> On Jun 3, 2019, at 11:47 PM, Aris Merchant
> <thoughtsoflifeandligh...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Under the present conditions,
> however, each player can quite reasonably claim that someone else should
> have performed The Ritual, and that it wasn’t *their* fault that it wasn’t
> performed. Unless the rule explicitly states that the responsibility falls
> on each player jointly and severally (i.e. it’s each player’s
> responsibility to see that The Ritual is performed), there is no way to
> prove from the text of the rules involved that this should be the case.
I am delighted that you raised the idea of joint and several liability! That
analogy occurred to me too; I didn’t mention it in my proto because it’s not a
rules based concept. But it did perhaps influence my thinking somewhat.
This Ritual stuff seems interestingly analogous to a specific situation in
which American law generally *does* recognize joint and several liability: it
is the situation where multiple careless or bad actors, each acting
independently of one another, are each an independent legal cause of the entire
harm that is suffered by the wronged party. For example, imagine that an
elderly person walking on a sidewalk is carelessly bumped into the road by a
distracted pedestrian, and that the elderly person is then struck by a speeding
and reckless drunk driver, and e suffers very serious injuries. The distracted
pedestrian and the drunk driver each were legal causes the entire harm—if
either of them had been acting with due care, then the elderly person would not
have been struck by the car. And the harm to the elderly person cannot be
apportioned in any principled way as between the two wrongful actors. So
American tort law holds them both jointly and severally liable, even though
each of them individually would have caused NO harm if the other had not ALSO
independently been acting wrongfully! See Restatement (2d) of Torts § 879 (“If
the tortious conduct of each of two or more persons is a legal cause of harm
that cannot be apportioned, each is subject to liability for the entire harm,
irrespective of whether their conduct is concurring or consecutive.”).
The Ritual strikes me as an analogous situation. Each player’s inaction is a
cause of the harm, and the harm that was caused cannot be apportioned among the
players in a principled way. As a result, it is not unjust that each player is
considered liable for the entire harm (jointly and severally as it were), even
though (as you said) “each player can quite reasonably claim that someone else
should have performed The Ritual, and that it wasn’t *their* fault that it
wasn’t performed.” Same with the distracted pedestrian and the drunk
driver—each of them could say that the other should have done the prudent thing
to avoid the accident, and that “it wasn’t their fault” the injury occurred.
Here, each individual player should have done the prudent thing and performed
the Ritual, and the fact that no other player performed it does not absolve the
others of their moral responsibility. (I suppose that point goes to rebut the
supposed injustice of holding people liable, rather than for whether they
violated the Rules.)
