was of course not exactly the same criminal scheme as the one that he was actually carrying out, but the fact of the matter is that this woman thought she was involved in a criminal enterprise, and willingly participated.
You're the one who seems confused here.
There are three utterly separate concepts at play here, and you seem insistent for reasons I cannot comprehend to squish them all into a single idea:
Any combination of these three ideas can be found in real life. As there are eight different combinations I'm not going to bother coming up with examples of all of them, but it should be pretty clear that they can happen.
Note that I am not talking about punishment, or anything of the sort. The scammers should be punished, end of story. But that doesn't change the fact that it was this woman's own damned fault for being such an idiot that she got scammed. That doesn't mean I think that she deserves it or that she should be punished or anything like that. Please, if you are going to argue, argue based on what I actually say and not these crazy ideas you imagine I believe.
They aren't weapons of mass destruction anymore. Nuclear weapons are fairly delicate and require a lot of maintenance to remain functional.
What's Orwellian is assuming that anything with the "nuclear" label is deathly serious even when the facts are otherwise.
Please argue against what I said, not what you imagine I said.
If you took reasonable precautions to secure your house or your car then you are not at fault.
If you left your car unlocked, parked in a bad neighborhood, with a big sign on it saying "valuable stuff inside, car unlocked, please steal what you want" then you are absolutely at fault.
I did not ever say that all victims are to blame for the crime they suffer from. Only that if the victim does something which will obviously lead to a crime, they are at fault.
Should be obvious when you consider that there are events for for which nobody is to blame, but alas, rational thinking is not most people's strong point.
Intent has nothing to do with blame.
I'm not talking about how much people should be punished. As far as I'm aware that was not even brought up in the thread. I am talking about whose fault a particular outcome is.
If I carry out an action with well-known consequences then I am at fault for those consequences. This is true whether I'm parking illegally and getting a ticket, climbing a tree in a thunderstorm and getting struck by lightning, or giving a scammer money and getting ripped off.
Certainly, what the scammer did was morally and legally wrong and what this woman did was not. But that is orthogonal to the fact that it is this woman's fault that she got ripped off. (And it is also the scammer's fault for ripping her off.)
Sorry, but that's simply wrong.
There are certain actions which you can take which, while not in any sense illegal, are virtually guaranteed to cause harm to yourself.
Leaving a stack of money out for anyone to take is one of these. Playing along to an internet scam is another. And although I'm sure I'll get flamed for saying so, teasingly parading past men in a bad neighborhood while wearing a revealing outfit is another.
Your fallacy is essentially in assuming that blame is a percentage which must be portioned out among the actors involved in the event. It is true that if I leave a stack of money out in plain view it is 100% the fault of the criminal for taking it. It is also 100% my fault for being a complete idiot.
If I take an action which I know, or should have very good reason to know, will cause me harm even if that harm is illegal, then it is my fault for taking that action and I bear the blame for the consequences. It is also the fault of whoever actually does it to me, but that doesn't change the first part.
People like this woman cause crime by making it pay off for the criminals. She deserves a whole heap of blame, just as much as the scammers do.
The average person does have better common sense than that. Probably less than one in one thousand people falls victim to these scams (number pulled out of my ass, but I'd bet that it's far less than that), meaning that the vast majority of people have the basic smarts to avoid them.
RTFA, a lot of people tried to talk her out of it but she was so obsessed (i.e. stupid) that they simply couldn't.
Please try to remember what site you're posting to.
Humor based on pretending to be stupid fails, because no idea is so stupid that you cannot find someone who honestly believes it.
Just wanted to remind people that stealing money from people and then giving it back to them is not actually a net gain, even if it's better than stealing it and not giving it back.