I got an art degree which I was told was basically “underwater basket weaving” and while I have not (yet) applied it exactly as I intended I’ve actually gotten a fair amount of use out of it over the years, applying some of the skills and knowledge I acquired in a variety of areas. Arguably, I’ve gotten more use out of my BFA than a lot of people with a bachelor’s in history or psychology or communications.
Which is exactly why we use courts and trials to make decisions based on the unique circumstances and facts of each incident.
Answering this is often a perspective issue. If, as many of us clearly do based on the responses, view the exploitation of students by predatory lenders as a systemic problem, then no, the person with the loans is the victim, and is not at fault.
If, as you do, the perspective is personal, then it can easily be the borrowers fault, as they took out loans with no thought on the future responsibility necessary to pay them back.
Both things can be true at the same time. I tend to be more sympathetic to the systemic view—many people are put in situations where there are only bad choices, so they are victims even when they are the ones who made the choices. The other perspective is that even when only given bad choices, sometimes some are better than others (state school instead of private, work-study instead of more loans, etc.)
Partly my bias towards the systemic view is driven by the mantra of “personal responsibility” that gets chanted by corporations and others who have caused harm as a way to use victim blaming to shield themselves from blame.
Of course, I can also flip the entire hypothetical around. Was it an imprudent decision to skip college and now find yourself a 35 years old and not qualified for any job that makes more that $15/hour?
That’s kinda my point. Is it ok to blame the victim? One might gather from the above statement that the victim is at least somewhat to blame. Maybe technically from a legal standpoint, the people who kicked his ass might face some legal repercussions, but most of us would think the KKK guy is a dick who got what he deserved.
In this scenario, you seem to portray the bank as the victim who should be blamed. They loaned money which was not paid back. They deserved it for exploiting poor innocent college students.
I am trying to expand the conversation. Ain’t nobody trying to blame rape victims for being raped. That is a given. My interpretation of the OP was that sometimes the “victim” might have contributed to the bad thing that happened.
We probably should teach basic financial literacy in high school. But that doesn’t change my mind that if you buy two ATVs on your credit card, you have made an imprudent financial decision.
I think we need to separate something being good in a moral sense and good in a sense that it’s pleasant. Sometimes the right thing to do isn’t pleasant. I also think telling someone they did something terrible has a different connotation from saying it’s awful they had to do something.
And what I’m saying is that I think it’s wrong in the moral sense to kill another human (excluding, in some limited circumstances, helping someone to die easily). Sometimes it’s necessary, because it may be the least wrong thing to do in a given situation. But because a wrong thing is necessary doesn’t make it right. Its necessity removes blame from the person who did it – but that doesn’t make the action itself right.
I still think that you are incorrect in this. It is not wrong morally to kill someone trying to kill me or my family. It simply isn’t and there is no way you can convince me the moral choice is to let a murderer kill me or my family. If your point is that next time it is easier to kill an intruder before the imminent threat then the morality of causing that death is tied to that event, not the one prior.
Where you might have a point is a situation where you could kill Hitler before the Holocaust or like in my horror movie example where the other character is a danger to all around them so killing them is pre-emptive self-defense.
I get what you’re saying but it makes no sense. If it’s morally wrong to use deadly force in self-defense no matter the circumstances then whomever does so is to blame. I categorically reject the idea that deadly force is automatically wrong in a moral sense.
Walking through Watts in a KKK robe is adjacent to “fighting words” territory, if not squarely in it. That doctrine has been long-held by the courts, though somewhat narrowed over time, and says that some forms of expression are so inflammatory, so provocative, that they’re essentially an invitation to fisticuffs and unprotected by the First Amendment.
Picture a Westboro Baptist nut telling a father at his daughter’s burial that she’s a perverted whore who’s burning in hell, for another example. If the dad punches him in the nose, the court could well decide (in different words) that the nut was asking for it, and his bloodied nose was predictable and excusable.
So, the KKK robe situation is an interesting one, because (without additional details) the guy who was beat up could well be deemed the one who deliberately instigated the confrontation. At a minimum there is blame on both sides, and that blame has nothing to do with victimhood to the extent it’s assigned.
In the context of the OP, I am not sure I understand your point of view. Both parties might be to blame? But neither is a victim?
Again, the hypothetical would need to be fleshed out, but depending upon the extent of the beatdown, there could be victims and blame on both sides. Mr. KKK robe could be blamed for deliberately instigating a confrontation, and a victim if there was an over-the-top response. The puncher could be the victim of “fighting words,” of egregiously inflammatory expression, and blamed for a brutal beatdown (to the extent it’s brutal).
Or the puncher could be considered completely blameless. For example, suppose KKK guy walks up to someone on a Watts corner, gets right in his face, and shouts, “Fuck you, n*****!” If he gets a broken nose as a result, the courts could absolutely decide he was asking for one.
Or if you were harassing Buzz Aldrin in an effort to get him to admit the moon landings were a hoax…
I didn’t say that. I said that in that situation there is no choice which is moral. You have to choose the one which is less wrong; and most people, me included, will consider that to be killing the would-be murderer. There are a few who decide otherwise – some observant Mennonites, for instance.
It makes perfect sense to me to say that they’re doing something wrong but in those circumstances they’re not to blame for it.
By no means in all, but in several community colleges are tuition free-
As of 2022, there are 20 states in the US that offer tuition-free community college through either a first-dollar or last-dollar program. These include:
You still have to pay for books, and of course living costs, but most students live at home during that period.
Well, yes- throwing fruit etc and or minor fisticuffs is one thing, but assault with a deadly weapon would still be a crime.
Of course. But that wasn’t the hypothetical, which was a beatdown of some unexplained severity.
I don’t think it’s all that useful to blame anyone for anything. It’s cheap and easy, and leaves out everything except the incident. I’m not saying things shouldn’t have consequences, far from it. But from what I’ve seen, some people are just born gullible. They just don’t have a suspicious, cynical personality. So they are easy marks for the schools of milling sharks that now abound. Other people have shitty impulse control and are addicted to adrenalin. They take stupid risks most people wouldn’t. Blaming these people is saying, ‘why don’t you have a different personality, you idiot!’
Then there are those who are way out of their depth. Why shouldn’t they get a selfie with a bear family begging on the road? Why shouldn’t they step over the chain and stand way out on the cliff to get the full effect of the magnificence of the crashing surf? They don’t know why. They are about to find out. You could say, couldn’t they read the fucking signs? But some people have lived their whole lives (up to that point anyway) never needing to read signs like that. They see other (equally ignorant) people doing it, and copy them. Whatever.
I’m just saying, people end up being victims for complicated reasons. Many of which they can’t readily remedy.
Nuance is a bitch.
One thing that has come out in this thread is that there are different sorts of “blaming,” or different things we could mean by the word “blame.”
If, by “blame the victim,” we mean telling other people: “Bad Thing probably wouldn’t have happened to them if they hadn’t done Inadvisable Thing,” we may make it a little less likely that those other people end up being victims in the kinds of ways you describe.
Except of course- for the criminal.
I have suggested a course in high school- Practical economics, where the students would learn to balance a checkbook/bank account, do a dimple tax return, and spot scams.
Well, that’s not the title of the thread …
The OP mentions victims of scams. If the scenario involves a ‘victim’ who had been cheated by his or her accomplices to a criminal plot…
~Max