It depends on the nature of the choice. There are the knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. You can try to mitigate the things that you know have a high certainty of happening, you can even make contingency plans for the known unknowns, but the unknown unknowns are impossible to account for. Lecturing someone about the responsibility of their choice is no different than blaming them when something goes wrong in ways they couldn't predict. We don't give people the same lectures when things go right.
Sure we do. At least, as you rightly pointed out, for some choices. People get praised and rewarded every day for choices they took a stab at and happened to get right. People give, and take, credit for things every day that just kind of fell into their laps.
I had a brainstorm this morning about this topic: I think
social capital plays a behind-the-scenes role in who gets pitied as an unfortunate victim of chance, versus damned to a lecture and a shaming for poor judgement. In general, I think people exonerate those who suffer from circumstances that they can't imagine themselves handling any better, and shake their fingers at people who get burned in situations that they imagine themselves gliding through much more gracefully. Note that in either case, this is in the eye of the beholder, and can be completely misinformed and misguided. For example, I can
try to imagine what it's like to be a poor teenage mother or a lowly soldier in combat, and my mental faculties allow me the potential to reach a high degree of verisimilitude in my mental picture of myself in either situation. But I will never have firsthand experience of either, and never have the clarity of perspective on either situation as someone who has lived through either one, including all the antecedent situations that brought them to that point. Whether I have compassion or condemnation for either person, my judgment of them and their choices in their respective situations cannot possibly be as informed as that of someone who has had a similar experience firsthand, or even has been close to someone else who has, and seen them through it. But societies and communities have lore that gets passed around that citizens end up using as their model for understanding what a given situation they've never lived (and probably won't ever live) probably feels like. For example, every American has a picture in their head of what it's like to be a family homesteader eking out a living from the land, including Americans who've never met a farmer in their lives. It follows that these become the default filters through which doers of certain deeds in response to certain situations are judged, in their respective societies. Pity, then, the poor soul who is socially isolated enough (through any cause) to not share in that key piece of lore, and fail to foresee the slant his unconventional actions will be given in the imagination of his more in-the-loop fellow citizens. He may be unable to see the way he will be blamed, rather than supported.
When it comes to criminal acts involving victims, then negative outcomes can be explained in the known unknowns and thus you should have thought about it beforehand and avoided that course of action. But in other instances, when things are going right for the most part, and there's an unknown that can't possibly be foreseen, then it's pointless to give the responsibility lecture.
This way of looking at things mostly has to do with the legal system, liabilities, etc. In tort law, you ARE responsible for the unknown unknowns even if there's ample evidence that you tried to guard against negative outcomes. In reality though? It's anyone's guess. It's no different than blaming someone for living life and taking a risk. People like to blame and lecture because it makes them feel righteous.
I think a key assumption upon which the whole Roman-originated Western legal system rests is that nearly all people are capable of foreseeing, to a high degree of accuracy at least in the short term, the way all of their actions and inactions might harm other people. You know a lot more about tort law than I do, but I can see how this is a decent logical basis for concluding that the vast majority of people can be held solely responsible for applying -- or failing to apply -- this filter to any of their actions (or inactions) in all but the most extreme and bizarre circumstances. I've not explored these philosophical waters myself, but I think the premise that nearly all people can bear the complete burden of consideration for all other people deserved to be called into question, in any case.
If this is a fair (I don't know if "true" applies as precisely) assumption, especially given most communities' high priority on inculcating consideration for fellow members into newbies, do people with a pattern of acting with good intentions but inadvertently harming others with their actions because of their diminished capacity for foreseeing the consequences of their actions upon others deserve labels like "disabled" and "unfit"?
I face this dilemma in the world of medicine too. The existential paradox at the heart of medicine is that doctors are destined to make mistakes, but they
may not make mistakes. It's no wonder most doctors will toe the published guidelines like a tightrope walker when treating any patient they don't know well, and more conservative ones even with patients they do know well. It's no wonder most will refer out and let some specialist write an order whose entire range of potential outcomes they don't fully comprehend.
That said, I take great joy in designing and ordering unconventional therapy regimens for patients, if I have good reason to believe they're warranted and well-founded. If my ideas really have any merit, it's not usually hard, and actually kind of fun, to dig up a few recent-ish papers on PubMed that support my choice of orders. I always cover my ass by making sure the test populations and research methods I'm citing are germane to this particular patient's case, and I can articulate the points of similarity well. The joy comes when the patient actually gets better.
For some reason, I don't fear the increased scrutiny that comes from deviating from established culture in a setting that leans conservative. I trust in my own ability to discern what cases deserve a daring approach, what ones I should default to the published guidelines on, and what's a job for somebody else, and I think this is largely a function of practicing good science, rather than being obedient. Could be the end of me, though, depending who I end up pissing off.
