Pastor Jones & His Moral Responsibility for Death (Or: The Cleansing Effect of the Intermediary)

[VarlosZ]

This thread reminds me of one from six (six!) years ago, about whether the U.S. was partially blameworthy for terrorist bombings in London.

It turned into a thread of dueling analogies. Towards the end of the thread, I came up with this one, which I felt at the time was very clever:

@VarlosZ

Scenario #1: I’m a roadie at a crowded rock concert. There is a wooden plank stretching across the rafters, over the crowd. For expedience, I place a heavy cinder block on top of this beam and walk away, even though I estimate that there is a 10% chance the plank will snap under the weight, in which case someone in the crowd will almost certainly be killed by the falling block.

Scenario #2: This is our gun/thief example from before. For the sake of simplicity, assume that the thief will be unable to get a gun from some other source. Again, I estimate that there is a 10% chance that he will wind up killing someone with the gun.

In both cases, the 10% chance comes through and somebody is killed.
I’m going to assume that you’d agree that I am responsible for the death in the first scenario, but you would say that I’m not responsible for the death in the second, because only the thief is responsible.

The obvious difference, of course, is that the plank is inanimate, whereas Scenario 2 brings a second will into to the equation. However, my question is this: from my point of view, why does that matter? Haven’t I made the same choice in both cases?

Lamentably, the thread was winding down and I never got a response.