No, the kidnappers and murderers are to blame for your kidnapping/killing. You are to blame if you broke any laws (which we’ll assume that you didn’t).
Prudence is a virtue. Imprudence is a vice. You are responsible for your imprudence, but that doesn’t imply that you deserved to die.
Separately, there are those who bristle at the idea of living a prudent lifestyle. There are those who blame victims. And there are those who do both of these things, oddly enough.
Quote below:
There are many obligations for the prudent and imprudent, two of which are honestly to others and themselves. As an aside, I don’t think ill of aid workers risking their lives in Somalia: that could have been a calculated risk. I do think ill of thrill seekers, but their risks could have involved calculations as well. To summarize, your question is broader than it first appears, IMHO.
No one should be killed/kidnapped/raped as a base premise no matter what they do (legal things).
The question is what responsibility does a given person have when they place themself in a particularly dangerous position that they easily could have avoided?
There is more than one theory of justice. Some are better than others, but different people have different perspectives. So do different jurisdictions. In the US, “In most cases, liability in tort law is all-or-nothing —a defendant is either fully liable or not at all liable for a claimant’s loss.” But I understand Europe has a concept of partial liability: you divide liability up into fractions and assign them to different parties. (I might be wrong about Europe, but the concept remains.)
In the case of murder or mayhem, I would argue for blame fully centered on the perps. The vic isn’t entirely let off, rather they are charged with imprudence, a much lesser and entirely separate moral offense. Now you could divide up the blame for the mayhem, but that’s not how I see things – I see the blame as all or nothing, and whatever the vic did is conceptually an entirely separate matter.
I’m thinking of prudence as appropriate risk assessment. I take of dim view of Everest climbers, but not necessarily and not generally on the basis of prudence. I assume most are aware of the risks and have thought them through. Perhaps not in the best way, but that’s an error of judgment which is a different problem. And for some of them, their judgment may have been fine.
The imprudent don’t calculate risks: they ignore them or set them aside for various reasons. They just let things happen. That’s a vice in my view. Hey, there are lots of vices.
Say somebody likes smashing their hand with a hammer: is that imprudent? Again, not necessarily. I once heard a chain smoker say, “You’re going to die when you’re going to die.” Later they came down with cancer. That person was imprudent in my opinion: they were refusing to contemplate the easily foreseen consequences of their behavior. To those who ask, “Did they deserve to get cancer?” I would answer, “What exactly is your problem?”
I don’t agree with the way you guys are framing this. The issue in the OP is just that those “taking a bath” aren’t victims in the vast majority of cases. These people took a financial risk, where losing their investment was a known outcome. They are willing participants in the activity who were hoping on the chance that things would go differently. That’s why we don’t feel bad blaming them. It was all 100% willing.
With the guy mauled by a bear, the bear isn’t to blame. But the person engaged in activities similar to the financial situation above. They active participants who were hoping for a different outcome, not someone who was victimized in the moral sense.
The issue with blaming the victim is that it absolves or at least lessens the culpability of the perpetrator. With the laptop example, you have a guy who was not in any way participating in the thievery. He was just using a laptop for an intended purpose. So the guy saying it was his fault comes off as absolving the thieves, while ignoring the fact that the guy was an actual victim. That’s victim blaming.
In general, the reason why people feel okay blaming people in certain situations is that they don’t see them as a victim in the first place. The whole concept of “blame the victim” is that you are inherently removing their victimhood by doing it.
I don’t think the difference between blame and responsibility has much to do with it. And, in fact, I don’t think you can so cleanly separate them. The person who says that the rape victim was partly responsible because they did X is still blaming the victim.
There have been literally hundreds of car thefts in my city in the past few years. Teenagers drive around, or ride bikes, looking for unlocked cars with visible keys in them, or even unattended running cars (!!!) and they steal them and deliberately wreck them, knowing that they won’t get in much trouble because they are minors.
I STILL see people walk away from running cars. “But I took the fob with me! It takes too long to start it up again” etc.
If the investors are “victms”, who’s the perp? The stock is being issued under the rules of the SEC. There’s nothing blatantly illegal here. The concept of victimization doesn’t usually encompass being a victim of one’s own stupidity. They might even get lucky and make some money in the short term from even greater fools.
I run the “valuables” lost and found at work. Despite being located between Chicago and Gary, Indiana, that is, not a small town with Mayberry qualities, when we get a lost wallet turned in it usually does still contain the money along with every thing else. About 2 out of 3. Most people actually are honest, even in less than ideal neighborhoods.
Our two biggest problems with reuniting people with their lost possessions:
someone shows up at the lost and found a half an hour after losing Valuable Item. We don’t have it - yet. We tell them “check back in another day or two, sometimes things take awhile to make it to the lost and found” (It’s a big store with a big parking lot). The item shows up the next day. Owner never checks back. After 90 days we dispose of Valuable Item in accordance with store policy.
You leave contact information but you’re the sort who “never answers my phone if I don’t know the number”. So we call and call and call but you never answer or check your v-mail or you wind up blocking us. Then you show up yelling and screaming why we never got ahold of you. Um… you sort of made that impossible?
If there’s a way to set your phone to allow someone to answer your phone without needing a passcode or your face, when a friend or relative calls your phone that is in our lost and found we can answer and say “this phone is located in XYZ store, if it is your phone please reclaim it at the customer service desk”.
When you do show up to claim your phone don’t get pissy when we ask you to prove it’s your phone by unlocking it. We’re doing that so only you get your phone and not some random idiot.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say no one should be killed/kidnapped/raped whether what they’re doing is legal or illegal.
That said - you are more likely to be killed/kidnapped/raped if you do illegal things. That doesn’t mean you deserve such treatment, just that you’re increasing the odds of that happening.
Practical responsibility and moral responsibility are two very different things. If you leave your car unlocked in a bad neighborhood and it gets stolen then you have some practical responsibility for it happening. The person that stole it is morally responsible. That doesn’t mean making a mistake means you deserve to suffer a consequence like that though.
There is a world of difference between pointing out what one can do to proactively avoid being victimized, and pointing out what one should have done to retroactively have avoided being victimized.
One can help avoid being victimized in the first place. The other serves no purpose other than to further traumatize the already traumatized victim (especially if we’re talking about violent crime). The crime already happened.
Like you, I don’t think it is ever appropriate to blame a victim. I do, however, frown on poor judgment. I also frown on a police force that doesn’t set up a sting by stationing a young officer outside with a laptop. They would probably apprehend their bold criminals in short order.
IMHO part of the reason this comes up is in the area of what sort of restitution to make towards the victim. In the case posited by the OP, does the general public or anyone else have any responsibility to make the victims whole, in the style of the “too big to fail” bailouts that happened in the 2008 crash? Similar questions can be asked about victims in other situations mentioned above.
Should the person kidnapped in Somalia expect a rescue operation or payment of ransom?
Should the person that had their car stolen when they left it running and unattended expect a payout from their insurer?
And so on. I don’t have a one size fits all rule, but for the Truth Social investors, I don’t think they should get any type of compensation should they lose their investment.
But another part of the reason it comes up is that we want to believe that bad things happen only to people who deserve them, because we want to believe that people generally get what they deserve, and that bad things won’t happen to us as long as we don’t do anything to bring them upon ourselves.
Actually, you’re really sweet. I’m not. I don’t have ANY sympathy for incarcerated individuals, and I’m happy to admit it. When one victimizes people, one deserves what one gets.
I’m actually an advocate for NOT imprisoning people who are guilty of minor and/or non-violent crimes. In fact, it is a significant contributor to prison overcrowding.