If the iPod was borrowed, she would be responsible for replacing it. That’s the problem with this question. Whether people mean responsible for the crime of stealing, or for allowing something to happen to the iPod.
bengangmo has presented a situation of bad guy vs. bad guy- the drunk driver and the jaywalker. Thudlow has presented a situation of a bad girl vs. a force of nature- the window-down girl and the rain.
But how does the situation change when there are conscious entities acting in good, approved manners? Consider this:
A quarterback drops back in the pocket and checks his receivers. He sees a man open, but running into double coverage. He throws the ball and the cornerback picks it off. Who is responsible for the interception? The quarterback or the cornerback?
If I’m not allowed to blame the victim, then I’d have to answer “the cornerback”. But I’m willing to bet that no one would answer that way. They’d blame the thrower. So the real question is Why does the morality (or lack thereof) of the perpetrator matter in determining who bears responsibility?
That’s quite interesting.
I don’t think the woman deserved it per se, but I do think that she created an environment where people would be less willing to help her. And that because people were less willing to help her she got into trouble.
And in some sense I do believe in a collective subconscious or “karma”, not in the sense that having something bad happen is “payback” for bad things you have done. Rather in the sense that how you handle the bad things, and how others react to the bad things that happen to you (how willing they are to help) is a result of how you conduct yourself around others, how you treat others and the thoughts that you hold close to you.
I think the stabbed woman story really just illustrates the failure of the concept of “moral responsibility.” It just doesn’t make any sense to discuss who’s the “most responsible,” and then the “next most responsible,” etc. etc.
Knigel,
The whole non-sense comes from the ambiguous use of the word “responsible”. “Responsible” can be used in the sense of “legally liable” or “morally reprehensible” or in a causal sense.
Saying that the actions of someone in large part caused an event to occur is not the same as saying that person is to blame. In the example given, it is true that the actions of the cheating woman have in very large part caused the stabbing. It does not follow that she is legally liable or that there is any moral reprehensibility for her to bear regarding the stabbing.
In the same way, if people who answer that question say that she is greatly responsible in the causal sense, it does not mean that they blame her (that would be the legal and/or moral sense). Since the question in the example does not differentiate between the different possible meanings of “responsible”, it leads to misunderstandings.
To give you an illustration: Say I want to collect insurance on a building I own which is being renovated. I leave the gas open during the weekend. On Monday, a builder who doesn’t have a reason to suspect anything comes in and lights a cigarette. The building catches fire. We have both caused the fire so in the purely causal sense of “responsible”, we are equally responsible. In the legal and/or moral sense though, I am fully responsible and he bears no responsibility.
This is why it would be greatly preferable not to use the word “responsible” for this type of question. It’s too likely to lead to misunderstandings.
Michael Emouse, I do not know if it is that complicated. The stabber is the most responsible, or any word you wish to use. If the stabber didn’t stab her, she would not be stabbed. She could have been the worst person alive; however, the stabber would still most responsible for stabbing her. No matter how much people try to spin this, it is a well known cognitive bias that distorts our thinking in real life situations. People can get metaphysical with it; however, then there is an even heavier burden of proof leaving things to our wildest imaginations.
Would the story change for you if instead of a stabber, an asteroid came out of nowhere and struck her down? Would she be responsible in any way?
It is a widely postulated cognitive bias. That doesn’t mean it exists. The psychological community also accepted repressed memories for >15 years, and prior to that they accepted Fruedian psychoanalysis, both on absolutely no evidence. So the fact that a cognitive bias is widely accepted by psychologists is hardly a clincher.
An asteroid, no, because nobody can avoid asteroids. It is totally random. She was exactly as likely to be struck by an asteroid no matter what she did, so of course she bares no responsibility.
Of course the killer didn’t “come out of nowhere”. He (presumably he) came out of a place that the woman knew was a source of killers. It says that right there in the story. She knew the place she was going to produced killers and muggers.
And that is the salient difference. Try replacing “meteor” with “lightning bolt” and “out of nowhere” with “out of a very obvious storm cloud” and your comparison becomes valid.
The woman attempts to walk home despite the fact that she is walking into a savage lightning storm. A lightning bolt comes out of the clouds and kills her. Would she be responsible in any way?
To me the answer is simple. Of course she is responsible. She knew the storm was there. She knew the storm was dangerous. She had numerous other options aside from walking home in the storm. She made a choice to walk home in the storm, despite it being unnecessary. She knew that the action was risky. She died.
How is she not in some way responsible for that?
As long as you don’t use the word “responsible” in the purely causal sense, no, she would not be responsible in any way.
Minor quibble: I wouldn’t call that a “trick” question. An example of a trick question is the old standard “Have you stopped beating your wife.”
Blake, if a woman wears a short skirt, is she asking for it?
That’s an interesting one, because logically the killer doesn’t have any responsibility for that at all. But you do see the opposite come up sometimes; there was a famous rape case back in the eighties, where a man broke into a woman’s home and raped her. The news reports focused entirely on the fact that she was a vicar’s daughter and a virgin.
It was only recently (in the UK) that it was not permitted to bring up the victim’s previous sexual history, in rape cases - the change was made because people would so often acquit a rapist if he raped a sexually-experienced woman.
No matter how you tell the story, and whether you use the words ‘responsibility’ or ‘blame,’ it’s hard to say that the woman is more responsible for her death than the highwayman.
That’s the kind of thing I thought this thread would be about.
That may be true, but this survey doesn’t support it. It’s bad science. The fact that the folks surveyed focused on the woman only proves what any halfway decent stage magician already knows - people focus on whatever you direct them to focus on. The woman was by far the focus of the story, so therefore she ends up as the focus in the survey results more often than she rightly should be.
Indeed, part of the issue here is that people will naturally focus on the main character of the story.
But I’d say the real trick being played on us here, is that this “social psychology study” (do they all use these kinds of leading questions and cheap rhetorical tricks?) is first asking its readers to conflate two very different kinds of “blame” and then chides them for doing so.
Who is morally (and legally) responsible for the woman’s death? The highwayman, duh.
Who could have avoided the woman’s death by acting differently? Well, the highwayman could have refrained from stabbing her of course, but that’s a pointless observation because keeping her alive is not a goal he was striving for. The woman herself is the one who could have most easily avoided her situation by not going onto a road which she knew to be dangerous.
So the question of “rank the different characters in order of their responsibility for her death” is misleading because there are really two different dimensions involved, two different meanings of the word “responsible”, which can not be compared on a one-dimensional scale.
By spending a lot of time on going over the full story of how the woman ended up on that road, the story is implicitly steering us towards considering the second type of responsibility, rather than the first. After which it then pulls a switcheroo and attempts to guilt-trip us for not focusing on the first type instead.
Asking to be struck by lightning? It’s hard to see how.
If she was playing golf during a thunderstorm while wearing a short skirt, maybe. Though it’s hard to see what relevance the short skirt has.
Now I have a question for you Knigel.
If a woman is carrying an umbrella, in the middle of a golf course, during a thunderstorm, is she asking for it?
This something that most psychologists and social worker types seem totally unable to comprehend. The idea that when an undesirable outcome is both foreseeable and easily avoidable, we must bare some responsibility when we don’t take reasonable efforts to avoid those risks.
What I find interesting is how often this is applied by the same types by both sides of the equation, apparently without recognising the inconsistency. The very same person who say that this flawed story tells us about people blaming the victim, then goes on to tell us that criminals (or the guards in the Stanford Prison experiment) are the products of society and are therefore *less *responsible for their crimes.
Of course the truth is that both are responsible to some degree. Criminals are in jail because of their own actions. They are ultimately to blame regardless of what society may have “done” to them and the murderer of the story is to blame regardless of what society may have “done” to him. But by the same token, the victims of these people are also sometimes to blame.
But for some reason certain types of people want use to believe that some people are utterly blameless victims regardless of their actions. A woman walking home very drunk through a bad neighbourhood should be free to drop her purse on the sidewalk, and expect that because it has her name in it it will be returned. If it gets stolen, she is in no way responsible for that theft is not in any way responsible for what happens to her.
To me that is utter bullshit. In the real world crimes occur. Some crimes can be avoided. We all know this and we all take reasonable steps to avoid crime all the time. The nature of the crime doesn’t matter. If the crime is predictable and someone doesn’t take reasonable steps to avoid it, they they do indeed share responsibility for that crime.
My insurance company also agrees. If I leave my car unlocked with the keys in it and it gets stolen, I am deemed to have behaved irresponsibly and they won’t pay out. Of course.
Blake,
No, she isn’t asking for it. She is asking not to get wet. She might be taking a chance; however, we all take chances. The problem is that we have hindsight. If something good happens, they made the right choice; however, if they make the same choice, and something bad happens, we seem to credit things much differently.
If she walks through the golf course and doesn’t get hit by lightning, I would not say that she is responsible for not getting hit by lightning.
If a woman walks through a dangerous part of town and does not get stabbed, I do not say she is responsible for not getting stabbed.
However, I do understand that there are gradients. If I shoot myself in the leg, I would consider myself to be responsible. If I push some guy with a gun, I think I would be partly responsible for getting shot.
The thing; however, is that these exercises aren’t so much about placing the blame or responsibility on people as they are about making us question our “common sense”, “intuition”, or cognitive biases.
I believe that you have built up straw people of social workers/psychologists or you know different circles than the norm. Usually, they are about studying the patterns of social actions and not so much about finding out who is and who is not responsible. There are also major disputes within the circles in regards to free will and responsibility; therefore, I’m pretty sure that you could find many psy and soc people who totally agree with your side. Actually, it is only recently that they have begun to not blame women and started questioning older ideas.
Most psy and soc people understand fully well that an individual is a product of nature and nurture (plus more). It’s a murky issue when trying to figure out what to do when someone acts out against society.
The way I see the story, is to disregard everything after the first choice. If someone chooses the woman instead of the stabber as the most responsible for the stabbing, there is something interesting to investigate. If we find the same situation in real life such as studies that show that people will blame a woman more depending on the story provided, we have more interesting things to investigate.
It’s great to find things that help us question our old ingrained ideas so that we can possible consider a future decision such as giving a murderer more/less jail time because a woman had a promiscuous history.
My god. Someone in 2010 still believes this rubbish? :eek:
I find that worldview offensive personally. I know many women who are capable of taking responsibility for their own safety regardless of the fact that you believe they are incapable of doing so.
Believe it or not, women are not utterly helpless victims at all times. They can take action to avoid unpleasant things happening to them and they can do things to make unpleasant things more likely. Just like men really. :rolleyes:
Women are not fragile flowers totally at the mercy of a big bad world. Some women do have the brains not to walk through bad neighborhoods alone, at night, unarmed. Those women really are responsible for not getting stabbed. They aren’t just drifting on the tide an waiting for men to rescue them or harm them. They are taking responsibility for their own safety. Just like men do.
Your belief that women are incapable of taking responsibility for their own safety actually sickens me slightly.
The idea that a woman can wear a suit of plate armour, take an attack dog on a leash and sling an uzi under her arm, and she still isn’t responsible for her safety, she is still entirely at the mercy of big bad men.
Sheesh.
Nonsense. The exercise asks only one thing: who is to blame.
You just told us several times that the stabber is always the most responsible. That it wouldn’t matter if he had been force fed drugs as an infant and as a result was hallucinating that she was the devil. He is always the most responsible according to you.
That view is totally incompatible with any sort of “murkiness” or concept that environment is to blame.
So investigate. Don’t make sexist statements that women are so stupid and incapable of taking responsibilities for their safety that they can’t even stay inside during a thunderstorm.
Indeed.
Or the idea that women are totally incapable of taking responsibility for their own safety as men have done for millennia.
Or the idea that idea that men are all 100% totally resposnible for their actions, good or bad, at all times and that women are 100% totally incapable of being responsible for their actions, good or bad.
Perhaps I am reading too much into the question, but I also see that there is a bit of an elephant in the room…
It seems to me that “stabbing” is meant to make us think rape…and then we are to castigated for saying a woman deserves to be raped.
The woman is clearly to blame.
She should have brought the chicken over first, then went back for the fox. After exchanging the fox and the chicken, she should have … have … what was the question again?
I don’t understand. If I ever did, I’ve forgotten. I’m old, help me.
It’s because you’re old and/or senile. 
(I think she meant the slash in “older/right” didn’t mean to equate the two, but as an ‘or’ between two items. The slash is often used between items that are commonly associated, but not always.)